Magazine

Meta-Governance and the Informal Reality of Nepal's Bureaucracy

Binod Pokharel

02.07.2025

This text addresses the concept of meta-governance—the governance of governance—which combines rules, markets, and networks to manage complex systems. It explains how, in Nepal, despite theoretical

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LAB - Living Anthropology and Art Boundaries

An interview with Jorge Freitas Branco

Jorge Freitas Branco

Constança Vieira de Andrade

30.06.2025

The present interview features Jorge Freitas Branco, Emeritus Full Professor at ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon and researcher at CRIA.

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A conversation with Livia Melzi

Marco Maria Zanin

30.06.2025

In this new article from LAB – Living Anthropology and Art Boundaries, I am pleased to present a conversation with Livia Melzi, a visual artist and researcher whose practice lies

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Dossier Restitution and Reparation

The universalist discipline of representation

Laura Burocco

18.06.2025

This essay examines the manipulative representation promoted by two European leading art institutions, the Biennale di Venezia (2024) and Documenta15 (2022), in support of a distorted Western decolonial

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‘No to Fortress Europe!": immigration, moral panics and borders

José Mapril

09.04.2025

The background of this issue is the growing incrustation of xenophobia and discrimination in policies and discourses in too many places, including here, where detention centers for "il-legal" people and "greenways" for their legal labor exploitation

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An interview with Jaume Franquesa

Jaume Franquesa, Ruy Llera Blanes

03.04.2025

This interview features Jaume Franquesa, an anthropologist and researcher at the University of Buffalo's College

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INCLUSION-EXCLUSION: Texts from the Ethnographic Writing Workshop

Gianmarco Marzola

João Afonso Baptista

30.03.2025

This collection aims to capture the collective, experimental and creative spirit of the Ethnographic Writing Workshop held in the spring of 2024 by the ‘Diversities: Ethnographies in the Contemporary World’ research group at the Institute of

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Having land and being from the land: two complementary meanings

Verena Sevá Nogueira

30.03.2025

This text proposes a brief reflection on the meaning of land in a peasant context. It discusses a process of socio-territorial changes experienced by rural families in the north-east of Brazil who were expropriated

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LAB - Living Anthropology and Art Boundaries

Ecologies of sustainability and networks of solidarity: knowledge and practices in the Valley of Thorns (Ecuador) and Ribeira Valley, São Paulo (Brazil)

Barbarita Lara, Marina Gomes, Maria Eliza Manteca, Diná Silva, Salomón Acosta, Nelson Espinoza, Jaqueline L. Silva, Aparecido Medeiros, Andrea Chávez, Génesis Delgado, Danielle Samia, Cleberson Moura, Daniela Balanzátegui, Francisco S. Noelli, Marianne Sallum

29.03.2025

This article presents two active projects in the Chota Valley (Imbabura and Carchi provinces, Ecuador) and in the Ribeira Valley, Apiaí (São Paulo, Brazil). Both initiatives establish a dialogue on

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Multimodal Alt

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

Vanessa Forneck and Eduardo Rocha

05.03.2025

The research maps and investigates the territories created by the abandonment of railway stations, a process that has been accentuated since

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Interview with Elena Mazzi

Marco Maria Zanin

25.02.2025

In this section of Agora, I am pleased to present an interview with Italian artist Elena Mazzi, whose work lies at the border between art and anthropology, transforming artistic practice into a site of

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Fragments of the imagined clay

Sónia Mota Ribeiro

12.12.2024

This piece, made up of a brief text and a set of images from field notes, photographs, relational maps, notebooks, loose-leaf drawings, and ethnography - reflects my doctoral research process into the practice of

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The tone of botany: a note on the sensitivity of knowledge

Pedro Crepaldi Carlessi

26.11.2024

This field record, taken in 2015, is the result of ethnographic research in which I followed the path of plants collected in an umbanda terreiro and taken to a botanical taxonomy laboratory for identification.

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Audiovisual genealogies, poetics and Afro-indigenous memories: through the lens of artists-researchers from Ecuador and Brazil

Barbarita Lara, Yuliana Ortiz, Amanda Takuapu/Comunidade Tabaçu Reko Ypy, Katherine Chalá, Génesis Delgado, Darwin Minda, Andrea Chávez, Iván Zambrano, Fabiana Leite, Cleberson Moura, Marianne Sallum, Daniela Balanzátegui

16.11.2024

This visual essay includes artistic expressions in the context of Afro-Indigenous memories in the Americas. We invited artists, activists, researchers, and allies, especially Afro-Ecuadorian Quilombolas/Cimarronas

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Make sure you don't get wet... if you catch the virus, who will take care of me?

Ricardo Vieira

15.11.2024

This text, of an ethnobiographical nature, gives an account of the communication strategies between an institutionalised elderly person, in times of covid-19, and his family. It tries to show that not everyone truly understood what this pandemic was

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Interview with Rosa Maria Perez

Rosa Maria Perez, Inês Lourenço

15.10.2024

Interview with Rosa Maria Perez, anthropologist, integrated researcher at CRIA-Iscte, retired Professor in the Anthropology department at Iscte and Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India.Starting with the

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25 April: 50 Years - Thoughts and Reflections

The provincialization of orthodox economic projects: porosities, relations and moralities

Patrícia Alves de Matos

24.09.2024

The severe human and social effects of the 2008 financial crisis, subsequently intensified by austerity policies on both sides of the Atlantic, have led to a renewed interest, in anthropology as in other social sciences, in the logics of capitalist

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Land and wasteland

Diego Amoedo

22.08.2024

50 years on, what has happened to the land? In addition to the profound political and social changes that the 25th of April brought to Portugal, there were also important changes in the social

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Building Afro-indigenous affective networks: women, education, and activism in Latin America

Katherine Chalá, Daniela Balanzátegui, Valentina Romero, Catarina Nimbopyruá Delfina dos Santos, María Celeste Sánchez Sugía, Watatakalu Yawalapiti, Maria John, Marianne Sallum

17.07.2024

Social movements and grassroots organizations led by indigenous and afro-descendant women in Latin America play a central role in defending human and civil rights, highlighting territorial and environmental rights,

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25 April: 50 Years - Thoughts and Reflections

The yellow brick road I walk as an ethnographer

Noelia García Rodríguez

11.07.2024

In this text I compare my anthropological fieldwork experience to a journey of transformation and growth, like Dorothy Gale's journey down the yellow brick road in the land of Oz. I find ethnography a fascinating

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25 April, always!

03.07.2024

Etnográfica celebrates the 50th anniversary of 25 April 1974. We wanted to associate an artistic (musical) proposal with this outstanding edition, an Agora's exclusive content:

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25 April: 50 Years - Thoughts and Reflections

Interview with José Sobral

José Sobral, Patrícia Alves de Matos

02.07.2024

Interview with José Manuel Sobral, anthropologist and retired researcher at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade

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Observing land transformation in Portugal

Fabienne Wateau

25.06.2024

50 years on, what has happened to the land? In addition to the profound political and social changes that the 25th of April brought to Portugal, there were also important changes in the social and

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In the City of Shadows: moving in the face of violence in Veracruz

Juan Antonio Flores Martos

20.06.2024

Ethnographing the impact of violence on the lives of the people of Veracruz (Mexico) stimulates a transformation of the ways of working and being in the countryside. The ethnographer experiences the need to adapt to

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Indigenous archaeologies, territories, and human rights: dialogues among representatives of the Tupi Guarani, Tuxá, and Eastern Pequot

Yacunã Tuxá, Natasha Gambrell, Luã Apyká, Blaire Morseau, Stephen W. Silliman, Daniela Balanzátegui, Marianne Sallum

21.05.2024

In recent decades, a global solidarity movement among various Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and traditional communities has grown, united to defend and preserve their territories and linguistic diversity.

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It's because I miss you that I'm skinny: male (re)encounters in the Bolivian Chaco

Pere Morell i Torra

18.04.2024

This text focuses on my last encounter with one of my main interlocutors in the field, when a change in the subject of my research also changed our relationship [1]. Through fragments of conversations, field diary

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The War Against Gaza: Genocide, Geopolitics and Anthropology

Paulo Gabriel Hilu da Rocha Pinto

27.03.2024

The number of dead and wounded, as well as the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Israel's military offensive against Gaza, reached staggering proportions in just a few weeks. The scale of the conflict and

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Missing girls: the sexual exploitation of children in the form of self-managed internal trafficking

M. Belén Ortega-Senet

13.03.2024

The sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) is one of the most invisible forms of sexual violence, loaded with myths, stereotypes, prejudices and greatly simplified in its understanding as a phenomenon. Of all its

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Found in Translation

Anthropology in Arabic: beyond the discursive monopoly

Abdellah Hammoudi

Tradução de Ilham Houass e Diane Abd-El-Karim

Revisto por Francisco Freire e Abdallah Hammoudi

12.03.2024

The text by Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi, which we find here today in Portuguese, was originally published in Arabic in 2018 as an introduction to the book

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The corner of the "calabaceira": encounters, affections and ethnography in the "Vale"

Simone Frangella

Max Ruben Ramos

05.03.2024

In this text, Simone Frangella and Max Ruben Ramos talk about their fieldwork experience in Vale da Amoreira, in the municipality of Moita, in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. The story invites us to think about how a

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Wandering through the past with an eviscerated present: looking at Gaza through the archives

Raquel Gil Carvalheira

04.03.2024

In this February of a live broadcast genocide, the proposal is "Wandering through the past with an eviscerated present: looking at Gaza through the archives". This in the month in which Etnográfica inaugurates its Found in Translation section with

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Interview with Caroline Brettell

Caroline Brettell

Marta Rosales

Sónia Ferreira

27.02.2024

Interview with Caroline Brettell, held at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, on 30 June 2023. The interview focused on the author's field experience with Portuguese emigration in France and rural populations in Portugal in

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Ex-votos around the monument to Dr Sousa Martins

(Re)encontrar Sousa Martins

Vincenzo Scamardella

06.02.2024

This tale is an ethnofiction about a contemporary and individual research for supernatural help that has its roots in the childhood memories of the protagonist. In this story, the fictional character of Miguel who is inspired by encounters that I

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A book and its critics

A decade and many events later: what can we (re)read about possible minority liberalisms?

Paulo Victor Leite Lopes

06.02.2024

In this first edition of “A book and his critics”, we discuss Moisés Lino e Silva’s (Federal University of Bahia) recent book "Minoritarian Liberalism. A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela (2022)", which, based on ethnographic fieldwork in

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“Over there”: on the relative legibility of the cityscape

Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

23.01.2024

Starting from a brief, casual quasi-ethnographic experience, Thaddeus Blanchette shows us the city as a space of "relative legibility", entangled in multiple perceptions, conceptions and experiences (cf. Lefebvre;

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The value of confession and the exercise of justice

Catarina Frois

06.12.2023

In this note, I discuss the intricacies of the different truths that arise from the empirical material constituted by crime authors' narratives in situations of deprivation of liberty and their analyses of the

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Multimodal Alt

Seeing like a routier: routiers’ borderscapes between Southern Europe and West Africa

Pedro Figueiredo Neto and Ricardo Falcão

22.11.2023

Routier is the self-designation employed by Senegalese men driving decades-old vehicles overloaded with mostly second-hand items from Southern Europe to be sold in West Africa. By seeing like a

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Relational ethics and care for the world

Jarrett Zigon

16.11.2023

In the inaugural contribution to this section, Jarrett Zigon challenges the anthropology limits of relativizing and localizing. Based on the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition, he proposes an anthropology of

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We are all curmanos

Ramón Sarró

10.10.2023

Starting from an analysis of the novel "El bosque de Ancines" by Galician writer Carlos Martínez-Barbeito, and his fascination with woods and wolves and other archetypes, the author examines the concept of the "curmano". What is a curmano? Are we

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Nombres de lugar: el espíritu

Ramón Sarró

10.10.2023

The name transforms the space into a singular place and, in particular, the religious name defines and constructs the identity of the place in a profound way. In this essay, the author combines landscape, language and religion to reflect on the

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Interview with João Leal

João Leal

Luís Cunha

Humberto Martins

03.10.2023

This interview features João Leal, the first director of Etnográfica. It was conducted by Luís Cunha and Humberto Martins in the Library of the National Museum of Ethnology in Belém.

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Etnographing the underground: notes and inspirations from the text by Francisco Martínez

Mariana Tello Weiss

28.09.2023

The text is highly inspiring from both a theoretical and methodological point of view. It proposes an ethnography of the basements in Sillamäe, a small village in eastern Estonia. A village that, because of its

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What Else Can We Do with/in Holes?

Tamta Khalvashi

28.09.2023

“Where is a bunker?” This question started to haunt many of us in Georgian cities, when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Quest for bunkers, basements and shelters, for spaces of both opacity and

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

Hermione Spriggs

21.09.2023

“The opaque is not the obscure” (Glissant 1997:191). So begins Fran Martinez’ text on basements, which he approaches as spaces of opacity that can nonetheless be entered ethnographically. The

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Identity(ies) and negotiation: the dance of dressing and undressing, undressing and dressing (or not).

Raquel Mendes Pereira

19.09.2023

In an attempt to distance myself from the tourists' naked bodies, I decided to order some dresses from Arna, the village seamstress. Even so, throughout the research, my body and the way it was covered or uncovered

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Where the Story Begins Anew

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

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Gender, sexuality and ourselves

Miguel Vale de Almeida

25.08.2023

In Portugal, the social sciences and humanities have been very resistant to the development of gender and sexuality studies. While the country's peripheral status and the advent of democracy only in 1974 may explain this phenomenon, the same delay,

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A book and its critics

Freedom to desire

Victor Hugo de Souza Barreto

28.06.2023

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Lights Out. Practicing Opacity in Estonian Basements

Francisco Martínez

21.06.2023

This essay engages with alternative regimes of visibility by investigating the things that are kept, and the practices that take place in basements of eastern Estonia. The use of hiding infrastructures is here

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