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Evident invisibles emerge in the ethnographic encounter which change the whence and the whither of the ethnographic gesture. Long ago, Margaret Mead critiqued anthropologists for ignoring ‘the world in between’ that makes their fieldwork possible – this article 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 article critiques (a) the practice of describing our main methodological disposition as ‘participant observation’, arguing instead for the older term ‘intensive ethnographic 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 (northeast Brazil) in the late 2000s.

English Abstract: Basing itself in the three aspects of the world that Kant proposed (as source, as domain and as limit), this article argues that the ethnographic gesture is correspondingly marked by three registers of encounter: empathy, company, community. Taking recourse to an ethnographic vignette about an encounter with a man on a bike, it explores the sense of community that marked my ethnographic presence in Alto Minho (northwest Portugal) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The article proposes that ethnography depends on the determination of a ‘field’ for fieldwork and that this is aided by the identification of field aporias – that is, challenges to interpretation that both stop the ethnographer in her tracks, engaging the need for further determination, and provide momentum to the ethnographic narrative.French Abstract: En se basant sur les trois aspects du monde proposés par Kant (comme source, comme domaine et comme limite), cet essai soutient que le geste ethnographique est marqué de manière correspondante par trois registres de rencontre : empathie, compagnie, communauté. En recourant à une vignette ethnographique sur une rencontre avec un homme à vélo, il explore le sens de la communauté qui a marqué ma présence ethnographique dans l’Alto Minho (nord-ouest du Portugal) à la fin des années 1970 et au début des années 80. L’article propose que l’ethnographie se base sur la détermination d’un « champ » pour le travail de terrain. Cette démarche est facilitée par l’identification d’apories de terrain – c’est-à-dire des défi s d’interprétation qui, à la fois, arrêtent les ethnographes dans leur élan, engageant le besoin d’une détermination supplémentaire, et qui donnent une dynamique au récit ethnographique.

Será que os portugueses são mesmo peixes-canibais como os moçambicanos achavam? Afinal, quem come quem? Que sentido fazem essas narrativas de circulação de substâncias corporais que se encontram um pouco por todo o mundo onde houve portugueses? Chegado a Moçambique, depois de mais de duas décadas de ausência, percebi que transportava em mim mesmo sinais que espoletavam nos meus anfitriões um sentimento de familiaridade transcolonial que nem sempre era agradável. Reúno neste livro uma série de ensaios onde analiso os tortuosos périplos da transcolonialidade, isto é, os espaços onde os impérios e as hegemonias se cruzam e onde as pessoas e os grupos se movem no interior do capitalismo global.

At the same time as, in Paris, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl experimented with the concept of “participation,” at Harvard, William James undertook a parallel trajectory by taking recourse to the notion of “the vague.” For him, vagueness described the fact that reality is richer than any and all conceptualizations. In light of the ethnographic material provided by contemporary developments in the ethnography of pharmaceuticals, this paper mobilizes James’s concept of vagueness by reference to Lévy-Bruhl’s participation in order to develop instruments for capturing ethnographically the complexities of entanglement and emergence in human sociality. The paper concludes that indeterminacy and underdetermination are doors of entanglement as they both limit and make possible the constitution of entities in sociality.

Th e present collection of papers refl ects a forum debate entitled ‘Doubt and Determination’ that took place at the Lisbon EASA2020 conference. Th e original question that set off our debate concerned the nature of the ethnographic gesture – that is, the decision to engage intensively with a particular form of life in order to situate it within a more common world. We distinguished two analytical moments in the ethnographic gesture (‘going out there’ and ‘returning’) and how they combined two contradictory dispositions: (i) the ind eterminacy and underdetermination of the actual events one experiences and (ii) the need to measure some things by relation to other things in order to determine a ‘fi eld’ and write an ethnography. Of course, there will never be a seamless fi t between the ambiguity of uncertainty and the disambiguation of determination. Th erefore, by its very character as a practice situated historically, ethnography will ever remain incomplete.

This article examines the mysterious side of ‘company’, a fundamental aspect of human existence, exemplifying it with an ethnographic vignette about a dugout canoe in the mangroves of southern Bahia (Northeast Brazil). Inspired by Kant's proposal concerning aspects of world, the article distinguishes company both from empathy and from community, as distinct registers of human sociality. Being in company necessarily engages more than two persons inhabiting a common space; it involves an intersubjective encounter that has implications not only for what we do, but also for who we are and where we are. As they emerge into personhood from within company, persons necessarily experience the presence of third parties as a possible threat, inevitably giving rise to contradictory emotions: there is as much fear and conflict as peace within company, for it brings together entities with divergent interests and combines persons and objects in the world. The article addresses the way in which companionship engages power relations, by reference both to gender and to control over land.

Máscara que sorri e chora. Cachitota (prisioneiro 0277), Machava, Moçambique, c. 1970 Fonte: Fotografia do autor Há muitas décadas que esta máscara anda comigo, de casa em casa, de parede em parede. Acaba sempre por encontrar o seu lugar presa a um prego numa qualquer parede do espaço onde normalmente trabalho e onde passo a maior parte da minha vida. Com o andar do tempo, fui também notando que olho para ela mais do que para as tantas outras coisas que tenho penduradas na parede de minha ca...

Anthropological history is today a growth area. This essay reviews the new collection Anthropology’s Ancestors that Aleksandar Boskovic is editing at Berghahn. The three short books he has published so far are very engaging intellectual histories of three anthropologists of the past who have recently received increased critical attention and whose legacy certainly deserves it: Robertson Smith, Margaret Mead and Françoise Héritier.

This piece is a response to Philip Swift’s article in this issue, where he critiques issues concerning ethnographic theory raised in my book World: An anthropological examination. 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.

Since the early twentieth century, generation has been a recurrent concept in social analysis. In spite of successive bouts of critique and periods of relative neglect, the category has never been abandoned. In this article, drawing inspiration from a broad range of thinkers – such as José Ortega y Gasset, Karl Mannheim, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall – we review and fine tune our conceptual toolkit regarding generations, making more explicitly visible its affordances for social analysis in times of crisis. We focus on the problem of intergenerational overlap of contemporaneity and the contradictions that emerge from it. We argue that the notion of coevalness can help us resolve some of these contradictions – for example, the lag between contemporaneity and generational awareness – and introduce, through its horizontal connotations, a decolonising ethical stance. Favouring a processual understanding of generation, we recommend ‘conjunctural analysis’ as the most flexible analytical framework for resolving the intersectional contradictions and overlaps of generational categorisation.

In the present conjuncture, Brazilian social anthropologists are facing a major challenge to their work. I suggest that this happens because of anthropology’s central dependence on the ethnographic method. The ethnographer’s direct contact with the people they study gives rise to an ethical response that moves the ethnographer beyond abstract moral principles. But, in the world of Jair Bolsonaro or Donald Trump, ethics counters morals: the objectivized, legalistic formulas favored by these autocratic ideologues (supposedly representing “tradition” and “identity”) turn out not to correspond to the actual conditions that face the persons that anthropologists meet in the field, who experience oppression and suffering in their lives.