Vol. 29 (1)
2025

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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Vol. 28 (3)
2024

Articles

Contingency conveniences: anticipation as a temporal practice of SEF inspectors at the Portuguese airport border

Mafalda Carapeto

This article follows from ethnographic work conducted at an airport in Portugal, where, from June 2021 to April 2022, I observed the daily routines of the inspectors of the Portuguese Immigration and Borders Service (SEF) across various groups,

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Articles

Cotidiano e trajetórias vitais situadas de mulheres idosas (AMBA, província de Buenos Aires, Argentina): a incidência da pandemia de Covid-19

Ana Silvia Valero, María Gabriela Morgante y Julián Cueto

Este trabalho pretende dar conta das interseções entre diferentes aspetos da vida quotidiana e das trajetórias de vida das pessoas idosas num espaço de bairro e a incidência da pandemia de Covid-19. Baseia-se no desenvolvimento sustentado,

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Articles

The reconfigurations of culture jamming in the digital environment: the case of anti-consumerism memes in the #antiblackfriday campaign (Brazil)

Liliane Moreira Ramos

In this article, I discuss the reconfigurations of the phenomenon known as culture jamming, characteristic of the communicative dimension of political consumption, based on the appropriation of Internet memes as a tool to criticize consumption.

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Articles

Informal economies in Bairro Alto (Lisbon): the nocturnal tourist city explained through a street dealer’s life story

Jordi Nofre

The historical neighbourhood of Bairro Alto is the city’s most iconic nightlife destination, especially for tourists visiting Lisbon (Portugal). The expansion of commercial nightlife in this area has been accompanied by the increasing presence of

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Articles

A pame theory of force: the case of the xi'iui of the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro, Mexico

Imelda Aguirre Mendoza

This text analyzes the term of force (mana’ap) as a native concept formulated by the pames (xi’iui) of the Sierra Gorda de Querétaro. This is related to aspects such as blood, food, cold, hot, air and their effects on the body. It is observed

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Articles

Convergences and bifurcations in the biographies and autobiographies of indigenous intellectuals from Mexico and Brazil

Mariana da Costa Aguiar Petroni e Gabriel K. Kruell

In this article we present an exercise of reflection on the challenges involved in writing and studying the biographies and autobiographies of indigenous intellectuals in different geographical, historical and political scenarios: Mexico and Brazil,

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Articles

The history through sacrifice and predation: tikmũ,ũn existential territory at the colonial crossroads

Douglas Ferreira Gadelha Campelo

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Articles

To grow up: affectionate imitation in the relations of Capuxu children with their animals

Emilene Leite de Sousa e Antonella Maria Imperatriz Tassinari

This paper analyzes the experiences of Capuxu children with the animals they interact with daily, looking for un understanding about how children’s relationships with these companion species cross the Capuxu sociality, including the onomastic

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Articles

Biological science laboratories as practices: an ethnographic reading of plant anatomy at a University in the Caatinga (Bahia, Brazil)

Elizeu Pinheiro da Cruz e Iara Maria de Almeida Souza

Anchored in notes elaborated in a multispecies ethnography, this text formulates a reading of biological science laboratories as situating practices of human and non-human actors. For this, the authors bring up plants from/in the caatinga,

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Interdisciplinarities

Sensitive maps in abandoned territories of railway stations on the Brazil-Uruguay border

Vanessa Forneck e Eduardo Rocha

The research maps and investigates the territories created by the abandonment of railway stations, a process that has been accentuated since the 1980s, in the twin cities of Jaguarão-Rio Branco and Santana do Livramento-Rivera, on the

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Multimodal Alt

A graphic ethnography as a form of affection and memory: afflictions, spirits, and healing processes in Zion churches in Maputo

Giulia Cavallo

In 2016, three years after completing my Ph.D., I embarked on my first attempt to translate my ethnographic research conducted in Maputo, among the Zion communities, into a graphic language. Through a series of single illustrations, I aimed to

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Recursivities

Desanthropic ethnography: between apocryphal stories of water, deep dichotomies and liquid dwellings

Alejandro Vázquez Estrada e Eva Fernández

In this text we address the possibility of deconstructing the relationships – that have water as a resource available to humans – that have ordered some dichotomies such as anthropos-nature, establishing that there are methodologies, theories

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Argument

Anthropology of art, Anthropology – history, dilemmas, possibilities

Filipe Verde

In this essay, I first aim to pinpoint the factors that have historically marginalized art within anthropological thought. I propose that this marginalization stems from two main influences: the aesthetic conception of art and the metaphysical

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Reviews

Um jovem caçador de lixo na Mafalala, nas décadas de 1960 e 1970

Diogo Ramada Curto

Celso Mussane (1957-) é um pastor evangélico moçambicano. Licenciou-se na Suécia (1994) e tirou o curso superior de Teologia Bíblica na Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná, em Londrina no Brasil (2018). Entre 2019 e 2020, publicou

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Reviews

Alberto Corsín Jiménez y Adolfo Estalella, Free Culture and the City: Hackers, Commoners, and Neighbors in Madrid, 1997-2017

Francisco Martínez

Este libro tiene tres dimensiones analíticas: primero, es una etnografía del movimiento de cultura libre en Madrid. Segundo, es un estudio histórico sobre la traducción de lo digital a lo urbano, favoreciendo una nueva manera de posicionarse en

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Laviolette Pic 1.jpg

Where the Story Begins Anew

Patrick Laviolette

29.08.2023

Summary

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 Hebdige’s Hiding in the Light (1988) to introduce what lays on the other side. Indeed, when evoking opacity and the suspension of time through concealment, the socially embodied imaginary is never very far away. Neither are the minor key details, as described by Rebecca Solnit in Orwell’s Roses:“What exists ‘without any wish to change’ is static; it’s before the story begins, before the fall from grace, or after it is concluded with reunion, rectification, or some other form of repair” (2021:191).

Resumo

Francisco Martínez começa o seu ensaio com uma citação de Édouard Glissant. Poderia muito bem ter escolhido algo da Poética do Espaço (1958) de Gaston Bachelard ou de Hiding in the Light (1988) de Dick Hebdige para apresentar o que se encontra do outro lado. De facto, ao evocar a opacidade e a suspensão do tempo através da ocultação, o imaginário socialmente incorporado nunca está muito longe. Nem os pequenos pormenores fundamentais, como descreve Rebecca Solnit em Orwell's Roses: "O que existe 'sem qualquer desejo de mudar' é estático; é anterior ao início da história, antes da queda em desgraça, ou depois de concluída com reunião, retificação ou qualquer outra forma de reparação" (2021:191).

Resumen

Francisco Martínez comienza su ensayo con una cita de Édouard Glissant. También podría haber escogido algo de Poética del Espacio (1958), de Gaston Bachelard, o de Hiding in the Light (1988), de Dick Hebdige, para introducir lo que hay al otro lado. En efecto, al evocar la opacidad y la suspensión del tiempo a través de la ocultación, el imaginario socialmente encarnado nunca está muy lejos. Tampoco lo están los pequeños detalles clave, como describe Rebecca Solnit en Orwell's Roses: "Lo que existe 'sin ningún deseo de cambiar' es estático; está antes de que empiece la historia, antes de la caída en desgracia, o después de que concluya con el reencuentro, la rectificación o alguna otra forma de reparación" (2021:191).

Résumé

Francisco Martínez commence son essai par une citation d'Édouard Glissant. Il aurait pu tout aussi bien choisir un extrait de Poétique de l'espace (1958) de Gaston Bachelard ou de Hiding in the Light (1988) de Dick Hebdige pour introduire ce qui se trouve de l'autre côté. En effet, lorsqu'il s'agit d'évoquer l'opacité et la suspension du temps par la dissimulation, l'imaginaire social incarné n'est jamais très loin. Il en va de même pour les petits détails clés, comme le décrit Rebecca Solnit dans Orwell's Roses : "Ce qui existe "sans aucun désir de changement" est statique ; c'est avant le début de l'histoire, avant la déchéance, ou après sa conclusion par des retrouvailles, une rectification ou une autre forme de réparation" (2021:191).

In this section the editors propose a challenging essay that will question and push forward theoretical-anthropological thinking. This piece may also include cutting-edge ethnographic methodologies, and will propose something new and controversial, within the parameters of professional academic common sense. Three different contributors will respond to these provocations with their own thoughts, based on their anthropological experience, with critical perspectives. The author of the main piece gives a final response.

In this first edition of “O Corte”, Francisco Martinez (Tampere University) discusses the ‘right to opacity’ in an age of visual excess, tracking and exposure. Based on his ethnographic wanderings in basements and closed spaces across eastern Estonia, he argues for the epistemological potential of such environments, in terms of questioning the hegemonic and alternative regimes of visibility we engage with. What kind of political and epistemological consequences can we take from such an approach. The text is followed by reactions from colleagues with similar interrogations. More on the “O Corte” section here.

Photo by the author.

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 Hebdige’s Hiding in the Light (1988) to introduce what lays on the other side. Indeed, when evoking opacity and the suspension of time through concealment, the socially embodied imaginary is never very far away. Neither are the minor key details, as described by Rebecca Solnit in Orwell’s Roses:“What exists ‘without any wish to change’ is static; it’s before the story begins, before the fall from grace, or after it is concluded with reunion, rectification, or some other form of repair” (2021:191).

So there’s a lot of reading between the lines when reflecting on Martínez’ essay. Here, the unsaid could be understood as mirroring the invisible. Moreover, what is renamed, rediscovered and revalued are important factors. As in the case of Eric Blair, who ‘rechristened’ himself George Orwell in 1936, and planted roses in the garden of a small, rented cottage in Wallington. Eighty years later, Solnit travelled to the English countryside and found those rose bushes, establishing a living connection between past and present joys.

Drawing a covert analogy with minor things that might become problematic, we are to assume that holes and basements are disruptive forces – ones which are good to fall into – good to think with. In this sense, they are paradoxical, ideological and heterograhic. To some extent, one might say, they are even dystopic spaces of our human impact on the Earth... of the Anthropocenic in other words (Laviolette & Argounova-Low 2021).

Now when Martínez writes: “the underground has been a hotbed for myths and stories for millennia” the imagination of many people will likely revisit their school philosophy classes. In so doing, they will likely recall something of the allegorical teachings of caves, fire, sun, shadows and the surrender of finding hiding places – with a discussion between two philosophers on the experience of prisoners who are forced (or have chosen) to solely gaze upon the opposing wall (Plato 1906).

Again, in terms of the unsaid and the invented, many readers will possibly associate Martínez’s own artistic experimentation with doing nothing in public cafés in Lisbon and Tbilisi with Marina Abramović’s work in 2010 ‘The Artist is Present’. In this long-term public performance, Abramović was sat at a table across from an empty chair, waiting for visitors to take turns in sitting opposite her and stare into her eyes. Over the course of a full working day of eight hours, for almost three months, she greeted thousands of strangers, as well as a few familiar faces. This included a profound, if rather ‘staged’, moment when she was confronted with her ex-partner and collaborator Ulay – Frank Uwe Laysiepen [1943-2020]. Brought to tears, she reaches across the table and they grasp each other’s hands. After repeat encounters of this sort, during an extended period of divorce procedures and legal lawsuits over contract disputes, the pair continued to patch up some of the holes from their past, until Ulay’s death in 2020.

Indeed, Martínez draws on Michael Taussig’s notion of secrecy as well as Georg Simmel’s idea of concealment/non-knowledge (Nichtwissen) to illustrate how basements are ultimately both relational spaces and spaces of relationships (para 18). Yet in considering death explicitly, one could wonder why basements in the context of the liminal are not made analogous to a literal and symbolic rite for burying unwanted things (see Boyle 1994). Perhaps Martínez feels that such a comparison is too simple or obvious to make. Nonetheless, from my point of view, what is maybe most conspicuously absent from his contribution, is a conceptual frame in which to make sense of his project’s acts of subterranean excavation. Here, an ‘archaeology of the contemporary past’ approach is rather taken-for-granted, so that there is little by way of systematic descriptions of what is actually found in these basements (Buchli & Lucas 2001). The examples that are given, dozens of plastic water bottles for instance, do evoke many topical learnings and geo-political concerns – ranging from fear over Russian invasions of former Soviet nations, to rising awareness for global climate change issues.

Regardless, I would certainly agree with Martínez’s observation that basements are a type of concealed cultural landscape capable of reproducing “a complex entanglement between the private and the public self”. There are many comparisons that we could make here, whether cross-cultural, or cross-temporal. Indeed, he makes one of the former types of comparison with some of his own work in Georgia, creating a typology of holes in Tbilisi (Martínez 2019). In such work he argues that holes are both symbolic and structural, an invitation to escape or to reveal something hidden. To peek through, or simply to break on through to the other side, to a place where the story begins anew.

Bringing in my own research or car cultures for a moment, we could easily imagine how the inner landscapes of motor vehicles also blur this dichotomy between public and private, as well as between the individual and the dividual (Laviolette 2020). The similarity exists because both descending the stairs into a building’s subterranean storage spaces and stepping (or hopping) into a stranger’s car are moments of trust that mostly require an invitation. And one of the differences relates to the visibility factor that Martínez so aptly makes in relation to submerged or underground environments. They are more or less concealed from view, yet lurking not far beneath the surfaces of our past, present and future. It is in this sense, as underworldly spaces, that they are architectural technologies of our consciousnesses, identities and memories.

Patrick Laviolette (FSS, Masaryk University, CZ / Co-Editor, AJEC)

Photo by the author.

Patrick Laviolette is an anthropologist working at the Division of Social Anthropology of the Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic). He was co-Editor of EASA's SA/AS (2015-2019) and is co-editor of Berghahn's AJEC (2019- ). He is the co-author and editor of the publications The Landscaping of Metaphor and Cultural Identity (Frankfurt: PLang, 2011); Things in Culture -- Culture in Things (Tartu: UTP, 2013); Extreme Landscapes
of Leisure (London: Routledge, 2016); Repair, Brokenness and Breakthrough (NY: Berghahn, 2019); Hitchhiking: Cultural Inroads (London: Palgrave, 2020).

References

ABRAMOVIĆ, Marina 2010. The Artist is Present. New York: MoMA. https://www.moma.org

BACHELARD, Gaston 1958. La poétique de l'espace. Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France.

BOYLE, Danny 1994. Shallow Grave (92mins). Glasgow: PolyGram.

BUCHLI, Victor & Gavin LUCAS 2001. Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. London: Routledge.

HEBDIGE, Dick 1988. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. London: Routledge.

LAVIOLETTE, Patrick 2020. Dividually Driven. Hitchhiking: Cultural Inroads. London: Palgrave. 31-58.

LAVIOLETTE, Patrick & Tanya ARGOUNOVA-LOW 2021 (eds). Auto-Anthropocenes, Special Issue. Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Social, 28 (4): 1008-1098.

MARTÍNEZ, Francisco 2019. ‘What’s in a hole? Voids out of place and politics below the state in Georgia’. In Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough. F. Martínez and P. Laviolette (eds.) Oxford: Berghahn, 121–144.

PLATO 1906 [375BCE] The Republic, Book VII (Rouse, W.H.D. ed). London: Penguin Group.

SOLNIT, Rebecca 2021. Orwell’s Roses. London: Granta.

Related links

"Lights Out. Practicing Opacity in Estonian Basements" by Francisco Martínez
"From basement to de-basement? A probing response to opacity" by Hermione Spriggs
"What Else Can We Do with/in Holes?" by Tamta Khalvashi
"Etnografiar lo subterráneo: notas e inspiraciones sobre el texto de Francisco Martínez" by Mariana Tello Weiss