Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the interweaving of anthropology and philosophy through particular persons who do not find shelter in collective concepts, such as ethnicity, nationality or society, and find in philosophical consideration a way to deal with their unusual trajectories.

Paper long abstract:

n researching how migrants in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, try new ways of life and create alternatives when facing unexpected situations, a Brazilian black priest, member of one of the Orthodox Greek churches in town, refers to his own particular trajectory of becoming something else he did not expect in terms of western philosophy.

When western philosophy is the ‘informant’´s model in a study conducted by an anthropologist, what happens to anthropology? Does philosophy come to be simply a discourse? Does anthropology miss its comparative landmark and turn out to be, then, a descriptive subject or an honest dialogue?

In common, philosophy and anthropology share at present the concern for creating models of thinking and living from people´s experiences. Anthropology has successfully approached philosophy considering different collective ways of being, such as indigenous cosmologies, as philosophy.

The paper explores other possibility of interweaving anthropology and philosophy, through particular individuals who do not find shelter in collective concepts, such as ethnicity, nationality or society, and find in philosophical consideration a way to deal with their unusual trajectories. Consequently, the paper suggests that this approximation between philosophy and anthropology, made by a particular person, searches for the ‘universalization’ of the person´s experience, namely the creation of an ontology.