Walking through closed trails: studying the unstudied objects in Brazilian Anthropology

Abstract

My option in studying objects never, or almost never, addressed by Brazilian Anthropology calls for questioning both the definition of object and the locus of research, and for continued attention to two dimensions of the ethnographic practice. The first is about interactions between reason and emotion in the definition of our research agendas. The second is the concern with the effects on the anthropological perspective when alterity is sidelined against the growing number of auto-ethnographies. In this paper, I address these questions on the basis of four fieldwork experiences of my professional trajectory.