Etnografías Contemporáneas

Vivir y beber en Malvinas. Un antropólogo entre los Kelpers

Rolando Silla — 2024-11-01

Thomas L. Melchionne
Buenos Aires: Editorial SB
2023, 286 páginas

Boliviantinos y argenguayos

Malena García Vildoza — 2024-11-01

Una nueva generación de jóvenes migrantes e hijos de inmigrantes en Buenos Aires
Natalia Gavazzo
Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Universitario
2019, 118 páginas.

Etnografías Contemporáneas, Diez años publicando antropología en la Universidad Nacional de San Martín

Equipo editorial — 2024-11-01

Care will have been criticized in the near future

María Epele — 2024-11-01

This article problematizes the importance of critical ethnographies of health, through the analysis of the notions of care, its academic grammars, policies, government technologies and the effects they produce. The aim of this work is twofold. On the one hand, it examines the particular characteristics of these ethnographies, its temporalities, and the ways in which they address specific health issues, including micro-dynamics of care. On the other hand, it examines how the ethnographies of health question and confront the interweaving between power, economies and care in marginalized neighborhood in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Region. The choice of care as conceptual subject to argue about the relevance and potentialities of ethnographic research, is based on its omnipresence in contemporary anthropological research, even after this notion was translated into regulations within the health safety scheme during the pandemic of COVID-19. Finally, the discussion about the specific contributions that ethnographies co-produce with the people affected by afflictions, focuses on how this analysis can modify their living conditions, well-being, health and survival.

The participation of the Chilean Armed Forces in disaster response

Mariano Del Pópolo — 2024-11-01

The article addresses the involvement of the Chilean Armed Forces in disaster response, taking the earthquake and tsunami of February 27 as a starting point and until the social outbreak in the country in 2019. By revisiting the military perspective through interviews and documents from the Chilean Army, the concept of military performativity is proposed to comprehend the increasing militarization of disaster response in the country. Drawing from these sources, the article also chronicles the institutional and doctrinal transformations within the Chilean Armed Forces, particularly in the context of disasters, highlighting a shift towards a predominantly repressive approach focused on maintaining public order.

Trans mother and daughter

Cristian Darouiche — 2024-11-01

This article presents an analysis of the notions of family and relatedness of motherdaughter relationship trans and transvestite women in the city of Mar del Plata, as a result of their forms of sociability and their material living conditions. This research is based on qualitative methodology, considering that this is the most effective way to understand and describe the way in which the world is understood, experienced and produced by the actresses. Within the possibilities offered by the qualitative approach, ethnographic fieldwork was chosen, since it seeks to understand the ways in which native women interact, present themselves and establish relationships. In short, this research aims to register mainly in the debates on kinship and family relationships, showing the ways in which trans women try to weave -not without conflicts- affective bonds of care and lasting solidarity among themselves, in the particular context of their living conditions. There is not a single form of family, but on the contrary, this is a cultural and political fiction that serves to order social relations and the construction of social reality.

The naqshbandi road in female key. Sufism, gender, and spirituality in Argentina

Mayra Valcarcel — 2024-11-01

This paper recovers the research of both authors to describe and analyse, from a comparative approach, the modalities of female conversion and sociability within the Naqshbandi Haqqani Sufi order in Argentina. We will explore similarities and contrasts emerging between the testimonies and experiences of those women who participate in the brotherhood in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (AMBA) and those who integrate rural communities that the order formed in different provinces (Mendoza, Córdoba, Río Negro). We will begin by briefly situating the Sufi presence in the local Muslim geography. Secondly, based on the testimonies of the interlocutors and outstanding scenes of the ethnographic work, we will describe the itineraries and processes of conversion. Thirdly, after gender relations within Sufism have been presented, we will reflect on the configuration of femininities that oscillate –in their multiple exchanges, tensions, and displacements– between Islam and New Age spiritualities. We will take as examples dance and Sufi turn in urban spaces, as well as the knowledge and experiences around gynaecology in rural environments.

A game of seduction

María Sol Bruno — 2024-11-01

This text explores methodological dimensions of my fieldwork through the analysis of certain relationships I established with individuals who became interlocutors/interviewees in my research. These individuals were part of a network that enabled the production and circulation of musical projects in the city of Córdoba. I have conducted research on these project for over a decade. In this article, I take into account the expectations that arise between the ethnographer and the interviewees, in what I call a game of seduction that had different outcomes depending on the case. The hypothesis is that developing a genealogy of independent cultural production that has been invisible over the years has certain effects both for those who have been active participants and for the outcome of the research.

Represamento de violência em modos de habitar territórios de mineração

2024-11-01

As part of a work that combined documentary analysis and ethnography of the impacts of an ore tailings dam in northeastern Brazil (in Caetité - Bahia), we sought to understand the phenomenon of the damming of violence in the ways of living of those affected by the dam. Data from digital platforms and contexts of interaction with those affected indicate the formulations that made the dam appear as an enterprise capable of boosting the industrial development of the region and the resistance strategies undertaken by those affected. The extraction and processing of ore in the territories covered by the research to which this text refers, as its empirical field, destroys part of the local biodiversity, displaces families and uses local labor for manual work. The result of extraction and processing, the supposed wealth, is transferred to other territories and, initially, the violence resulting from the process is dammed up in local ways of life, violence that materializes the various oppressions related to mining

Anthropology and the politics of alterity

Sian Lazar — 2024-11-01

Recent anglophone ontological anthropologies have an important Latin American intellectual and political history that is rarely fully acknowledged. This article outlines some of that history, arguing that debates about the politics of this ‘ontological turn’ should be read in the context of a tension between political economy and cosmological approaches that have been a feature of Latin American anthropology in some form since the early 20th century, and that are deeply implicated in histories of conquest and colonialism, including internal colonialism. This conceptual history helps to explain both the desire of some scholars to avoid a certain kind of politicisation and the argument that methodological and theoretical innovation within anthropology is political in itself. But it also means that ontological anthropology encounters some of the same challenges faced by indigenous movements confronted with similar choices.

Territory and conflict mediation: technique, moral value and state performance

Mariana Inés Godoy — 2024-11-01

This article takes an ethnographic approach to the meanings and uses of the concept of “territory” in the context of conflict mediation in the province of Salta/Argentina, and more specifically, of a type of intervention that is new in this field, that of the so-called Complex Public Conflicts. Taking into consideration the perspective of the mediators themselves who make up the teams working in this area, and focusing on the experience of two specific cases of intervention, I will try to understand how the state and the justice system shape an image of themselves based on the technical and moral idea of "reaching the territory", emphasizing a personalized dimension that is attentive to local relations, and what are some of the dilemmas of this statement that can be observed in practice.