Etnografías Contemporáneas

Independent, apolitical, and non-partisan.

Federico Del Castillo — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Police and politics are two terms that appear antagonistic in the police world. Politics is often perceived by police officers as a foreign domain, a dirty and impure field, tainted by personal interests. Law enforcement does not allow for political preferences or partisanship. However, since it directly affects the collective behavior of people, policing is naturally a political profession. So, how do politics and policing coexist? This article offers answers to this question by examining a field where politics and policing are clearly intertwined: police unionism. It explores three dimensions of Uruguayan police unions: 1) their organizational identities, 2) their repertoires of collective action, and 3) their relationships with civilian unions. We will observe that, despite being inherently political organizations, Uruguayan police unions interact with politics in an elusive manner —much like the police institution itself— proposing a definition of the political that is separate from partisanship and focused on defending police workers. In this hygienic stance towards partisanship, the unions find legitimacy and simultaneously consolidate their position in both the police and union fields.

Ações coletivas juvenis em São Paulo

Rose, Silvia Helena, Simone — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article proposes an overview of the different types of social and collective youth actions in the city of São Paulo, observed between 2000 and 2020. This genealogy includes mobilizations of urban youth organized around activist and collectivist agendas—that is, those that did not fall within an institutional/traditional political context. The methodology, of a multidisciplinary nature, included the systematic monitoring of some mobilizations and collective practices of urban young people on the streets and networks. The central and cross-cutting conceptual tool of analysis is the articulation between the political, cultural, aesthetic and communicational dimensions of such events. It was concluded that they map out a landscape of affections and are marked by politicities, with a strong performative basis, characterizing an exercise of subjectivity that is, at the same time, a conscious refusal of subjection.

Altars out of place.

Natalia Bermudez — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, I intend to reflect on how anthropological intervention and the development of collaborative projects can enhance the knowledge accumulated by our interlocutors –and by anthropologists themselves– oriented both at processing or resolving part of the conflicts they face, and at challenging the legitimized perspectives within certain judicial, political and politico-academic spaces. The results of these reflections draw on the ethnographic research I have conducted since 2007, with a particular focus on a collaborative Project started in 2012 alongside relatives, family activists and organizations linked to the struggle against institutional violence in Córdoba. In this project, the construction of altars, murals and grottos, and other forms of conflict regulation -often perceived in activist and academic circles- as subsidiary or peripheral political practices- were strengthened as knowledge accumulated by the popular sectors to deal with the deaths of young people, and above all, with the “bad victims”. Acknowledging their own logics of conflict resolution, the forms of local resistance and social creativity can lead us to stop blocking the recognition that communities have of their knowledge and of themselves.

Ontocartography.

Rocío Fatyass — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this article I analyze emerging results from a research project with children, supported by the National University of Villa María (Córdoba, Argentina). Using ethnographic and participatory methods, I approach processes and activities from the co-construction of an ontocartography about the neighborhood in which the participants live. In theoretical terms, I recover antecedents of queer feminism and new materialisms that renew discussions in the field of childhood and in contemporary methodologies. In the results I detail how children bond with others and imprint meanings on the materialities and spaces of the territory, from repertoires internalized and renewed in the arrangements of this research. In the conclusions I reflect on the ontology of children's agency from a relational and decentered perspective, questioning its individual, voluntary and textual character.

Antropologia Feminista desde el Sur

Tchella Maso — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article investigates the foundations and challenges of feminist anthropology from the Global South, drawing on references from post-structuralist anthropology and Black and Latin American feminism. Based on the notion of “place of enunciation” (Ribeiro, 2019), it emphasizes the deconstruction of epistemic hierarchies and proposes accompaniment as a methodological and ethical practice. It explores how intersectionality and feminist reflexivity reconfigure power relations in research, connecting ethics, politics, and practices of social transformation. Drawing from ethnographic experiences in Brazil, it proposes a model of situated and collaborative knowledge production, contributing to the strengthening of political, personal, and affective bonds through first-hand experiences.

Habitar el trabajo de campo.

Noemi Gomez Mendoza — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article is based on a reflexive approach whereby the author allows herself to inhabit the fieldwork carried out from 2018 to the present in the corporation “El Comienzo del Arcoíris”, located in the village of Puerto Caldas, Pereira, Colombia. The aim was to analyze how interpersonal relationships, as well as being affected by the community influenced the research and the commitments made by the author. Hence, it is based on feminist ethnography and social pedagogy in order to make a critical and reflexive reading that situates the researcher as part of the social network where fieldwork was conducted.

Los objetos no tienen deseos.

Alf Hornborg — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“Postdualist” approaches, such as the material turn in the humanities and social sciences, represent understandable reactions to the humanist and idealist traditions in Western thought, but tend to be deluded by a focus on individual artifacts rather than on the global, material relations on which their existence depends. The attribution of agency and even desires to abiotic objects, championed by posthumanist researchers such as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, is cognate to the category mistakes recurrently identified by social theorists as fetishism and anthropomorphism. Paradoxically, given their subversive ambitions, proponents of the new concern with materiality and artifactual agency are offering an ideology that ultimately buttresses the capitalist world order by ignoring the materiality of world trade and the causality inherent in the artifact of money. The concerns with distributed agency also tend to displace responsibility and accountability from humans to artifacts. Moreover, in converging with a deep genealogy of ideas that blur the boundary between nature and artifice, the material turn depoliticizes technology by naturalizing it. The article proposes a new anthropology of technology that acknowledges the reliance of modern technology on asymmetric global resource flows orchestrated by money and the fictive reciprocity of market prices.

Politizar la casa.

Estefania Manzano — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Florencia Pacífico
Buenos Aires: Prometeo
2023, 261 páginas

Cartografía de los estudios sociales sobre el deporte

Federico Czesli — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Alejo Levoratti
UNSAM Edita
2024, 241 páginas.