Sociality, Style, and Paying Attention

Latino Studies

Lévi-Strauss approached the organization of cultural sign systems, e.g., totemism, myth, kinship rules, as 'languages' whose deep structures underlie surface phenomena. For Lévi-Strauss, binary oppositions were seen to constitute the basis of underlying 'classificatory systems' within cultures. On the other hand, in Thick Description Geertz gave the renowned definition of culture as essentially semiotic, namely, the webs of significance that 'man … himself has spun' (1973: 5). The task, thus, of anthropological analysis became a search of meaning and an issue

2019

This book tells the remarkable story of the friendship between Liria Hernández, a Roma woman from Madrid, and Paloma Gay y Blasco, a non-Roma anthropologist. In this unique reciprocal experiment, the former informant returns the gaze to write about the anthropologist, her life and her environment. Through finely crafted and deeply moving text, Hernández and Gay y Blasco suggest new ways of doing and writing anthropology. The dialogue between Hernández and Gay y Blasco provides a courageous account of the entanglements and rewards of anthropological research. Drawing on letters, conversations, and fieldnotes gathered over twenty-five years, each of the authors talks about herself, the other, and the impact of anthropology on their two lives. They examine their intertwined trajectories as Spanish women and reflect on the challenges of devising their own reciprocal genre. Blending ethnography, life story and memoir, they undermine the dichotomy between author and subject around which scholarship still revolves. Reviews “Engrossing, provocative, moving, analytically fascinating – this reciprocal ethnography is all these. Most importantly, what we find in Writing Friendship is a close-up, laid bare demonstration of how people make meaning out of one another’s ideas and experiences. Fascinating.” (Christina Toren, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of St Andrews, UK) “On rare occasions you come across a book that you don’t want to finish, a book that inspires so much that it takes your breath away. Writing Friendship is that kind of book. Through creative experimentation, the authors, who come from very different social worlds in Spain, stitch together a marvelous story. They show us how slowly developed long-term friendships can shape the kind of deep ethnography that underscores the wondrous complexity of the human condition. This is a book that has soul.” (Paul Stoller, author of Yaya’s Story: The Quest for Well Being in the World) “A wonderfully and beautifully written work. Gay y Blasco and Hernández uniquely position emergent and shared story as a framework for co-interpretation, collaborative research and writing.” (Luke Eric Lassiter, author of The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography)

Latin American Studies Association, 2009

Peruvians working in the late thirties and early forties, used ethnographic ideas and attitudes— specifically those associated with so-called ethnographic surrealism—to structure their depictions of indigenous people and artifacts. I read Moro and Arguedas against one another, and put them in dialogue with European surrealist-ethnographers who, in the Diaspora of the 1936-1940 period, fanned out across the Americas, often writing literary depictions of the indigenous people and objects they encountered. Briefly, I find that Moro embodied a fascination with the object understood in its dual nature: the surrealist object (which entails hasard objectif, totem, estrangement and collage) and the ethnographic object (touching museum collections, documents). Arguedas, meantime, embodied a fascination with practices such as music, myth, rites, and lifeways which, though ephemeral, are exemplified and given form in his work through the notion of the animate landscape—a landscape combining the cultural and the natural, representing in physical and affective geography the exemplary indigeneity that Arguedas, like his surrealist counterparts, still sought at this early stage in his thinking. Just as much as in Antonin Artaud or Wolfgang Paalen, the landscape in Arguedas presents itself as a text to be read only by the privileged eyes of the artist/ethnographer.

2016

This paper draws on two points about the difficulties of conducting research between two languages and cultures which are scant in social science research: one is reflecting on the notion of “making sense ” and how prevalent it has become to make sense for a western audience. This process is complicated and leads to more meanings lost in translation, so it is important to unpack it specifically during the research process. The second point I discuss in this paper is the notion of “situated auto/biography ” that is not specific to an author or a researcher, but deals with all parties involved in the process of knowledge production. I argue that translation acts as a creative space for thinking and not just conveying meanings, but that through a dialogical and transversal act, it can help in creating new meanings. As Hoffman (1989) argued in her book, Lost in Translation, speaking a different language is analogous to living another life in another social setting. Translation is an act...

Anthrovision, 2019

This article puts forward a methodological pathway for work between anthropology and art that is premised on the relation between social and aesthetic form. It draws on the authors’ work with cartonera publishers in Latin America, small community-based collectives whose members make low-cost books from recycled cardboard in an explicit attempt to make both the consumption and production of literature accessible to wider society. We begin by describing Dulcinéia Catadora, a cartonera publisher based in São Paulo that is the ethnographic focus of this article. We then present three theoretical propositions, which enable us to analyse not in isolation from, but rather in relation to, social and political processes, asking how ethnographic practice can intersect with aesthetics in a mode which goes beyond the illustrative. We conclude by proposing what we term a ‘trans-formal’ methodological approach based on a method of ‘emulation’, opening up new possibilities for research that is multi-disciplinary, transnational, horizontal and participatory. Este artículo presenta una propuesta metodológica para el trabajo entre la antropología y las artes que se basa en la relación entre la forma social y la forma estética. Parte del trabajo de los autores con los editores cartonera en América Latina. Éstos son pequeños colectivos comunitarios cuyos miembros fabrican libros de bajo coste a partir de cartón reciclado en un intento explícito de hacer que el consumo y la producción de literatura sean accesibles para la sociedad en general. Comenzamos describiendo a Dulcinéia Catadora, una editora de cartonera de São Paulo que es el foco etnográfico de este artículo. Luego presentamos tres proposiciones teóricas que nos permiten analizar los procesos sociales y políticos no de manera aislada, sino más bien en relación, preguntando cómo la práctica etnográfica puede cruzarse con la estética en un modo que va más allá de lo ilustrativo. Concluimos proponiendo lo que llamamos un enfoque metodológico "trans-formal", basado en un método de "emulación", que abre nuevas posibilidades para una investigación multidisciplinaria, transnacional, horizontal y participativa. Cet article propose une approche méthodologique centrée autour des sciences sociales et humaines afin d’’étudier les relations entre formes sociales et esthétiques. Cette contribution est fondée sur le travail des éditeurs cartonera en Amérique Latine : il s’agit de petits collectifs dont les membres produisent des livres bons marchés à partir de papiers cartons, afin de rendre la production et la consultation de littérature accessible à un public plus large. Dans une première partie nous procédons à une description ethnographique de Dulcinéia Catadora, un éditeur de cartonera basé à São Paulo. En questionnant comment la pratique ethnographique peut s’entrecouper avec l’esthétique au-delà de l’illustratif, nous présentons par la suite trois propositions théoriques grâce auxquelles nous analysons cartonera dans ses interactions sociales et politiques. Nous proposons ainsi une approche ‘trans-formale’ qui est fondée sur l’émulation, et permet de nouvelles recherches pour une recherche pluridisciplinaire, transnationale, horizontale et participative.

Anthropology and Humanism, 2012

a virulently racist approach predicated on völkisch racial theories. A new generation of anthropologists thought they were empowered to speculate about connections between physical appearance and cultural or psychological traits.

2001

Organization, 2003

Almost thirty years ago Clifford Geertz observed that the fashion of doing research, and especially of writing it, had begun to change-especially in anthropology, but also in other social sciences (Geertz 1980). After a hundred years of positivism, which in social sciences has been translated as an imperative to imitate natural sciences, the winds of change seemed to be stirring. Most likely it was a change in scientific fashion, as science, like any other collective phenomenon, is subject to changing fashions (Czarniawska and Panozzo 2008). This new fashion has been aided, or perhaps even led, by the methodological reflections of Winch (1958/1990), Feyerabend (1962/1997) and Kuhn (1975/1988). They were all keen to demonstrate that philosophy as well as the history of science questioned the ideal of the "true science" inherited from natural sciences. Social sciences seem to have recalled another ancestor: the humanities. Slowly but surely, "laws and proofs" were becoming "cases and interpretations", in a movement that Geertz called "the interpretive turn", alluding to the "linguistic turn". 1 Not for the first time, analogies and metaphors from fiction became legitimate-during the new installment of the complicated history of the relationship between social sciences and belles lettres (Lepenies 1988). A "third culture", the one that showed interest in "how human beings are living or have lived" (Snow 1956), began to emerge. Being a mixture of the two original cultures, the third culture also mixed the genres with great gusto: philosophy blended with cybernetics and literature theory (Gumbrecht 1992), literature with empirical studies (Latour 1996), and allegories with ethnographies (Geertz 1972). It was there, in the vibrant fringe of blurred genres, that the new giants arose, all creolized personages: Michel Foucault (historian, philosopher, sociologist, political scientist); Niklas Luhmann (theorist and practitioner of administration, philosopher, cyberneticist, connoisseur of the Classics); Umberto Eco (semiologist, writer, journalist); and Bruno Latour (philosopher, anthropologist, sociologist). The examples do not have to be limited to the social sciences: Anton Zeilinger, the Viennese theoretical physicist, the designer of teletransportation, scrutinized with great interest the philosophical and rhetorical grounds of his own science (1997). These brilliant authors are, however, rather the exceptions than the illustration of the norm in the "normal sciences". But even in normal sciences there seems to be awareness of, or even a need for "the third way", which, however filled with promises, will not be easy to chart. The present essay contains a tentative analysis of some such promises and difficulties. Creole Researchers: The Case of "Malwina Gintowt" I shall examine the phenomenon of creolized authors within social sciences using an actual case that has been anonymized. It is not a "sample" taken from "the population of such cases", but an illustration of what I see as phenomena typical of the "third culture". Malwina Gintowt is a scholar from Central Europe, who began her research career with a desire to understand and describe what was of such interest to C.P. Snow: "how human beings are living or have lived". The most obvious choice of the field was psychology. Malwina Gintowt entered this field exactly at the point in time when the "old" European interpretative psychology began to be pushed to the margins by the "new", scientific, quantitative U.S. psychology. 2 After years of study, however, Malwina Gintowt came to the conclusion that psychology was not especially interested in how the majority of people live or lived. As far as Malwina