Ethnographic exercises as activities in public space: Social Occupational Therapy in art, culture and politics

Ethnographic exercises are discussed - as proposed by the Metuia Project/ USP between 2007 and 2013 - as an activity able to enhance the recognition of the compound, plural and sometimes contradictory knowledge, but produced creatively in the intellectual and social do, in the interaction among students, occupational therapists, researchers and homeless people. It starts from the need to develop an understanding of the significant activities of artists working in the public spaces in São Paulo, as it persists as a plurality of meanings that the street acquires amid disputes of interests and cultural tensions, but also interconnections and creativity. The itinerant life and social areas’ characteristics, combined with reflections of urban anthropology and ethnographic research favored the theoretical and practical teaching in dialogic territorial shares of social occupational therapy. This article is the result of reflections built from the research Circuits and religious practices in life trajectories of adult homeless people in city of São Paulo, associated with university extension project linked to Metuia Project/USP, called Point meeting and culture: social networks, culture and social occupational therapy. In conclusion, on the one hand, there is need for renewed reflection about the occupational therapist’s place, considering the asymmetries of the relations in the construction of knowledge. On the other hand, it indicates that the produced activities, necessarily, in dialogical relations, only share meanings when inserted into the experience of the difference in consistent proposals with its own plasticity and in the middle of specific social and cultural contexts