EXCELLENCE AS A MORAL CLASSIFICATORY DEVICE: Evaluation Regimes and Knowledge Governance

Resumo

This article analyzes Brazil’s graduate evaluation policy implemented by CAPES as a regulatory regime that operates simultaneously through technical devices and morally anchored values. Drawing on an anthropological approach grounded in the notion of the State as practice and in the concept of moral economy, it examines how indicators, evaluation forms, and review reports produce institutional hierarchies and redefine the meanings of quality within the National Graduate System. It argues that, in this arrangement, excellence operates as a moral classificatory device: a normative-technical mechanism that not only measures performance but also organizes positions within the academic field and legitimizes asymmetries under the grammar of objectivity. The ethnographic analysis of the everyday life of a program rated 4 shows how evaluative logic is internalized, guiding curricular reforms, internationalization strategies, the monitoring of faculty output, and the restructuring of institutional planning. It concludes that evaluation is not limited to measuring results; it produces morally legitimized hierarchies, converting situated criteria into naturalized technical evidence and thereby structuring the horizon of the possible in contemporary scientific production.