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Vol. 29 (2)
2025



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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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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Magazine

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Iscte-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa
Edifício 4 - Iscte_Conhecimento e Inovação, Sala B1.130 
Av. Forças Armadas, 40 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal

(+351) 210 464 057
etnografica@cria.org.pt

Financiado pela FCT, I. P. (UIDB/04038/2020 e UIDP/04038/2020)

© 2025 Revista Etnográfica

Magazine

About

Editorial Team

Authors

Articles Submission

Numbers

Agora

About

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Articles

Sections

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Iscte-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa
Edifício 4 - Iscte_Conhecimento e Inovação, Sala B1.130 
Av. Forças Armadas, 40 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal

(+351) 210 464 057
etnografica@cria.org.pt

Financiado pela FCT, I. P. (UIDB/04038/2020 e UIDP/04038/2020)

© 2025 Revista Etnográfica

The Cut

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 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).
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).
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).
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

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Iscte-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa
Edifício 4 - Iscte_Conhecimento e Inovação, Sala B1.130 
Av. Forças Armadas, 40 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal

(+351) 210 464 057
etnografica@cria.org.pt

Financiado pela FCT, I. P. (UIDB/04038/2020 e UIDP/04038/2020)

© 2025 Revista Etnográfica

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Iscte-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa
Edifício 4 - Iscte_Conhecimento e Inovação, Sala B1.130 
Av. Forças Armadas, 40 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal

(+351) 210 464 057
etnografica@cria.org.pt

Financiado pela FCT, I. P. (UIDB/04038/2020 e UIDP/04038/2020)

© 2025 Revista Etnográfica