About
Based in Portugal, Etnográfica is a journal of social and cultural anthropology publishing original articles in Portuguese, English, Spanish and French in three issues per year. Covering a wide range of ethnographic contexts, the journal values high-quality empirical research, varied analytical perspectives and theoretical innovation. Articles selected by the Editorial Committee are subjected to double-blind peer review by two experts in the field. Etnográfica is indexed in relevant social science databases and collections such as Anthropological Index Online, EBSCO, SciELO, Scopus, Web of Science – SciELO Citation Index, DOAJ.
Funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, I.P. (UID/04038/2020).
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Audiovisual genealogies, poetics and Afro-indigenous memories: through the lens of artists-researchers from Ecuador and Brazil
16.11.2024
This visual essay includes artistic expressions in the context of Afro-Indigenous memories in the Americas. We invited artists, activists, researchers, and allies, especially Afro-Ecuadorian Quilombolas/Cimarronas
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Make sure you don't get wet... if you catch the virus, who will take care of me?
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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"
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
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
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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(Re)encontrar Sousa Martins
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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Etnographing the underground: notes and inspirations from the text by Francisco Martínez
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?
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
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).
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
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
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
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
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
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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