Gustavo Onto
CV Lattes
ORCID
Academia.edu
Gustavo is an ethnographer of forms of economic policy and regulation. He has published on antitrust, financial education, fiscal and monetary policy, and economic nationalism, as part of previous research projects, situated between the areas of economic anthropology and the anthropology of the State, bureaucracy and public policies. He is conducting research on the Brazilian public debt management.
He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the National Museum (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), an MA in Sociology from Columbia University (USA), and a Masters in Public Management and Government from Getúlio Vargas Foundation (EAESP, São Paulo). BA in Economics (University of São Paulo). From 2016 to 2021 he was a Post-Doctoral fellow at the Graduate Program in Sociology and Anthropology of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology in the same university. He was visiting researcher at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris, and the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in Denmark. He was also a Visiting Scholar at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School for Social Research.
He coordinates the research center Documenta - Laboratory of Anthropology of the State, Regulation and Public Policy and is a researcher at the Center for Research on Culture and Economy (NuCEC), both at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is also a researcher at Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). Chief-Editor of the non-academic magazine Mote. He collaborates with the website Estudios de la Economia.
More recently, he coordinated a project with researchers from Copenhagen Business School on ethnographies of collaborative settings involving social scientists and economists, engineers, or policymakers. As part of his doctoral research, he conducted an ethnography of the knowledge practices involved in Brazilian competition policy.
Articles in English
OSSANDÓN, José e ONTO, Gustavo. Do ethnographers make markets? Cultural economy after collaboration. Journal of Cultural Economy, 1–16, 2026.
ONTO, Gustavo and FERNANDES, Viviane. Collaboration as Exposure: ethnographic knowledge in economic policy. Journal of Cultural Economy, pp. 1–19, September, 2025.
MIOLA, Iagê and ONTO, Gustavo. "Antitrust between success and failure: a sociological and ethnographic reappraisal of Brazilian competition policy". Economic Sociology, perspectives and conversations, Vol. 25, Number 2, March 2024.
KINGSOLVER, A. MATHUR, C. ONTO, G. Economic Nationalism in a World on Fire. Special Issue, Anuac - Journal of the Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology. 2022.
KINGSOLVER, A.; PANDEY, A.; ONTO, G.; OPESEN, C.; APPEL, H. World anthropological perspectives on economic nationalisms. Sociologia & Antropologia, Vol. 12 (2). 2022.
ONTO, Gustavo. "Corporate personhood and the competitive relation in antitrust". IN: Neiburg and Guyer (eds.) The Real Economy: Essays in Ethnographic Theory. Hau Books/Chicago University Press, pp. 179-202.
ONTO, Gustavo. "Competition on paper: artifacts of visualization in antitrust policy". Economic Sociology, The European Electronic Newsletter, v. 20, p. 24-30, 2019.
ONTO, Gustavo; UNDURRAGA, T. ; ARIZTIA, T. "The centrality of lateral economic objects: examples from Latin America". EASST Review, v. 35, p. 23, 2016.
ONTO, Gustavo. "Regulation as Cultural Transformation: the 'educational role' of the Brazilian competition policy". Revista Direito e Práxis, v. 7, p. 690-715, 2016.
ONTO, Gustavo. "Economic Regulation or the Ethnography of Attachments” In: Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Electronic Version. 2014.
ONTO, Gustavo. "The market as lived experience: on the knowledge of markets in antitrust analysis". Vibrant (Florianópolis), v. 11, p. 159-190, 2014.