Articles

A puzzle Narcissus: ethnography faces delirium and “stays” at the Hotel da Loucura – Rio de Janeiro

Luciano von der Goltz Vianna

The present article starts from a debate that aims to understand how the disciplinary regimes of Anthropology lead the researcher to follow a protocol of questions and interests in his research. The objective here is to discuss the existing

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Articles

Por trás das crianças, dos objetos e dos cuises: agência e pesquisa em um bairro periurbano de Córdoba (Argentina)

Rocío Fatyass

Neste artigo retomo ideias emergentes de um projeto de pesquisa com crianças que acontece em um bairro periurbano da cidade de Villa Nueva (Córdoba, Argentina) e discuto a agência das crianças e sua participação na pesquisa em ciências

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Articles

The construction of knowledge about the Amazon ecosystem by a Brazilian scientific institution

Aline Moreira Magalhães

Since expeditions by naturalists in the 18th century, the production of modern knowledge about the flora and fauna of the Amazon has included people who know the ecosystem from experience. At the National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA),

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Interdisciplinarities

Living in a Siza house: the experience of auteur architecture in Malagueira, Évora

Juliana Pereira, Ana Catarina Costa, André Carmo, Eduardo Ascensão

This article draws on the genealogy of studies on the house in Portuguese Anthropology and Architecture as well as on recent perspectives coming from the Geographies of Architecture, to explore the way residents of auteur architecture experience

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Dossiê “Beyond penal populism: complexifying justice systems and security through qualitative lenses”

Introduction: Beyond penal populism: complexifying justice systems and security through qualitative lenses

Annabelle Dias Félix, Maria João Leote de Carvalho, Catarina Frois

In the global political landscape, as far-right parties gain prominence, populist rhetoric advocating for harsher justice and security policies is becoming increasingly prevalent. Proponents of this rhetoric base their discourse on “alarming”

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Dossiê “Beyond penal populism: complexifying justice systems and security through qualitative lenses”

Privatizing urban security: control, hospitality and suspicion in the Brazilian shopping

Susana Durão, Paola Argentin

In this article we argue that hospitality security – a modality that confuses control and care – operates through the actions of security guards in the creation of what we call pre-cases. From a dense ethnography accompanying these workers in a

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Dossiê “Beyond penal populism: complexifying justice systems and security through qualitative lenses”

“Police abuse, we face it every day”: ethnographic notes on racist police violence

Pedro Varela

Racist police violence is one of the most brutal facets of racism in our society, reflecting structures of power and oppression that marginalize sectors of our society. This paper emphasizes the importance of understanding this reality, highlighting

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Dossiê “Beyond penal populism: complexifying justice systems and security through qualitative lenses”

Marginality, security, surveillance, crime, imprisonment: reflections on an intellectual and methodological trajectory

Catarina Frois

This article engages with contemporary anthropological and ethnographic methodological debates by reflecting on the challenges of conducting research in contexts related with marginality, deviance, surveillance, and imprisonment. It examines the

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Dossiê “Beyond penal populism: complexifying justice systems and security through qualitative lenses”

Navigating the labyrinth: qualitative research in the securitized border regions of North Africa

Lydia Letsch

Qualitative researchers face unique challenges in the dynamic domain of border regions, particularly when venturing into highly securitized areas with a constant military presence, advanced surveillance, and restricted access zones. This article

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Memory

Uma vida, muitas vidas: entrevista com Victor Bandeira, etnógrafo e viajante

Rita Tomé, João Leal

Falecido recentemente, Victor Bandeira (1931-2024) desempenhou um papel fundamental no desenvolvimento da museologia etnográfica em Portugal. Foi graças às suas expedições a África (1960-1961, 1966, 1967), ao Brasil (1964-1965) e à Indonésia

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Lévi-Strauss Award

From the “note of condolence” to the “unjust aggression”: news about death written by the PMSC

Jo P. Klinkerfus

This paper is a reduced and synthesized version of the ethnography on PMSC Notícia, the news platform of the Military Police of Santa Catarina (PMSC). Based on news about death, dying and the dead published on the website in 2021, social

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Artigos

“Enough of this fake war”: ecologies of value, workers and environmentalists in Southern Italy

Antonio Maria Pusceddu

This article mobilizes the ecologies of value as a conceptual framework to account for the conflicts, contradictions and dilemmas arousing from the experience of the contemporary socio-ecological crisis. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Brindisi,

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Artigos

“Preventing them from being adrift”: challenges for professional practice in the Argentinean mental health system for children and adolescents

Axel Levin

This ethnographic article addresses the difficulties, practices, and strategies of the professionals of the only Argentine hospital fully specialized in the treatment of mental health problems of children and adolescents. More specifically, it

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Artigos

Making Children: an iconography of the ibejadas in the centers, religious article shops, and factories of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Morena Freitas

The ibejadas are childlike entities that, alongside the caboclos, pretos-velhos, exus, and pombagiras, inhabit the umbanda pantheon. In religious centers, these entities manifest through colorful images, joyful sung chants and an abundance of sweets

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Artigos

To migrate and to belong: intimacy, ecclesiastical absence, and playful competition in the Aymara Anata-Carnival of Chiapa (Chile)

Pablo Mardones

The article analyzes the Anata-Carnival festivity celebrated in the Andean town of Chiapa in the Tarapacá Region, Great North of Chile. I suggest that this celebration constitutes one of the main events that promote the reproduction of feelings of

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Artigos

Hauntology and nostalgia in the touristed landscapes of Sarajevo

Marta Roriz

Drawing on anthropological and ethnographic developments in the study of urban tourism, this essay offers a description of Sarajevo’s tourist landscapes from the perspective of an ethnographic tourist, detailing how time is inscribed in the

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Memory

David J. Webster in Mozambique: minimal epistolary (1971-1979)

Lorenzo Macagno

The article comments on, contextualizes and transcribes the epistolary exchange between social anthropologist David J. Webster (1945-1989) and ethnologist and Portuguese colonial official António Rita-Ferreira (1922-2014) between 1971 and 1979.

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Dossier ‘Gender and Care in the Cape Verdean transnational experience’

Género e cuidados na experiência transnacional cabo-verdiana: introdução

Luzia Oca González, Fernando Barbosa Rodrigues and Iria Vázquez Silva

Neste dossiê sobre o género e os cuidados na comunidade transnacional cabo-verdiana, as leitoras e leitores encontrarão os resultados de diferentes etnografias feitas tanto em Cabo Verde como nos países de destino da sua diáspora no sul da

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Dossier ‘Gender and Care in the Cape Verdean transnational experience’

“Vizinhu ta trocadu pratu ku kada casa”… Caring to avoid hunger in Brianda, Santiago Island, Cape Verde

Fernando Barbosa Rodrigues

Taking the ethnographic field as a starting point – the interior of the island of Santiago in the Republic of Cabo Verde – and basing on participant observation and the collection of testimonies from the local inhabitants of Brianda, this

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Dossier ‘Gender and Care in the Cape Verdean transnational experience’

“Eu já aguentei muita gente nessa vida”: about care, gender, and generation in Cape Verdian families

Andréa Lobo and André Omisilê Justino

This article reflects on the care category when crossed by the dynamics of gender and generation in Cape Verde. The act of caring is of fundamental importance for family dynamics in this society, which is marked by mobilities of multiple orders –

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Dossier ‘Gender and Care in the Cape Verdean transnational experience’

Global care chains in Cape Verdean migrations: women who stay so that others can migrate

Luzia Oca González and Iria Vázquez Silva

This article is based on fieldwork conducted with women of four generations, belonging to five families living in the locality of Burela (Galicia) and their domestic groups originating from the island of Santiago. We present three ethnographic

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Dossier ‘Gender and Care in the Cape Verdean transnational experience’

The difficult balance between work and life: care arrangements in three generations of Cape Verdean migrants

Keina Espiñeira González, Belén Fernández-Suárez and Antía Pérez-Caramés

The reconciliation of the personal, work and family spheres of migrants is an emerging issue in migration studies, with concepts such as the transnational family and global care chains. In this contribution we analyse the strategies deployed by

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Debate

Universal foreigners: the ‘ontological turn’ considered from a phenomenological perspective

Filipe Verde

This article questions the consistency, reasonableness, and fruitfulness of the methodological proposals and idea of anthropological knowledge of the “ontological turn” in anthropology. Taking as its starting point the book manifesto produced by

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Debate

Universos estrangeiros: ainda a polêmica virada ontológica na antropologia

Rogério Brittes W. Pires

O artigo “Estrangeiros universais”, de Filipe Verde, apresenta uma crítica ao que chama de “viragem ontológica” na antropologia, tomando o livro The Ontological Turn, de Holbraad e Pedersen (2017), como ponto de partida (2025a: 252).1 O

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Debate

Resposta a Rogério Pires

Filipe Verde

Se há evidência que a antropologia sempre reconheceu é a de que o meio em que somos inculturados molda de forma decisiva a nossa compreensão do mundo e de nós mesmos. Isso é assim para a própria antropologia e, portanto, ser antropólogo é

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Debate

Da ontologia da fenomenologia na antropologia: ensaio de resposta

Rogério Brittes W. Pires

Um erro do construtivismo clássico é postular que verdades alheias seriam construídas socialmente, mas as do próprio enunciador não. Que minha visão de mundo, do fazer antropológico e da ciência sejam moldadas por meu ambiente – em

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Note on the cover

Note on the cover

Pedro Calapez

© Pedro Calapez. 2023. (Pormenor) Díptico B; Técnica e Suporte: Acrílico sobre tela colada em MDF e estrutura em madeira. Dimensões: 192 x 120 x 4 cm. Imagem gentilmente cedidas pelo autor. Créditos fotográficos: MPPC / Pedro

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What the blackout brought to light: dependencies, systems, lines, relations

Ruy Llera Blanes

Luís Silva

Felipe Campos Mardones

Francisco Freire

Paulo Mendes

Antónia Pedroso de Lima

Antonio Maria Pusceddu

04.07.2025

This text reflects on the socio-political questions prompted by the “event” of the blackout that took place across the Iberian Peninsula on 28 April 2025. Specifically, by integrating political economy perspectives with experiential
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Meta-Governance and the Informal Reality of Nepal's Bureaucracy

Binod Pokharel

02.07.2025

This paper shows meta-governance in Nepal, where non-state actors — especially dalals — facilitate government services amid bureaucratic inefficiencies. Despite being unofficial
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An interview with Jorge Freitas Branco

Jorge Freitas Branco

Constança Vieira de Andrade

30.06.2025

The present interview features Jorge Freitas Branco, Emeritus Full Professor at ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon and researcher at CRIA.
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A conversation with Livia Melzi

Marco Maria Zanin

30.06.2025

In this new article from LAB – Living Anthropology and Art Boundaries, I am pleased to present a conversation with Livia Melzi, a visual artist and researcher whose practice lies
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The universalist discipline of representation

Laura Burocco

18.06.2025

This essay examines the manipulative representation promoted by two European leading art institutions, the Biennale di Venezia (2024) and Documenta15 (2022), in support of a distorted Western decolonial
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‘No to Fortress Europe!": immigration, moral panics and borders

José Mapril

09.04.2025

The background of this issue is the growing incrustation of xenophobia and discrimination in policies and discourses in too many places, including here, where detention centers for "il-legal" people and "greenways" for their legal labor exploitation
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An interview with Jaume Franquesa

Jaume Franquesa, Ruy Llera Blanes

03.04.2025

This interview features Jaume Franquesa, an anthropologist and researcher at the University of Buffalo's College
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INCLUSION-EXCLUSION: Texts from the Ethnographic Writing Workshop

Gianmarco Marzola

João Afonso Baptista

30.03.2025

This collection aims to capture the collective, experimental and creative spirit of the Ethnographic Writing Workshop held in the spring of 2024 by the ‘Diversities: Ethnographies in the Contemporary World’ research group at the Institute of
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Having land and being from the land: two complementary meanings

Verena Sevá Nogueira

30.03.2025

This text proposes a brief reflection on the meaning of land in a peasant context. It discusses a process of socio-territorial changes experienced by rural families in the north-east of Brazil who were expropriated
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Sensitive maps in the abandoned territories of railway stations on the Brazil-Uruguay border

Vanessa Forneck and Eduardo Rocha

05.03.2025

The research maps and investigates the territories created by the abandonment of railway stations, a process that has been accentuated since
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Interview with Elena Mazzi

Marco Maria Zanin

25.02.2025

In this section of Agora, I am pleased to present an interview with Italian artist Elena Mazzi, whose work lies at the border between art and anthropology, transforming artistic practice into a site of
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Fragments of the imagined clay

Sónia Mota Ribeiro

12.12.2024

This piece, made up of a brief text and a set of images from field notes, photographs, relational maps, notebooks, loose-leaf drawings, and ethnography - reflects my doctoral research process into the practice of
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The tone of botany: a note on the sensitivity of knowledge

Pedro Crepaldi Carlessi

26.11.2024

This field record, taken in 2015, is the result of ethnographic research in which I followed the path of plants collected in an umbanda terreiro and taken to a botanical taxonomy laboratory for identification.
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Make sure you don't get wet... if you catch the virus, who will take care of me?

Ricardo Vieira

15.11.2024

This text, of an ethnobiographical nature, gives an account of the communication strategies between an institutionalised elderly person, in times of covid-19, and his family. It tries to show that not everyone truly understood what this pandemic was
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Interview with Rosa Maria Perez

Rosa Maria Perez, Inês Lourenço

15.10.2024

Interview with Rosa Maria Perez, anthropologist, integrated researcher at CRIA-Iscte, retired Professor in the Anthropology department at Iscte and Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India.Starting with the
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The provincialization of orthodox economic projects: porosities, relations and moralities

Patrícia Alves de Matos

24.09.2024

The severe human and social effects of the 2008 financial crisis, subsequently intensified by austerity policies on both sides of the Atlantic, have led to a renewed interest, in anthropology as in other social sciences, in the logics of capitalist
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Land and wasteland

Diego Amoedo

22.08.2024

50 years on, what has happened to the land? In addition to the profound political and social changes that the 25th of April brought to Portugal, there were also important changes in the social
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Building Afro-indigenous affective networks: women, education, and activism in Latin America

Katherine Chalá, Daniela Balanzátegui, Valentina Romero, Catarina Nimbopyruá Delfina dos Santos, María Celeste Sánchez Sugía, Watatakalu Yawalapiti, Maria John, Marianne Sallum

17.07.2024

Social movements and grassroots organizations led by indigenous and afro-descendant women in Latin America play a central role in defending human and civil rights, highlighting territorial and environmental rights,
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The yellow brick road I walk as an ethnographer

Noelia García Rodríguez

11.07.2024

In this text I compare my anthropological fieldwork experience to a journey of transformation and growth, like Dorothy Gale's journey down the yellow brick road in the land of Oz. I find ethnography a fascinating
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25 April, always!

03.07.2024

Etnográfica celebrates the 50th anniversary of 25 April 1974. We wanted to associate an artistic (musical) proposal with this outstanding edition,  an Agora's exclusive content:
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Interview with José Sobral

José Sobral, Patrícia Alves de Matos

02.07.2024

Interview with José Manuel Sobral, anthropologist and retired researcher at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade
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Observing land transformation in Portugal

Fabienne Wateau

25.06.2024

50 years on, what has happened to the land? In addition to the profound political and social changes that the 25th of April brought to Portugal, there were also important changes in the social and
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In the City of Shadows: moving in the face of violence in Veracruz

Juan Antonio Flores Martos

20.06.2024

Ethnographing the impact of violence on the lives of the people of Veracruz (Mexico) stimulates a transformation of the ways of working and being in the countryside. The ethnographer experiences the need to adapt to
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Indigenous archaeologies, territories, and human rights: dialogues among representatives of the Tupi Guarani, Tuxá, and Eastern Pequot

Yacunã Tuxá, Natasha Gambrell, Luã Apyká, Blaire Morseau, Stephen W. Silliman, Daniela Balanzátegui, Marianne Sallum

21.05.2024

In recent decades, a global solidarity movement among various Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and traditional communities has grown, united to defend and preserve their territories and linguistic diversity.
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It's because I miss you that I'm skinny: male (re)encounters in the Bolivian Chaco

Pere Morell i Torra

18.04.2024

This text focuses on my last encounter with one of my main interlocutors in the field, when a change in the subject of my research also changed our relationship [1]. Through fragments of conversations, field diary
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The War Against Gaza: Genocide, Geopolitics and Anthropology

Paulo Gabriel Hilu da Rocha Pinto

27.03.2024

The number of dead and wounded, as well as the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Israel's military offensive against Gaza, reached staggering proportions in just a few weeks. The scale of the conflict and
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Missing girls: the sexual exploitation of children in the form of self-managed internal trafficking

M. Belén Ortega-Senet

13.03.2024

The sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) is one of the most invisible forms of sexual violence, loaded with myths, stereotypes, prejudices and greatly simplified in its understanding as a phenomenon. Of all its
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Anthropology in Arabic: beyond the discursive monopoly

Abdellah Hammoudi

Tradução de Ilham Houass e Diane Abd-El-Karim

Revisto por Francisco Freire e Abdallah Hammoudi

12.03.2024

The text by Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi, which we find here today in Portuguese, was originally published in Arabic in 2018 as an introduction to the book
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The corner of the "calabaceira": encounters, affections and ethnography in the "Vale"

Simone Frangella

Max Ruben Ramos

05.03.2024

In this text, Simone Frangella and Max Ruben Ramos talk about their fieldwork experience in Vale da Amoreira, in the municipality of Moita, in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. The story invites us to think about how a
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Wandering through the past with an eviscerated present: looking at Gaza through the archives

Raquel Gil Carvalheira

04.03.2024

In this February of a live broadcast genocide, the proposal is "Wandering through the past with an eviscerated present: looking at Gaza through the archives". This in the month in which Etnográfica inaugurates its Found in Translation section with
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Interview with Caroline Brettell

Caroline Brettell

Marta Rosales

Sónia Ferreira

27.02.2024

Interview with Caroline Brettell, held at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, on 30 June 2023. The interview focused on the author's field experience with Portuguese emigration in France and rural populations in Portugal in
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Ex-votos around the monument to Dr Sousa Martins

(Re)encontrar Sousa Martins

Vincenzo Scamardella

06.02.2024

This tale is an ethnofiction about a contemporary and individual research for supernatural help that has its roots in the childhood memories of the protagonist. In this story, the fictional character of Miguel who is inspired by encounters that I
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A decade and many events later: what can we (re)read about possible minority liberalisms?

Paulo Victor Leite Lopes

06.02.2024

In this first edition of “A book and his critics”, we discuss Moisés Lino e Silva’s (Federal University of Bahia) recent book "Minoritarian Liberalism. A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela (2022)", which, based on ethnographic fieldwork in
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“Over there”: on the relative legibility of the cityscape

Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

23.01.2024

Starting from a brief, casual quasi-ethnographic experience, Thaddeus Blanchette shows us the city as a space of "relative legibility", entangled in multiple perceptions, conceptions and experiences (cf. Lefebvre;
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The value of confession and the exercise of justice

Catarina Frois

06.12.2023

In this note, I discuss the intricacies of the different truths that arise from the empirical material constituted by crime authors' narratives in situations of deprivation of liberty and their analyses of the
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Seeing like a routier: routiers’ borderscapes between Southern Europe and West Africa

Pedro Figueiredo Neto and Ricardo Falcão

22.11.2023

Routier is the self-designation employed by Senegalese men driving decades-old vehicles overloaded with mostly second-hand items from Southern Europe to be sold in West Africa. By seeing like a
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Relational ethics and care for the world

Jarrett Zigon

16.11.2023

In the inaugural contribution to this section, Jarrett Zigon challenges the anthropology limits of relativizing and localizing. Based on the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition, he proposes an anthropology of
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We are all curmanos

Ramón Sarró

10.10.2023

Starting from an analysis of the novel "El bosque de Ancines" by Galician writer Carlos Martínez-Barbeito, and his fascination with woods and wolves and other archetypes, the author examines the concept of the "curmano". What is a curmano? Are we
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Nombres de lugar: el espíritu

Ramón Sarró

10.10.2023

The name transforms the space into a singular place and, in particular, the religious name defines and constructs the identity of the place in a profound way. In this essay, the author combines landscape, language and religion to reflect on the
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Interview with João Leal

João Leal

Luís Cunha

Humberto Martins

03.10.2023

This interview features João Leal, the first director of Etnográfica. It was conducted by Luís Cunha and Humberto Martins in the Library of the National Museum of Ethnology in Belém.
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Etnographing the underground: notes and inspirations from the text by Francisco Martínez

Mariana Tello Weiss

28.09.2023

The text is highly inspiring from both a theoretical and methodological point of view. It proposes an ethnography of the basements in Sillamäe, a small village in eastern Estonia. A village that, because of its
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What Else Can We Do with/in Holes?

Tamta Khalvashi

28.09.2023

“Where is a bunker?” This question started to haunt many of us in Georgian cities, when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Quest for bunkers, basements and shelters, for spaces of both opacity and
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From basement to de-basement? A probing response to opacity

Hermione Spriggs

21.09.2023

“The opaque is not the obscure” (Glissant 1997:191). So begins Fran Martinez’ text on basements, which he approaches as spaces of opacity that can nonetheless be entered ethnographically. The
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Identity(ies) and negotiation: the dance of dressing and undressing, undressing and dressing (or not).

Raquel Mendes Pereira

19.09.2023

In an attempt to distance myself from the tourists' naked bodies, I decided to order some dresses from Arna, the village seamstress. Even so, throughout the research, my body and the way it was covered or uncovered
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Where the Story Begins Anew

Patrick Laviolette

29.08.2023

Francisco Martínez starts his essay with a quotation by Édouard Glissant. He might just as easily have chosen something from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1958) or Dick
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Gender, sexuality and ourselves

Miguel Vale de Almeida

25.08.2023

In Portugal, the social sciences and humanities have been very resistant to the development of gender and sexuality studies. While the country's peripheral status and the advent of democracy only in 1974 may explain this phenomenon, the same delay,
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Freedom to desire

Victor Hugo de Souza Barreto

28.06.2023

In this first edition of “A book and his critics”, we discuss Moisés Lino e Silva’s (Federal University of Bahia) recent book "Minoritarian Liberalism. A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela (2022)", which, based on ethnographic fieldwork in
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Lights Out. Practicing Opacity in Estonian Basements

Francisco Martínez

21.06.2023

This essay engages with alternative regimes of visibility by investigating the things that are kept, and the practices that take place in basements of eastern Estonia. The use of hiding infrastructures is here
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Confusing maps: notes on new energy territorialities in Portugal and Europe

Ruy Llera Blanes

Luís Silva

Francisco Freire

Antonio Maria Pusceddu

Antónia Lima

Paulo Mendes

21.06.2023

In the current context of post-pandemics, climate crisis and armed conflict in Ukraine, the issue of energy, its production, access and consumption have gained prominence in the global geopolitical landscape. In
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