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English Abstract: Fiction might not be formally the same genre as ethnography, but fiction remains a legitimate companion to anthropological reflection. Placing Kafka alongside the authors of this special section of SA/AS allows me to read them just a touch beyond their central positions: especially for what they can teach us about untranslatability, 'impass-ability' and impossibility, as a vital part of ethnography and of relating more generally. Aft er discussing the texts of this section, I address questions posed to our panel at EASA2020. I then discuss what I call Brazil's most untranslatable novel, which sheds unique light on contemporary anthropological worries about untranslatability, or impossible-to-fully-bridge difference. French Abstract: La fiction n'est peut-être pas formellement le même genre que l'ethnographie. En tant que produit d'une « observation sérieuse » quotidienne (Wood 2014[2020]) par contre, la fiction reste un compagnon légitime à la réflexion anthropologique. En plaçant Kafka aux côtés des auteurs de cette section spéciale de SA/AS, je peux les lire un peu au-delà de leurs positions centrales, en particulier pour ce qu'ils peuvent nous apprendre sur l'intraduisibilité, l'«impasse-abilité» et l'impossibilité, parties essentielles pour l'ethnographie et des relations/rapports plus généralement. Après avoir discuté les textes de cette section, je réponds aux questions posées à notre panel lors de l'EASA2020. Je discute ensuite de ce que j'appelle le roman le plus intraduisible du Brésil, qui jette une lumière unique sur les préoccupations anthropologiques contemporaines concernant l'intraduisibilité, ou la différence qui est impossible à combler entièrement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the anthropological division of labor, Latin Americanists have occupied a pretty consistent place until recently: Latin Americanists, especially those we might say study settlers, have tended to be trained and hired to discuss politics and governance. Maria José de Abreu's I The Charismatic Gymnasium i and Kevin O'Neill's I Hunted i both demonstrate that new forms of Latin American Christianity - Charismatic Catholicism in Brazil and Pentecostalism in Guatemala, respectively - cannot be ignored if we are to understand both everyday lives and governmental regimes in the region. [Extracted from the article]

In light of renewed questions about the relationship between anthropology's past and future, two radicalizations of the British tradition are particularly worth exploring: those of Talal Asad and Marilyn Strathern, arguably the most widely read anthropologists beyond the discipline, and the most regularly misunderstood. Asad and Strathern are rarely engaged together because the anthropologies that their works have inspired operate quite separately, their mutual implications left unexplored. And yet, tracing the development of Asad's and Strathern's respective work reveals a deep resonance, beginning with their training in the concern with translation, which owes more to Malinowski than anthropologists today are generally aware. The paper argues that reading Asad and Strathern together can help mitigate the over-cultivation of the "concept" in recent anthropology, multiply insights into the constitutive relations among anthropology, science and the secular, and refine perspectives on the legacy of British anthropology and on anthropology's future politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 17 April 1996, police opened fire on more than 1,500 unarmed protesters of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Southeast Pará, Brazil, killing nineteen and wounding seventy‐nine. Two years later, Osias, one of the wounded survivors, awoke to find that he had written a messianic prophecy, which he decided to share because it contained 'a lot of reality'. This article explores what conditioned Osias's expectation that his text could provoke public reflections on reality. As such, it engages with a question unexplored by current scholarship: why the will to publicity might be inextricable from secularity, which I define as the condition of living with secularization, understood in turn not as the rise of unbelief, but as the expansion of a domain of thought and practice distinguished from religion. The ethnography ultimately inspires a rereading of Asad's Formations of the secular, interrogates assumptions about the determining reality of 'secularism' and 'politics', and makes more visible how anthropological writing is shaped by secularity. With a postscript on the October 2018 presidential elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents authors views on the theory of ontological politics and the work of professor Marilyn Strathern towards the same field. Topics include ontology as a kinetic hermeneutic which power cannot be overestimated without becoming doctrinaire, epistemological problems related to ontology, and involving succumbing to the temptation of reification at the risk of overlooking the nuances of the analytical difference.