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In this paper I propose an anthropological framework for the analysis of sociocultural bounds between pleasure and whispering. To do so, I focus on the cultural practice of listening to online videos called ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) as an assisted sensibility that aimsto elicit pleasurable sensations through whispering and other light sounds. Although the pleasure in whispering refers to an individual experience, the attention to different sensory and sensual practices based on whispering reveals the implications of sonorities in contemporary culturalsensorium, their technological mediations and how they modulate identities, relationships and politics. The phenomenological, sensorial and vocal analysis of social practicesthrough this sonority gives us an account of pleasure as a sensorial disposition where intimacy and memory manifest themselves as sonorous affects and situated vibratory processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early days of anthropology as a discipline in the nineteenth century, evolutionism and diffusionism supplied anthropologists with 'global' visions. Anthropologists have always been involved with all-encompassing cosmopolitan notions such as humankind and culture. Many have thus endeavoured to explain the world as a whole, and how humans have developed in different historical moments. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the new label 'globalization' generated a field of scholarly preoccupations, anthropologists started to contribute to this growing body of literature. Their most valuable contributions are related to the tensions between local and global forces, and between forces of heterogeneity and homogeneity, as well as to the use of ethnography as a methodological tool. Anthropologists have borrowed notions from other related disciplines such as sociology, history, and geography. This paper situates the anthropological production on 'the global' within this diverse history of borrowings, internal disciplinary debates, and wider historical junctures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an invitation to reflect on the importance eroticism may have in the different stages of anthropological work (gathering information, analysis, writing, presenting to an audience…), starting from a definition of eroticism as potential and creative force, which includes but not be limited to the sexual sense of the term; an approach that may serve to capture the dynamic, sensorial intensity of both pleasant and unpleasant human experiences. In order to do so, I turn to classic texts by Audre Lorde, Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari and Georges Bataille as well as current authors such as Maria Livia Alga, Alba Barbé, Adriana Guzmán and Elisa Lipkau. But, above all, I take inspiration from Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation”, published originally in 1966 and applied to art criticism. Following a brief revision of anthropological research in the field of sexuality, I address different questions relating to importance of commitment and erotic affectation in ethnography, developed above all in certain fields such as visual anthropology and feminist anthropology. One question guides my entire reflection: What would an erotics of anthropological research be and in what sense could that be of use? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss the transformations undergone by the academic institution at global and European level, arguing that contemporary University is both neoliberal and eurocentric. First, we highlight the changes that have affected research practice, conceived as an increasingly "fast", individualist and depoliticized activity; the role (and the subjectivity) of the researcher, constantly pushed to accumulate academic merits and achieve "excellence" and "impact"; and the growing precaritization of both working and life conditions. Then, drawing on our experience of collaborative ethnography with "Stop Evictions Granada- 15M" (Spain), we propose possible "lines of flight" from this situation. Based on our fieldwork, we theorize collaborative ethnography as a way to decolonize research practices. We stress its potential to produce collective knowledge and promote (re)politicization processes and claim that collaboration can help overcome the (currently hegemonic) individualistic and depoliticizing logics in Academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue is meant to discuss the following issues: how can we collectively produce meaning? Whom should we research for/with? What should be the aims of our research? We are particularly interested in tackling the ways in which collaborative ethnographies are being constructed, from different perspectives, and how the multiple decisions affecting them are taken. With the aim of contextualizing the ethnographic experiences discussed in this volume, in this presentation we frame the historical emergence of collaborative ethnography and sum up the main contributions done by Anthropology. Then, we point out the main contents of the articles included in this issue, which is made up of six papers proceeding from ongoing researches, all of them collaborative, engaged and even activist in some cases, undertaken together with different actors in diverse scenarios. Our interlocutors have been Mexican women emigrated to New York, young Indigenous graduated at the Intercultural University of Veracruz, neighbors from marginalized neighborhoods in Lisbon, social movements and platforms for the right to housing in Spain. A great variety of contexts, perspectives and knowledge(s) emerge from this review: even though ethnography is central for all of them, it is accompanied by a plurality of knowledge(s) and practices -- ranging from radio series to ethnomusicology -- paving the way to diverse strategies of knowledge production -- story telling, collective workshops, conversations. A set of core-issues is emerging overall, and we hope it may contribute to the discussion on the tensions, dilemmas and potentialities of collaborative and engaged ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to show the metonymical identification that exists between the male body and the Basque community and how this identification provokes a systematic exclusion of women from the spaces where cultural protagonism is displayed. To do so, it will examine how protagonism is performed in the sport of hand pelota, a sport in which the most popular modality is exclusively male and which has been central to shaping the Basque imaginary. The game of pelota has shaped many of the main squares in Basque villages and towns, as well as the Basque bodies placed in them. The place where pelota is played, the fronton, is the space used by the Basque community to hold their most significant events. And Pelota is the prototypical game played in that space. By deciphering the chain of signifiers generates in the game, it is possible to understand the imaginary which prevent women from becoming protagonists in the context of Basque cultural representation. The paper tells the story of one of them, the Navarrese pelota player Maite Ruiz de Larramendi, forced to give up pelota when she was a child, and attempts to provide keys for the interpretation of other cases beyond its ethnographic boundaries, such as the well-known case of the South African athlete Caster Semenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a proposal for the anthropological analysis of the cargo system, including both indigenous and non indigenous communities. From the understanding of the cargo system as an essentially heterogeneous institution, the paper suggest as main hypothesis that this institution is the origin of other mechanisms in the interaction of the members of the communities. First, the community institutions promote the participation of the largest number of people. Second, interactions' scenes are constantly created and recreated by the community members. Third, the roles' rotation, as a product of a tacit agreement into community members, is fundamental to assure social participation. The proposal is structured in three parts. First, the composition of the cargo system as a continuum which explains the differences between individual and collective behaviour. Second, the idea of community as a fundamental concept to understand the cargo system. As a conclusion, the idea of communitarian project becomes the common characteristic of all the communities -native or no native- in the Mesoamerican area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is focused on artistic creation, usually understood as transitivity, and separated from the idea of religious creation. Yet the artistic creation also involves a role as a believer, instead of a creator. The artist is born as a result of the experience of otherness, but as a consequence of an own belief. In a second stage, this birth is also tied to a search, driving the artist to the marginality, taking distance from the established social beliefs. In the case of music, that marginality is experienced in the pain, and gives way to hope. That is why pain and glory melt in the work of singers and composers, and the coincidence of these opposed feelings originates a powerful semantic force. This phenomenon is analyzed in the paper by the use of some examples of the work of musicians, taken from many different kinds of music and time periods: Juanito Valderrama, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Camarón, Antonio Vega or Amy Winehouse, among other examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analytical review of the development of rural anthropology in Chile. The research is based on an analysis of the rural anthropology studies during the last two decades, which were particularly focused on the changes in the rural society. The authors identified a general tendency to discuss rural phenomena from a descriptive angle, with very few attempts to produce theoretical concepts to understand and interpret the socio-cultural processes that have taken place in the Chilean rural sector. As a result of the study, the authors of this paper propose some guidelines for the development of the field of rural studies during the next decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in the field of health with the participation of social anthropology in Chile is scarce. On the other hand, studies in social sciences, whether funded by the state and / or universities, are usually not linked to concrete problems. In this context, this paper presents an experience of forming an interdisciplinary team that has tried to know the medical models of indigenous origin in the Chilean north and the strategies of attention to the diseases deployed by Aymara families. Its purpose is to address the problems faced by health and social sciences professionals, the constraints generated by specialized training to find solutions in specific situations, and the difficulties that arise for transdisciplinary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital worlds have posed anthropologists for the last two decades a whole set of methodological challenges that according to the traditional tale of the field has forced ethnography to adapt, transform or renew. In this paper I reframe this question to argue that the key issue when we study digital worlds is not just how to proceed but how to find the appropriate account to describe ethnography in these particular encounters. Drawing on three of my fieldworks focussed on different expressions of digital cultures, I describe how one of my ethnographies on digital media is re-mediated, and how other ethnography on prototypes is prototyped. Two instances leading me to argue in the encounter with digital worlds anthropology has the opportunity to re-learn its methods in the company of others and re-describe it drawing on the conceptual vocabularies that discovers in its empirical encounters. I will call it a relation of methodological recursivity in which the ethnographic object turns into the source to re-describe the ethnographic method. Methodological recursion evinces a twofold effect: The incorporation of vernacular practices as part of our method, and the re-description of ethnography drawing on the conceptual vocabulary of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic anthropology studies offer evolutionary and migratory narratives to characterize individuals and human groups based on genetic traits. From the analysis of genetic information, these studies construct genealogies that connect body characteristics with geographies and stories of origin. In recent years, an international group of researchers worked in a project focused on Latin American populations. In this paper, we present the results of our ethnographic work and interviews with participants in this project. Based on this material, we show that Mexican participants tend to use their physical appearance, typological ideas of human difference, family stories and family names to give meaning to scientific terms such as genetic ancestry. Participants rely on shared visual habits to interpret their own and others' appearance and to negotiate their belonging to racial, ethnic and family groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the Spanish translation of the article How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement, published ten years ago by the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn in the journal American Ethnologist. As a result of the ethnography developed among the Quichua-speaking Runa in Ecuador's Upper Amazon, the work represented a turning point in the discipline by moving the anthropological analysis to a scope beyond human, breaking the perimeter of the object of ethnographic study by expanding the view on the interactions that humans maintain with other beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the contemporary debate on ethnographic methodology in anthropology, this paper analyses how new methodological options arise throughout processes of educational interculturality and how these can nourish, rejuvenate and decolonize classical anthropological ethnography. The contrast between a postmodern anthropology and activist ethnography reveals possibilities for fruitfully complement social and political engagement with the classical canon of ethnography, which is here illustrated for the sphere of Intercultural Studies and the emerging field of what may be called an anthropology of interculturality. The resulting, "doubly reflexive ethnography" completes the contrast of emic and etic approaches through a emic-etic dialectical, structure-oriented perspective, which is particularly suitable for studying institutions and organizations whose actors co-reflect on the same research process as the anthropologist her/himself. This proposal is finally summed up in a three-dimensional heuristic research model, which combines semantic, pragmatic and syntactic dimensions of ethnography and which is particularly suited for "inter-cultural", "inter-lingual" and "inter-actor" diversity contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the limited influence anthropologists have had in the definition of the agenda and in the contents of the policies and international instruments dealing with international migration. In order to do so, some examples from recent events are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance of affectivity in the human sciences implies not only the emergence of a new analytic field about an important aspect of social activity, but a reflection on the modalities of knowledge in these disciplines. In fact, to propose the affective dimension as an analytic object has consequences on how to approach knowledge, because the very existence of an affective dimension obliges to rethink the cognitive dimension inherent in the act of knowledge. In this paper I propose some methodological elements for reflection derived from these ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A good part of the anthropological knowledge —understood more like a constellation of thematic areas and problems than as a single discipline with a coherent scientific corpus— has been constructed around the universalism vs relativism issue within the framework of the so call "cultural turn". The present work points three references in the history of the controversial concept of culture in anthropology: Geertz (The Interpretation of Cultures 1973), Clifford and Marcus (Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography 1986) and Abu-Lughod (Writing Against Culture 1990). In this order we can expose and understand why some anthropologist are demanding to get over the cultural turn (i.e. the interpretativism, the literary style and the criticism of anthropology and history as sciences that discover universal laws); this paper also discusses the possibility to get over the cultural turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]