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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Spriggs Pic 2.png

From basement to de-basement? A probing response to opacity

Hermione Spriggs

21.09.2023

Summary

“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 apparent paradox that Martinez sets up appears to be a problem with relations of power, wrapped up in the expressly visual coding of “observer” and “observed”. As inherently dark places, basements present a particularly fertile ground for exploring and reversing these relations, and – I suggest – for challenging our own ethnographic reproduction of language that links the ability to see with knowledge possession.

Resumo

"O opaco não é o obscuro" (Glissant 1997:191). É assim que começa o texto de Francisco Martínez sobre as caves, que ele aborda como espaços de opacidade que podem, no entanto, ser explorados etnograficamente. O aparente paradoxo que Martínez estabelece parece ser um problema de relações de poder, envolto na codificação expressamente visual de "observador" e "observado". Como lugares inerentemente escuros, as caves apresentam um terreno particularmente fértil para explorar e inverter estas relações e - sugiro - para desafiar a nossa própria reprodução etnográfica da linguagem que liga a capacidade de ver à posse de conhecimento.

Resumen

"Lo opaco no es lo oscuro" (Glissant 1997:191). Así comienza Francisco Martínez su texto sobre los sótanos, que aborda como espacios de opacidad en los que, sin embargo, se puede entrar etnográficamente. La aparente paradoja que plantea Martínez parece ser un problema de relaciones de poder, envuelto en la codificación expresamente visual de "observador" y "observado". Como lugares intrínsecamente oscuros, los sótanos presentan un terreno particularmente fértil para explorar e invertir estas relaciones, y -sugiero- para desafiar nuestra propia reproducción etnográfica del lenguaje que vincula la capacidad de ver con la posesión de conocimiento.

Résumé

"L'opaque n'est pas l'obscur" (Glissant 1997:191). C'est ainsi que commence le texte de Francisco Martínez sur les sous-sols, qu'il aborde comme des espaces d'opacité qui peuvent néanmoins faire l'objet d'une approche ethnographique. Le paradoxe apparent que Martinez met en place semble être un problème de relations de pouvoir, enveloppé dans le codage expressément visuel de "l'observateur" et de "l'observé". En tant qu'endroits intrinsèquement sombres, les sous-sols constituent un terrain particulièrement fertile pour explorer et inverser ces relations et - je le suggère - pour remettre en question notre propre reproduction ethnographique du langage qui lie la capacité de voir à la possession de connaissances.

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 (Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn 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.

“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 apparent paradox that Martinez sets up appears to be a problem with relations of power, wrapped up in the expressly visual coding of “observer” and “observed”. As inherently dark places, basements present a particularly fertile ground for exploring and reversing these relations, and – I suggest – for challenging our own ethnographic reproduction of language that links the ability to see with knowledge possession.

Basements as places that reveal through their withholding: one might assume that on entering such reticent spaces, the ethnographer’s job would be to find the means for ‘illuminating’ objects and social relations, bringing them ‘to light’. But this is not what Martinez is proposing. Instead he offers opacity as “a medium that resists the light of (Western) understanding in order to preserve diversity”. How, then, to probe the shadowy spaces of others without rendering them transparrent? The compound noun cellar door comes to mind as a sympathetic point of entry. Regarded by many as the most satisfying English phrase purely in terms of its sound^[1], cellar door creates an aperture into the darkness and slowness of basements that also pays heed to the underground’s recalcitrance.

In response to Martinez’ critique of hypervisibility as a normalising force and his call for re-training our embodied practices of attention, I’d like to propose three further lines of inquiry into the opaque:

Photos: stills from film “Earth Swimmers”

i) A recrafting of “participant observation” into “observer participancy”
ii) A shift away from visual towards sonic modes of encounter and description
iii) An ethics of reciprocal (de)basement; of mutual unboxing in the context of ethnographic encounter

i) Basements are places where things are stored, stashed and possessed, and places where one becomes vulnerable to possession by one’s stashed away things. Basements fill with objects that take on lives of their own – possessions and associated rituals whose potency ferments like illicit moonshine. The traditional anthropological method of participant observation breaks down in this context, not only because the conditions for visually-coded observation are blatantly absent in the dark, but also because basements are themselves, as Martinez puts it, “opaque” accumulations of traces and layers: their interiority resists exposure, and through this resistance their contents become charged. With opacity, therefore, comes agency and enchantment – in Alfred Gell’s idiom, aesthetic power which intensifies by the inability to trace or comprehend the techniques of its production (1999). Basements vibrate with the potential to debase conventional relations, including those between the observing anthropologist and the nonhuman field of observation – things that are stored in basements take on an uncanny ability to observe us back. In quantum mechanics, “observer participancy” refers to the ability for observation to change its subject of attention and vice-versa; that is, the observer creates and is created by her local reality (Frieden 1998, Pitty 2000). In short, our basements make us just as we make them. With this in mind, “observer participancy” more aptly describes anthropological encounters in opaque spaces than “participant observation”. In basements, as Alberto Corsin-Jiminez writes of other creative autonomous zones, we are “called forth into existence. We are experimented into the world”.

ii) As Martinez suggests, basements are theatrical spaces in which their occupants find themselves free to explore obsessions, perversions and expressions of radical difference. Basements are also productive places for reimagining what anthropology itself might be (a dark anthropology?), because in the absence of vision, alternative modes of sensing and knowing the world are drawn to the fore.

I recently made a “dark film” myself in collaboration with a professional mole catcher (Earth Swimmers, 2021). I tasked myself to use my camera (my tool for observational capture) in a way that responded and adapted to Nigel’s own set of tools and techniques for accessing the subterranean world of the mole. This mimesis worked whilst I tracked his above-ground movements, assessing the arrangement of mole-hills and feeling with his heel for the subtle ‘give’ in the earth that signifies a mole’s underground tunnel. But then Nigel used his mole catcher’s probe (a long, slim, metal pole with a bulb at one end) to penetrate the run, gleaning tactile, vibratory knowledge of the soil’s composition and the depth and direction of the tunnel. At this point the ground’s surface blocked my camera lens, and the mole's world retreated into obscurity. I responded by revising my toolkit and came back with my own form of probe, a contact microphone made from a small piezo plate that picks up sonic vibrations directly from the earth.

Rays of light bounce off a surface, sound travels through. And whilst things can be seen in an instant, sonic perception occupies time. Sounds travel through things (soil, rocks, traps), and the materials they pass through infect their sonority such that sounds become carriers for nonhuman “voice”. And whilst distance is necessary for visual comprehension, sonic vibrations enter the body with an intimacy akin to touch. Attending to things acoustically therefore slows down observation, “cultivating or enriching time” and “returning sensation” (Martinez this volume p7) by attuning the listening body in new ways. This affects the observer/prober’s perspective to such a degree that subject-object relations form in an altogether different way (see Spriggs PhD thesis, forthcoming).

In the vibratory world of mole catching, ‘deep listening’ (cf Pauline Oliveros 2005) reveals an animated landscape of more-than-human subjects, mutually tracking and responding to each other in “a skillful oscillation between openness and closure, refusal and engagement” (Martinez ibid). Sacrificing my own visually-oriented toolkit in order to lean into this language of vibration granted me partial access to the mole’s own dark cosmology. I followed Nigel as an anthropologist of Other Animals, attendant to nonhuman worlds that retain their right to opacity (as Nigel says, moles “can never really be known”) but can nonetheless be entered and felt (Spriggs ibid).

iii) Watching Urlich Seidl’s film Im Keller (2014) makes me feel like a mole – the creepy kind that spies. But in the long frontal shots of this documentary portrait of Austrian basement culture, Seidl’s protagonists seem completely at ease with the turning inside-out of their own private spaces, their most intimate rituals meeting the camera’s unflinching gaze. A victim of domestic abuse is shown in her basement enacting an elaborate BDSM relationship. “It sets my mind free,” she explains during a frank and frontal interview in which she speaks naked whilst tightly bound in rope. In another vignette, a woman cradles and coos at a naturalistic newborn doll that she lifts from a cardboard box amidsts dozens of other boxed-up sleeping babies. In a third, a grey-haired man toasts to the Third Reich in his museum of Nazi paraphernalia. After the film I’m left with a sense that I’ve seen far too much of these people’s hidden lives, their opacity compromised, without any reveal of the filmmaker’s own. And yet, as the BDSM protagonist states, her debasement is a form of personal liberation that could only take place in the basement, thanks no doubt to its withdrawal from the gaze of the outside world. The right to both debasement and opacity is negotiated in the tensions that Seidl sets up. As a hinge between the public and private, inside and out, the basement presents as a ‘knot’ of non-Euclidean space (Kuchler 1999, Le Guin 1998): It is host to that “which cannot be reduced” (Glissant in Martinez, this volume).

Martinez’ own relation to his basement is arguably missing from his text. That said, the idea of turning out my own boxed-up histories in this context makes me cringe. Unpacking our vulnerabilities and intimate obsessions is not what we’re taught to do as anthropologists, such that doing so here feels like a taboo. Do we as researchers also retain a right to our opacity, as Martinez claims? Or is mastering the art of self-exposure a discomfort we should practise on an ethical basis if we seek to attend to the basements of others (Martinez this volume, c.f. Donald 2012)? Could controlled practices of personal de-basement offer liberation within academic contexts that remain awkwardly bound to homogenising forms of knowledge production?

To push this a little further: Might assuming the researcher’s own right to opacity in fact foreclose an ethical responsibility, even unwittingly reproduce a form of hegemony and/or repression, if we take stock of the ethnographic truth presented here that basements themselves tend toward debasement – ‘de’ meaning both ‘from the bottom/below’ but also ‘right to the bottom’, as in ‘totally’ or ‘completely’^[2]? What does it mean to cling to the opaque when the completion of basement is in fact a de-basement, when basement (noun) and debasement (verb) are knotted together, holding down whilst emptying out, creating spaces of freedom through underground exposure?

What sort of dark, vibratory places might host this kind of anthropological transformation?

Hermione Spriggs

Hermione Spriggs is an artist and researcher. Her current practice-based PhD research involves an ethnography of rural pest control in North Yorkshire, asking how hunters communicate with animals and exploring the relevance of a hunting attitude to environmental art practice. Her edited volume Five Heads: Art, Anthropology and Mongol-Futurism is published by Sternberg Press. Current projects include a public art commission for Kings Hedges Cambridge, a film commission for Sheffield DocFest, a text for Cabinet Magazine and a nomadic series of animal tracking workshops with collaborator Tamara Colchester.

Bibliography

Corsin Jimenéz, A (2015) “Higgs Boson Blues: Sounding out the Anthropological Prototype”, Published online ttps://comedyofthings.com/
Pitty, P (2000) “New Physics and the Group Mind”, Annual Glaister Lecture, published online in Braziers’ Research Communications https://www.braziers.org.uk/bpsisr/research-and-publications/research-papers/

Kuchler, S (1999) “Lessons Learned from the Net: A Note on the Cataloguing of Visual Information in Museums”, Journal of Museum Ethnography, No. 11.

Le Guin, U (1982) “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”

Oliveros, P (1995) Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. iUniverse.

Gell, A. (1999) Art and Anthropology

Frieden (1998)

Seidl, Im Keller

Spriggs (2021) Earth Swimmers

Spriggs (forthcoming) “Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps”, PhD Thesis

Glissant, E (1997) Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Related links

"Lights Out. Practicing Opacity in Estonian Basements" by Francisco Martínez
"Where the Story Begins Anew" by Patrick Laviolette
"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

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14FOB-onlanguage-t.html#:~:text=The%20fantasy%20writer%20J.%20R.%20R.%20Tolkien,often%20given%20credit%20for%20it. [2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/de