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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Khalvashi Pic 2.jpg

What Else Can We Do with/in Holes?

Tamta Khalvashi

28.09.2023

Summary

“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 safety, was drawn from the possible spillover of this conflict onto Georgia that itself had been at war with Russia in 2008. Feelings of fear and anxiety snapped so strongly that they prompted us to introspect our cities from below – in search of spaces for survival.

Resumo

"Onde é que há um bunker?" Esta pergunta começou a assombrar muitos de nós nas cidades da Geórgia, quando a Rússia invadiu a Ucrânia em fevereiro de 2022. A procura de bunkers, caves e abrigos, de espaços de opacidade e de segurança, foi motivada pelo possível alastramento deste conflito à Geórgia, que tinha estado em guerra com a Rússia em 2008. Os sentimentos de medo e ansiedade foram tão fortes que nos levaram a introspeccionar as nossas cidades a partir de baixo - em busca de espaços de sobrevivência.

Resumen

"¿Dónde hay un búnker?" Esta pregunta empezó a atormentarnos a muchos en las ciudades georgianas, cuando Rusia invadió Ucrania en febrero de 2022. La búsqueda de búnkeres, sótanos y refugios, de espacios a la vez opacos y seguros, surgió de la posible extensión de este conflicto a Georgia, que a su vez había estado en guerra con Rusia en 2008. Los sentimientos de miedo y ansiedad irrumpieron con tanta fuerza que nos impulsaron a introspeccionar nuestras ciudades desde abajo, en busca de espacios para la supervivencia.

Résumé

"Où se trouve un bunker ? Cette question a commencé à hanter nombre d'entre nous dans les villes géorgiennes, lorsque la Russie a envahi l'Ukraine en février 2022. La quête de bunkers, de sous-sols et d'abris, d'espaces à la fois opaques et sûrs, a été motivée par la possibilité d'un débordement de ce conflit sur la Géorgie, qui avait elle-même été en guerre avec la Russie en 2008. Les sentiments de peur et d'anxiété ont été si forts qu'ils nous ont incités à introspecter nos villes d'en bas - à la recherche d'espaces de survie.

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.

“Basement mirage”. Photo by author.

“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 safety, was drawn from the possible spillover of this conflict onto Georgia that itself had been at war with Russia in 2008. Feelings of fear and anxiety snapped so strongly that they prompted us to introspect our cities from below – in search of spaces for survival.

What our renewed inquiry for bunkers revealed was that many underground spaces of Soviet blocks were not as opaque, secretive or even valid anymore. Indeed, basements in Soviet apartment buildings were intended to preserve sealing and waterproofing, and in an emergency, to be convertible back to shelters. But today, in Tbilisi for instance, most of these dark spaces were reformed into privatized areas of relation, becoming small shops, big supermarkets and banks, or even beauty salons instead. Since Soviet buildings did not have much storefront spaces due to the restrictions on private businesses, new shops and stores have, imaginatively, popped up in these once hidden spaces.

Basements and bunkers have even taken a form of individual homes, or home-like structures, for those who have not been able to afford rising real estate prices in residential buildings in Georgia. Even those bunkers in Soviet building blocks where once domestic trash was disposed, have been cleaned, renovated, privatized and rented out as homes to students in search of affordable housing. These barely breathable spaces (without a proper ventilation or lightning) are occupied by people precariously positioned. Those who are forced to seek inexpensive shelters in basements and bunkers - refugees, homeless, students and the evicted, are trapped in these abject temporalities and opacities of holes seemingly at infinitum, or in a standby regime.

A basement is a minor infrastructure, one related to the concept of opacity that Martínez proposes as an alternative to live beyond transparency, while questioning what conditions of existence are worth pursuing, and what political projects have to be defended to preserving them. That is staying with opacity endangers a critique of social and political arrangements of transparency and perhaps also calls for their capacity for social rearrangement and restructuring.

I take Francisco Martinez’s call for “the right to opacity”, as first posed by Édouard Glissant (1997), seriously. But I also would like to ask how can we achieve this right in places that are stripped of the “right to the city” (Harvey 2012) altogether? What is the promise of right to opacity in cities, saturated not merely by the current regimes of visibility, transparency and discernability, but by the machines of war, destruction and privatization? What kind of promise can the right to opacity, to invisibility, or indeterminacy hold out to those whose lives are entangled in repressive powers of market and war, themselves recruiting opacity on transparency’s behalf?

Looking at the city from its holes revealed, at least in Georgia, that it is made up with cleaves of not just unnoticed underground spaces, aesthetic experiments and alterative knowledge, but with opaque set of privatizations, dispossessions and destructions. It revealed that staying with those ex-centric and peripheral spaces such as holes and underground structures, do not always guarantee self-expression and adventure. For these basements often emerge as guarantees of prosperity for hegemonic order of capitalism itself resting on abject spaces, bodies, and infrastructures. It is like living in the city of Omelas, whose thriving life depends on the perpetual misery of a single child trapped in darkness and filth, as depicted by Ursula Le Guin in her novel Those Who Walk Away from Omelas.

“Looking from below”. Photo by author.

It is at this disjunction that right to opacity may seem more complex and more multifaced for those, who do not just stay with the hole, but are stuck in/with it. And although this insistence on opacity through holes is crucial in a time of hypervisibility and hierarchical monitoring, I wonder what if we think about it together with the right to the city as elaborated first by Henri Lefebvre (1986) and later by David Harvey (2012)? Right to the city is a collective ability to change ourselves by changing our urban surroundings and to be able to imagine and govern the city beyond the market forces. Bunkers, basements, and shelters – these dark corners of architecture – embodying structures of both oppression and creation, are now superseded by an ideal of private property that has emerged as a new form of state and capital capture in Georgia. It impedes the possibility to live otherwise, to enjoy opacity as a way of creativity. So, I wonder, what would it mean to think of these basements as a way of uncovering opaque muddle of post-socialist capitalism along, those that absorb bunkers and basements as sources to expand their lives?

To defend the right to the city is to insist against the threat of one-sided, linear story of post-Soviet development. It is to cultivate those conditions that sustain such life the opaque promises. When routed through this way, opacity emerges not as a technology of resistance for those with little power, but it becomes a mode of being in its own right – a condition of existence. It emerges as an active force, rather than a passive reaction. It is this active force that promises to expose the hegemonic regimes of visibility, market and war; it makes us aware that falling into a hole is no single person’s fault. For right to the city names the structural condition that keeps people in a perpetual haze of hole. As Martínez aptly demonstrates, holes, then, can incite both claustrophobic and permissive affect, which may be evoked in a graffiti left behind by Soviet soldiers in their military shelters: “What else can we do in Silki?” To put it differently, “What else can we do with/in the hole in which we are trapped?” In my experience, there is something fundamentally oppressive in holes, but the message that Martínez leaves us with is that we may dissociate them from structural precarities that discipline our lives and invent our own technologies of invisibility, the one that expands our ability to change the very terms of living.

Tamta Khalvashi (Professor of Anthropology, Ilia State University; Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellow, 2022-2023).

Tamta Khalvashi is a professor of Anthropology and the Head of the PhD Program of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ilia State University in Georgia. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from Copenhagen University (2015). She has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships from Fulbright Program at New York University, Department of Anthropology (2016-2017) and Cornell University, the Society for the Humanities (2022-23). Her research interests are located in the overlap of experimental anthropology, the interdisciplinary field of affect theory, and cultural anthropology with a particular focus on postsocialist transformations, peripheral histories, marginal social identities, space and materiality. Her article Horizons of Medea: Economies and Cosmologies of Dispossession in Georgia (Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 2018) has been awarded Honorary Mention from Soyuz (Postsocialist Cultural Studies Research Network of the American Anthropological Association) in the Article Price Annual Competition (2018). Khalvashi is author of A Sea of Transience: Politics, Poetics and Aesthetics on the Black Sea Coast (with Martin Demant Frederiksen, 2023).

References

Harvey, David. (2012). “Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution”. Verso: London and New York.

Lefebvre Henri. (1996). Writing on Cities. Blackwell Publishers: Oxford and Malden.

Le Guin, Ursula. (1973) “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The Wind's Twelve Quarters. New York: Harpers.

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
"Where the Story Begins Anew" by Patrick Laviolette
"Etnografiar lo subterráneo: notas e inspiraciones sobre el texto de Francisco Martínez" by Mariana Tello Weiss