Ethnographic Theory

Kasenian réak is a regional variant of the Javanese horse dances from Bandung, Indonesia. Commonly known in the archipelago as jaranan, kuda lumping or jathilan, the Javanese horse dances are a group of ceremonial musical performances during which a group of performers, led by a trance master, undergo voluntary possessions on behalf of spirits of the ancestors and other supernatural beings, under the influence of a musical ensemble. In different possession and trance phenomena around the world recognizing the acting spirit is often the key to communication with the supernatural being and treatment of the possessed. Thus, more or less different and precise taxonomies may be developed in order to do so. In réak, the possessed behaviour is interpreted by the trance master and members of the group in order to meet the spirit’s various demands and act accordingly to manage the possession. The purpose of this article is to examine the spirits’ taxonomies at play in réak as a case study. I do this in order to show in which sense analyses of the phenomenon of possession based on classification often fail to grasp the complexity and thus the significance of the experience. The outcome will underline which benefits can be obtained by a an approach that gives more value to a context-based ethnography of the possessed and its peculiarities than to the development of a general theory of possession with comparative purposes.

Este trabajo presenta elementos conceptuales para elaborar una aproximacion existencial a a etnografia. Las principales influencias de esta propuesta se relacionan con el pensamiento filosófico de Heidegger y Sartre, asi como de las ideas desarrolladas
por la antropologia critica y reflexiva, la antropologia de la experiencia de Victor Turner, y el posmodernismo antropologico. Se discuten las vinculaciones existentes entre el Ser, la Existencia y el lenguaje para la descripcion y analisis de la practica etnografica en el mundo contemporaneo. Se pasa revista a la constitucion ontologica del sujeto-etnografo desde los inicios de la disciplina hasta el presents. Asimismo, se brinda una definición existencial de la antropologia y de su momento experiencia.1, la etrnograiia, como un desplazamiento ontologico por el espacio del Mundo. Esta practica supone la posibilidad  de concretar una praxis no alienada, donde la estructura dual del sujeto-etnografo (un
individuo historico y un 'espacio metodologico'), se unifique en lo que Bob Scholte denomina ‘reconciIiaci6n existencial’. Finalmente, se postula la necesidad de un nuevo espacio intersubjetivo que supere al individuo autonomo y cerrado de la etnografía tradicional.

"A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data.

A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called ""intellectual property,"" gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.

Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

This article explores mystical belief and disbelief in Jeanne Favret-Saada's ethnography of Bocage witchcraft in relation to the ontological turn in anthropology. The ethnographic archive provides numerous examples in which natives display seemingly contradictory practices of belief and disbelief when it comes to mystical forces. A common way by which anthropologists deal with such contradictions is to attempt to explicate their social function and cultural significance. In doing so, they perceive belief and disbelief to be cognitive states of clarity. Favret-Saada differs in her approach since she apprehends mystical belief and disbelief to be ambivalent and connected and, as I argue, portrays it as being caught in a perilous arrangement of death. In order to convey these points, I compare her ethnographic work to that of E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Rane Willerslev. The article goes on to analyze Favret-Saada's minimal ontology of the opaque subject and how it can inform ontological anthropology.

The Siberian Northeast shows striking parallels between the cosmologies of hunters and reindeer
herders. What may this tell us about the transformation from hunting to pastoralism? This article
argues for a structural identity between hunting and sacrifice, and for the domestication of the
reindeer as the result of hunters’ efforts to use sacrifice to control the accidental variables of the
hunt. Hunters can practise their ethos of ‘trust’ with prey only through highly controlled ritual
enactments. We describe two: the famous bear festival of the Amur Gulf region and the consecrated
reindeer of the Eveny. Both express the same overall logic by which sacrifice functions as an ideal
hunt. The animal is involved in a relation not of domination but of trust, while also undergoing a
process of taming. We therefore suggest that the reindeer’s domestication may be based not only
on ecological or economic adaptations, but also on cosmology.

Weil jede Zigeuner-Gruppe unweigerlich auch ein Teil der Mehrheitsgesellschaft ist, steht die Tsiganologie unter dem Paradigma des tsiganologischen Relationismus. Den  Relationismus als eine Perspektive auf eine besondere soziale Beziehung stützen mehrere Grundannahmen.
Erstens: Zigeuner-Gruppen sind immer als ein inhärenter Bestandteil der zu untersuchenden Gesellschaft zu betrachten Neben der Einbettung der jeweiligen Zigeuner-Gruppe in die Umgebungsgesellschaft geht die Tsiganologie weiter davon aus, dass es immer Bereiche gibt, in denen sich die einzelnen Zigeuner-Gruppen von der Umgebungsgesellschaft unterscheiden. Diese kulturellen Differenzen zu verstehen und die Wirkungen dieser Differenz regional nachzuverfolgen, ist das hauptsächliche Erkenntnisinteresse der Tsiganologie.
Zweitens: Die Beziehung zwischen Umgebungsbevölkerung und Zigeuner-Gruppen ist ein asymmetrisches Beziehungsgefüge. Schon dadurch, dass Zigeuner-Gruppen keine Nahrungsmittel produzieren (non food producing communities), müssen sie diese in der sozialen Umgebung erwerben. Die Arten dieses Erwerbs sind vielseitig, gleichbleibend ist jedoch die  eingebettete Abhängigkeit der Zigeuner-Gruppe von ihrer Umgebungsbevölkerung. Den Zigeuner- Gruppen kann es also überall auf der Welt nur so gut gehen wie der Umgebungsbevölkerung, aus der sie ihre Ressourcen beziehen.

Das bedeutet drittens: Die Umgebungsbevölkerung hat einen erheblichen Einfluss auf die jeweiligen Zigeuner-Gruppen in ihrem Territorium, auch wenn dieser Einfluss beiden Seiten oft nicht bewusst ist.

Nun stelle ich mit dem Vergleich der Kulturen mittelasiatischer Zigeuner-Gruppen den oben angesprochenen Relationismus  auf den Prüfstand. Wenn es stimmt, dass Zigeuner-Gruppen immer in Relation mit ihrer Umgebung gesehen werden müssen, dann setzen Wandlungsprozesse in disparaten  Umgebungen auch unterschiedliche Entwicklungen der einzelnen Zigeuner-Gruppen in Gang.

Dafür fand ich einen Vergleich von Zigeuner-Gruppen, die sich  seit 70 Jahren von einander getrennt entwickelten, vorher aber  ein gemeinsames Territorium und eine gemeinsam Geschichte besaßen, ideal. Diese Konstellation findet sich überall dort, wo nationalstaatliche Grenzen vormals ungeteilte Räume  zerteilten und möglicherweise die in ihnen gemeinsam lebenden Zigeuner-Gruppen voneinander trennten.
Auch die mugat in Mittelasien teilten sich einmal vor der Nationalstaatenbildung einen weiten mittelasiatischen Kulturraum. Ab der Kolonisierung des Raumes durch die Russen im Norden und die Engländer im Süden schlugen sie zwei unterschiedliche Entwicklungsrichtungen ein. Mit dem Beginn der Ost-West-Blockbildung am Anfang des 20.  Jahrhunderts lebten sich diese zwei Regionen noch weiter auseinander. Ab den 1930er Jahren bis in die 1990er Jahre waren die Grenzen zwischen der Region Afghanistan und der Region Usbekistan/ Tadschikistan hermetisch abgeriegelt, ein Transfer zwischen beiden Großregionen nicht mehr Teil alltäglicher Praxis. Als ich mit meinen Feldforschungen begann, war dieses Setting bereits 20 Jahre Geschichte. Afghanistan war jedoch immer noch nicht in die Routen der Mobilität der postsowjetischen mugat Zigeuner aufgenommen, ebenso wie die mugat Afghanistans keine Veranlassung sahen, in den Norden Mittelasiens zu gehen. Hier fand ich mein empirisches Feld für einen Vergleich.

This paper navigates my experience of returning copies of the " Gaidinliu notebooks " from the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) to the Zeme Nagas of Assam, India. The notebooks were confiscated in 1932 by the British administrators and donated to the museum. They are from a religious movement, the Heraka, and their prophetess, Gaidinliu (1915-1993). Returning the notebooks highlighted a number of theoretical issues in approaching texts, particularly since these were written in a language that is " untranslatable ". I argue that their textuality requires one to examine the notebooks in relation to the millenarian unfolding of the kingdom (Zeme: heguangram), using the notion of textuality (Uzendoski 2012) grounded in dreams, prophecy, songs and visions. Secondly, to appreciate the value and purpose of the notebooks, one must pay attention to the sonority of sound that manifests the words of the notebooks in song. Finally, these issues point to significant ways in which we understand the relationships between history, language and experience.

Resumen: en este artículo profundizo en la propuesta teórica de lo que denomino tramas transnacionales del cuidado, a partir de una agenda investigativa de alrededor de una década en torno a la migración y el cuidado, desde una etnografía multisituada y colaborativa llevada a cabo en Colombia y España (Cali, Medellín, Cartagena, Bogotá, Barcelona y Madrid) que se ha valido de la construcción de más de cien de relatos y cerca de cincuenta cartografías corporales. Desde allí, pongo en perspectiva la noción cadenas globales de cuidado, acuñada por Arlie Hochschild, para pensar en una metáfora que ayude a imaginar, de manera más fácil y aguda, la cantidad y la complejidad de imbricaciones en las trayectorias de quienes migran y cuidan en un mundo que aún no reconoce de manera justa la implicación que, para la vida en general y para las vidas de las personas migrantes en particular, tiene el régimen transnacionalizado del cuidado. A partir de las disertaciones de Stuart Hall sobre la uti...

This text is a response to Philip Swift’s paper, where he critiques issues concerning ethnographic theory raised in my book World: An anthropological examination (2017, HAU Books). Inspired by the work of Donald Davidson, I argue that indeterminacy and underdetermination are conditions for all communication and that, in light of that, a position of metaphysical pluralism provides us with a better account of the conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture than the kind of ontological pluralism that Swift espouses.

This essay attempts to bring together charity and grace, the central concepts of two thinkers whose views may seem irreconcilable to many: Donald Davidson, an analytical philosopher and the most distinguished follower of Quine; and Julian Pitt-Rivers, an Europeanist anthropologist, who wrote at length on Spain and Southern France. The latter’s historicist exegesis of gracia points to basic aspects of human experience that are also salient in the reduction to basics that Davidson carried out concerning interpretation and truth. For Davidson, interpretation is made possible due to the rational accommodation (the charity) that indeterminacy sparks off. For Pitt-Rivers, gratuity highlights how processes of personal interaction depend on the drawing of shared trajectories: that is, not only do I have to grant others charity in order to make sense of them; I also have to frame others as subjects with a future by relation to myself as already in existence. For ethnographic theory, the paper concludes, it is essential to see that human propositional interaction involves processes of sense-making that integrate transcendentally shared intentionality (i.e. the credit with which we respond to the indeterminacy of meaning) with shared experience (i.e. the debit implicit in the ultimate underdetermination of the world’s entities).

** download includes full Introduction **. How are local understandings of identity, relatedness, and belonging transformed in a global era? How does international tourism affect possibilities for who one can become?

In urban Portugal today, hundreds of individuals trace their ancestry to 15th century Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism, and many now seek to rejoin the Jewish people as a whole. For the most part, however, these self-titled Marranos (“hidden Jews”) lack any direct experience of Jews or Judaism, and Portugal's tiny, tightly knit Jewish community offers no clear path of entry. According to Jewish law, to be recognized as a Jew one must be born to a Jewish mother or pursue religious conversion, an anathema to those who feel their ancestors' Judaism was cruelly stolen from them. After centuries of familial Catholicism, and having been refused inclusion locally, how will these self-declared ancestral Jews find belonging among “the Jewish family,” writ large? How, that is, can people rejected as strangers face-to-face become members of a global imagined community - not only rhetorically, but experientially?

Leite addresses this question through intimate portraits of the lives and experiences of a network of urban Marranos who sought contact with foreign Jewish tourists and outreach workers as a means of gaining educational and moral support in their quest. Exploring mutual imaginings and direct encounters between Marranos, Portuguese Jews, and foreign Jewish visitors, Unorthodox Kin deftly tracks how visions of self and kin evolve over time and across social spaces, ending in an unexpected path to belonging. In the process, the analysis weaves together a diverse set of current anthropological themes, from intersubjectivity to international tourism, class structures to the construction of identity, cultural logics of relatedness to transcultural communication.

A compelling evocation of how ideas of ancestry shape the present, how feelings of kinship arise among far-flung strangers, and how some find mystical connection in a world said to be disenchanted, Unorthodox Kin will appeal to a wide audience interested in anthropology, sociology, Jewish studies, and religious studies. Its accessible, narrative-driven style makes it especially well suited for introductory and advanced courses in general cultural anthropology, ethnography, theories of identity and social categorization, and the study of globalization, kinship, tourism, and religion.

In this special section of HAU (part II), we present four texts that allow us to go further with the objective to provoke the real, ethnographically. We explore the empirical and conceptual program involved in the making of an ethnographic theory of the " real economy, " a critical concept shaping contemporary public debates about the present and future of our collective existence. In this cooperative exploration of a concept that holds varied and shifting places, we are particularly interested in questioning how assemblages of vernacular and scientific realizations and enactments of the real economy are linked to concepts of truth and to moral values; how these multiple and shifting realities become present, and entangle with historically and socially situated lives; and how the formal realizations of the real in the governance of economies engage with the experiential life of ordinary people.

Part I: The real in the real economy https://www.academia.edu/35496048/The_real_in_the_real_economy

The decade that has just ended has been marked by profound political upheavals as well as by a renewed interest in ethnographic theory in anthropology. Does this represent a mere temporal coincidence or is there a link between the developments on political and scientific fronts? What if we thought of these two movements as analogous, namely as manifestations of a political and epistemological desire for liberation? Thinking of their analogical relationship and their elective affinities might allow to underline the political spirit of ethnographic theory. The production of theory from situated ethnographies, I argue, could be understood as drawing and expanding on an activist strand of research that goes back to the middle of the 20th century: “liberation anthropology”, a tradition that seems to travel through time, space and languages, without always leaving tracks of connections and continuities between its different expressions.

This paper explores some meaningful cultural symbols that seem to shape and frame American contemporary everyday life from an anthropological viewpoint. To do so, I put in practice ideas proposed by Michel Foucault and Paul Ricoeur concerning the way social reality is shaped through the unfolding of cultural signs and symbols. This process assumes the naturalization of certain truth marks that order the world and the actors’ social practices, within a fabric of shared intersubjective meanings in given socio-historical contexts. For, beginning with my everyday life experiences in Philadelphia for three years as a graduate student, I will comment about certain aspects of American culture that called my attention as a foreign anthropologist, i.e., road behavior, written signs and instructions, systems of communication, the mail, among others, that display key elements of the construction of common sense, personhood, and cultural ethics, from a perspective that combines intercultural comparison and cultural critique.

Evident invisibles emerge in the ethnographic encounter that change the whence and the whither of the ethnographic gesture. Long ago, Margaret Mead critiqued anthropologists for ignoring ‘the world in between’, which makes their fieldwork possible—this essay takes the argument a step further, proposing that all ethnographic encounters are fundamentally ‘amidst’. Thus, it calls for a shift from translation to intermediation as the guiding trope of ethnography. Although the practice of ethnography requires the objectification of a ‘field’, metaphysical pluralism remains the fundamental condition of ethnographic intermediation. In light of that, the paper critiques (a) the practice of describing our main methodological disposition as ‘participant observation’, arguing instead for the older term ‘intensive research’; and (b) the implicit use of the trope of ethnography-as-translation. Ethnographic examples are taken from the author’s own fieldwork in the coastal mangroves of southern Bahia in the late 2000s (NE Brazil).

Anthropologists have long relied on powerful concepts operant in the
societies where they have carried out fieldwork to unlock the meanings
of various, even seemingly disparate, practices and experiences, and
which, in virtue of their sharing a name, are given a coherence by
ethnographic and ethnological texts. In this essay, we examine how
anthropological icons like hau, mana and the shaman, are created, and
suggest that there might be fragments encountered during fieldwork that
do not, in themselves, necessarily add up to a coherent whole, but which
are fit into stories of these kinds because of the pressure of narrativity
within conventional notions of anthropological theory. To illustrate this
argument, we draw in particular on Malinowski’s stories of the baloma,
Trobiander spirits of the dead, reading his well-known fieldwork diaries
alongside his published account, in order to show how life is always
stitched across multiple registers of storytelling, some of which take the
form of narrative and others that do not. Attending to the space between
these modalities, or to their crossings, a different picture of theory
begins to emerge, and which hews a bit closer to our ordinary
experience of social life.

This paper analyzes an ethnographic scene during my research on Qom/Toba shamanism, in which I  talked about shamanic issues with my interlocutor, Alejandro Katache, then a well known pi'ioGonaq ("healer", "shaman") in La Primavera Qom community in Formosa Province, in the Argentine Chaco region. In the paper I discuss about anthropological field methodology, and also epistemological and ontological problems arisen in the encounter between Western and Qom world views. The idea is to problematize our naturalized Western assumptions about the nature of reality when dealing with shamanic systems and the predicaments of our would-be scientific approaches to such borderline social phenomena in the contemporary world.

Celem eseju jest oswojenie czytelnika ze sposobem antropologicznej/etnologicznej lektury przeszłości. Nie będzie to czynione poprzez prezentowanie czy formułowanie jakiego teoretycznego programu, lecz przez spojrzenie, jak wygląda to w praktyce. Przykładem będzie intrygująca grypa Słowińców. Pretekstem dla mojego antropologicznego czytania historii, jest postawienie na pozór banalnego, lecz świadomego i przemyślanego pytania: „Dlaczego Słowińcy nie chcą rozmawiać”? To pytanie stało się najważniejszym podczas moich badań terenowych nad ich współczesną kondycją. Omówiona w artykule strategia badawcza oraz jej wyniki, czynią możliwym nakreślenie różnic pomiędzy metodą antropologiczną/etnologiczną a metodą historyczną w studiowaniu przeszłości.


Słowa kluczowe: antropologia a historia, antropologia historyczna, antropologizacja humanistyki, metodologia antropologii, interpretacja antropologiczna, Słowińcy


The aim of this essay is to familiarize the reader with a very anthropological (ethnological) approach to the past. It will be done not by presenting or formulating any theoretical program, but by looking at how it is practiced, taking an intriguing group of Slovincians as a case study. A pretext for my anthropologically informed reading of history is given by a question: "why Slovincians do not want to talk?", which emerges to be the most important one during my fieldwork on their contemporary life. The elaborated research strategy and its outcomes makes it possible to outline the difference between the anthropological and the historical method of studying the past.


Key words: anthropology and history, historical anthropology, anthropologization of humanities, anthropological methodology and interpretation, Slovincians

Conversions of debt among the Yawanawa: an analytical model of the cultural, social and political grounds of exchange

This text proposes the notion of conversions of debt and aims to show its analytical usefulness on revealing the entanglements of money, commodities and market transactions with a web of political, cultural and social obligations. In order to do so, it deploys material collected during fieldwork to analyze two pairs of conversions of debt in which goods and money circulate among the Yawanawa, a native population from southwestern Amazon. In such conversions, debts generated by political relations, as well as ritual and cure services, generate prestations in the form of money, goods and services. Analyzing conversions of debt among the Yawanawa, the text demonstrates that money and goods are domesticated, serving political, cultural and social obligations, and do not corrode principles of sociability or cultural reproduction of the Yawanawa, despite the constant effort to keep these transactions subordinated to community goals.

Keywords:  Exchange; Conversions of debt; Social obligations; Amazon; Yawanawa

This article navigates my experience of returning copies of the “Gaidinliu notebooks” from the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) to the Zeme Nagas of Assam, India. The notebooks were confiscated in 1932 by the British administrators and donated to the museum. They are from a religious movement, the Heraka, and their prophetess, Gaidinliu (1915–1993). Returning the notebooks highlighted a number of theoretical issues in approaching texts, particularly since these were written in a language that is “untranslatable.” I argue that their textuality requires one to examine the notebooks in relation to the unfolding of the kingdom (Zeme: heguangram), using the notion of textuality (Uzendoski 2012) grounded in dreams, prophecy, songs, and visions. Second, to appreciate the value and purpose of the notebooks, one must pay attention to the sonority of sound that manifests the words of the notebooks in song. Finally, these issues point to significant ways in which we understand the relationships bet...

This paper navigates my experience of returning copies of the " Gaidinliu notebooks " from the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) to the Zeme Nagas of Assam, India. The notebooks were confiscated in 1932 by the British administrators and donated to the museum. They are from a religious movement, the Heraka, and their prophetess, Gaidinliu (1915-1993). Returning the notebooks highlighted a number of theoretical issues in approaching texts, particularly since these were written in a language that is " untranslatable ". I argue that their textuality requires one to examine the notebooks in relation to the millenarian unfolding of the kingdom (Zeme: heguangram), using the notion of textuality (Uzendoski 2012) grounded in dreams, prophecy, songs and visions. Secondly, to appreciate the value and purpose of the notebooks, one must pay attention to the sonority of sound that manifests the words of the notebooks in song. Finally, these issues point to significant ways in which ...

The Siberian Northeast shows striking parallels between the cosmologies of hunters and reindeer herders. What may this tell us about the transformation from hunting to pastoralism? This article argues for a structural identity between hunting and sacrifice, and for the domestication of the reindeer as the result of hunters’ efforts to use sacrifice to control the accidental variables of the hunt. Hunters can practise their ethos of ‘trust’ with prey only through highly controlled ritual enactments. We describe two: the famous bear festival of the Amur Gulf region and the consecrated reindeer of the Eveny. Both express the same overall logic by which sacrifice functions as an ideal hunt. The animal is involved in a relation not of domination but of trust, while also undergoing a process of taming. We therefore suggest that the reindeer’s domestication may be based not only on ecological or economic adaptations, but also on cosmology.

In this paper a key dialectical link between space, body, and
ethnography is proposed, mainly within the context of Latin American
anthropology. I emphasize the Argentine case through the analysis of my
own field experience among the Qom or Toba people of the Chaco region.
The idea suggested here is that the constitution of anthropological “places” is
related with a political economy of academia which is influenced in turn by
the geopolitical location of each anthropological tradition. The interplay
between space, body, and ethnography shapes not only the conceptual bodies
of anthropology but also the ethnographers’ own regime of materiality. The
latter displace and open themselves to the world according to the contingencies
of both their academic and field backgrounds.

Resumen: en este artículo profundizo en la propuesta teórica de lo que denomino tramas transnacionales del cuidado, a partir de una agenda investigativa de alrededor de una década en torno a la migración y el cuidado, desde una etnografía multisituada y colaborativa llevada a cabo en Colombia y España (Cali, Medellín, Cartagena, Bogotá, Barcelona y Madrid) que se ha valido de la construcción de más de cien de relatos y cerca de cincuenta cartografías corporales. Desde allí, pongo en perspectiva la noción cadenas globales de cuidado, acuñada por Arlie Hochschild, para pensar en una metáfora que ayude a imaginar, de manera más fácil y aguda, la cantidad y la complejidad de imbricaciones en las trayectorias de quienes migran y cuidan en un mundo que aún no reconoce de manera justa la implicación que, para la vida en general y para las vidas de las personas migrantes en particular, tiene el régimen transnacionalizado del cuidado. A partir de las disertaciones de Stuart Hall sobre la utilidad de las metáforas en el campo de la teorización —lo que llama “lucha con los ángeles”—, de los relatos construidos a partir de la etnografía multisituada y de un proceder reflexivo, desarrollo la imagen de tramas transnacionales de cuidado como una metáfora de dimensiones discursivas, somáticas, políticas, estésicas y afectivas. Sobre el lugar que Colombia ocupa en estas cadenas o tramas se ha escrito poco, a pesar de ser uno de los países centrales en la operación del régimen transnacionalizado del cuidado. A la vez, desarrollo una complejización de la útil noción de cadenas globales de cuidado, poco explorada hasta ahora, necesaria para imaginar y dar cuerpo a los relatos de personas migrantes que se dedican a labores del cuidado y para entender las políticas del despojo allí implicadas, con el fin de, a contracorriente y “en forcejeo con los ángeles”, imaginar futuros posibles.

Palabras clave: cadenas globales de cuidado, cuidado, etnografía multisituada, metáforas, migración, teoría etnográfica.

Transnational Care Plots: “Wrestling with the Angels,” Theory and Metaphors on Care and Migration

Abstract: In this article, I further explore the theoretical proposal of what I call transnational care plots. I do so based on an approximately decade-long research agenda on migration and care, using over a hundred stories and nearly fifty body mappings derived from a multi-sited and collaborative ethnography conducted in Colombia and Spain (Cali, Medellin, Cartagena, Bogota, Barcelona, and Madrid). I draw on the notion of global care chains, as coined by Arlie Hochschild, to provide a metaphor that leads to a more fluid and acute mental picture of the number and complexity of the intertwining trajectories of those who migrate and care in a world that does not yet give fair recognition to the implications of the transnationalized care regime on life in general, and on the lives of migrants in particular. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s dissertations on the usefulness of metaphors in the domain of theorizing — what he calls “wrestling with angels” — and on narratives constructed from multisite ethnography and a reflexive approach, I develop the image of transnational care plots as a metaphor with discursive, somatic, political, aesthetic and affective dimensions. Little has been written about Colombia’s place in these chains or plots, despite the fact that it is one of the central countries in the operation of the transnationalized care regime. At the same time, I develop a complexification of the so far little explored notion of global care chains, which is essential to envisioning and shaping the narratives of migrant care workers and to understand the politics of dispossession involved there. This, in turn allows us to imagine possible futures that go against the tide and which “wrestle with the angels.”

Keywords: Care, ethnographic theory, global care chains, metaphors, migration, multi-sited ethnography.

Tramas transnacionais do cuidado: “luta com os anjos”, teoria e metáforas sobre cuidado e migração

Resumo: neste artigo, aprofundo-me na proposta teórica do que denomino “tramas transnacionais do cuidado”, a partir de uma agenda de pesquisa de aproximadamente uma década sobre a migração e o cuidado, sob uma etnografia multissituada e colaborativa realizada na Colômbia e na Espanha (Cali, Medellín, Cartagena, Bogotá, Barcelona e Madrid) que vem se valendo da construção de mais de 100 relatos e cerca de 50 cartografias corporais. A partir disso, coloco em perspectiva a noção “cadeias globais de cuidado”, criada por Arlie Hochschild, para pensar em uma metáfora que ajude a imaginar, de maneira mais fácil e aguda, a quantidade e a complexidade de imbricações nas trajetórias de quem migra e cuida em um mundo que ainda não reconhece justamente a implicação que, para a vida em geral e para a vida das pessoas migrantes em particular, o regime transnacionalizado do cuidado tem. A partir das teses de Stuart Hall sobre a utilidade das metáforas no campo da teorização — o que chama “luta com os anjos” —, dos relatos construídos a partir da etnografia multissituada e de um proceder reflexivo, desenvolvo a imagem de tramas transnacionais de cuidado como uma metáfora de dimensões discursivas, somáticas, políticas, estésicas e afetivas. Sobre o lugar que a Colômbia ocupa nessas redes ou tramas, pouco tem sido escrito, apesar de ser um dos países centrais na operação do regime transnacionalizado do cuidado. Por sua vez, desenvolvo uma complexização da útil noção de “cadeias globais de cuidado”, pouco explorada até o momento, necessária para imaginar e dar corpo aos relatos de pessoas migrantes que estão dedicadas a trabalhadores de cuidado e para entender as políticas do despojo implicadas ali, com o objetivo de, na contramão e na “luta com os anjos”, imaginar futuros possíveis.

Palavras-chave: cadeias globais de cuidado, cuidado, etnografia multissituada, metáforas, migração, teoria etnográfica.

The reading of the sociolinguistic work of Gumperz & Hymes (1972) and Sankoff(1980) on the social use of language and languages in contact, suggested me to use some of their concepts to understand processes of religious change. I had in mind my field experience among the qom or Toba of Eastern Formosa province in the Argentine Chaco. Indeed, the qom had been contacted by Protestant missions since the 1940s, which led to the emergence of an indigenous church named Iglesia Evangélica Unida (United Evangelical Church, UEC), In this regard, I wondered if the phenomenon of linguistic code-switching could be extended to the realm of cosmology and ritual. If so, would it be possible to have a sort of cosmological code-switching that included religious ideology, mythology, and ritual?
I thought that typical concepts such as syncretism might be enriched through a more dynamic approach regarding code-switching in language (Toba-Spanish) and in religious ideology and practice. Here I assume that religious discourse is a complex communicative phenomenon that functions at many levels, verbal and non-verbal. In this sense, the use of the linguistic analogy per se seems useful, even though we will not mechanically link language and culture.
This paper summarizes the steps developed to apply a linguistic model to religious phenomena, evaluating problems and potential benefits as they emerged in the course of my research. In addition, it explores other analogies derived from studies in intercultural contact and social change, such as creolization and continuum.

El trabajo buscó contribuir de manera conceptual a la aproximación antropológica de la política y el poder etnográficamente situados. El punto de partida fue un recorrido desde los debates clásicos acerca de la relación
entre antropología e ideología hasta las discusiones contemporáneas en torno de la teoría etnográfica. Seguidamente, e inserta la discusión en el campo del estudio de procesos políticos que involucran al Estado, recortó un caso
de la Argentina contemporánea que expresa y materializa la dimensión política de la infraestructura pública. En el mismo se examinaron las asociaciones significativas entre infraestructura y federalismo establecidas y movilizadas por actores políticos comprometidos con la creación de una regionalización interprovincial entre las provincias de Córdoba, Entre Ríos y Santa Fe. Ese corpus de datos, del cual surgen las observaciones y los argumentos vertidos, se corresponde con una década de investigación desarrollada desde un enfoque
y una metodología etnográficos privilegiando el trabajo de campo basado en la observación participante y la entrevista abierta. Finalmente, se propuso una respuesta al interrogante teórico y metodológico de cómo complementar el estudio etnográfico de los efectos materiales concretos del Estado con las dimensiones productiva y creativa de la política, a través de tender puentes entre la política del significado y la del valor.

This paper seeks to contribute conceptually to an anthropological approach to politics and power situated ethnographically. The starting point is a review of everything from classical debates about the relationship between anthropology and ideology to contemporary discussions on ethnographic theory. Then, with the discussion limited to the study of political processes involving the state, it focuses on a case from contemporary Argentina that expresses and materializes the political dimension of public infrastructure.
It examines significant associations between infrastructure and federalism established and mobilized by political actors committed to creating an interprovincial regionalization among the provinces of Cordoba, Entre Rios and Santa Fe. This corpus of data, from which the observations and arguments presented arise, is the result of a decade of research developed from an ethnographic perspective with a methodology that privileged fieldwork based on participant observation and open interviews. Finally, it proposes a response to the theoretical and methodological question of how to complement ethnographical
study of the concrete material effects of the state with the productive and creative dimensions of politics by building bridges between the politics of meaning and the politics of value.

Este trabalho buscou contribuir de maneira conceitual para a aproximação antropológica da política e do poder etnograficamente situados. O ponto de partida foi um percorrido dos debates clássicos sobre a relação entre
antropologia e ideologia até as discussões contemporâneas sobre a teoria etnográfica. Em seguida e após ser introduzida a discussão no campo do estudo de processos políticos que envolvem o Estado, recortou-se um caso da Argentina contemporânea que expressa e materializa a dimensão política da infraestrutura pública. Além disso, examinaram-se, no caso em questão, as associações significativas entre infraestrutura e federalismo estabelecidas e mobilizadas por atores políticos comprometidos com a criação de uma regionalização interprovincial entre Córdoba, Entre Ríos e Santa Fe. Esse corpus de dados, do qual surgem as observações e argumentos vertidos, corresponde-se com uma década de pesquisa desenvolvida a partir de um enfoque e uma metodologia etnográficos que privilegiam o trabalho de campo baseado
na observação participante e na entrevista aberta. Finalmente, propôs-se uma resposta ao interrogante teórico e metodológico de como complementar o estudo etnográfico dos efeitos materiais concretos do Estado com as dimensões
produtiva e criativa da política por meio do estabelecimento de pontes entre a política do significado e a do valor

This reading list covers studies within anthropology and cognate disciplines that deal with situations where people are stuck in the present. This is not some warped time loop or hole in the matrix out of a sci-fi flick, though conjuring up such images might be of use to some. As a social scientific concept, the chronic present rather attempts to account for the fact that certain individuals or communities entertain unproductive relationships to time and have little to no say in the making of the future. Assuming an unchanging present allows us to examine the cultural and social configurations that tie people to a certain position in time. The chronic present further reckons with the emotional and bodily effects of an advanced encapsulation by the present by framing the perception and experience of stagnation and repetition.

This article analyses some changes produced in the contemporary ‘postmodern’ self and its consequences for the anthropological study of religion. In this regard, these changes influence deeply the way we westerners represent our ontological structure, and approach other religious systems and ontologies, due to the current processes of globalisation and transnationalisation, the notion of Self often fluctuates between an old

Part of a special issue, "Un-Framing and Re-Framing the Global," guest co-edited with Zsuzsa Gille and Hilary Kahn. Framing the global in U.S. undergraduate education has significantly entailed “field” experiences. How have such activities prepared students to understand the interaction of daily life with larger institutions, structures, and processes? How to incorporate attention to the contradictions and untenable translations of a locale and its global entanglements into pedagogical responses to a pandemic that has significantly halted physical mobility and personal contact? This article takes up questions of how a certain conceptualization of ethnography could inform efforts to design new pedagogies for global studies. Building off a recent discussion in anthropology, I argue that the concept of ethnographic “sensibility” provides a productive entry point to discovering and articulating insights into the forms and dynamics of a population and place as shaped by interactions with other populations and places in time and space. I draw from my own experiences with the pre-pandemic piloting of an online course in media ethnography. I highlight examples of student work that point in one direction for how to engage students of global studies in profound field experiences, perhaps even when accessed digitally. This article employs the articulation of entry points for global research for the crafting of entry points for pedagogy.

What do we mean when we refer to world? How does the world relate to the human person? Are the two interdependent and, if so, in what way? What does world mean for an ethnographer or an anthropologist? Much has been said of worlds and worldviews, but do we really know what we mean by these words? Asking these questions and many more, this book explores the conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture, and how these shed light on the relationship between humans and the world in the midst of which they find themselves.

As Pina-Cabral shows, recent decades have seen important shifts in the way we relate human thought to human embodiment—the relation between how we think and what we are. The book proposes a novel approach to the human condition: an anthropological outlook that is centered around the notions of personhood and sociality. Through a rich confrontation with ethnographic and historical material, this work contributes to the ongoing task of overcoming the theoretical constraints that have hindered anthropological thinking over the past century.