Paper short abstract:

In Lima, fog catchers become speculative devices that render conceivable a series of relations to residents in the urban periphery. I draw on two different encounters with the limits of fog capture to propose an ethnographic approach that attends to limitations heuristically and experimentally.

Paper long abstract:

Often a disappointing micro-alternative to large-scale water infrastructure supply, fog catchers have nonetheless served as experimental devices that elicit a series of relations to residents in the urban periphery in Lima. In this paper, I draw on two different encounters with the limits of fog capture to suggest an ethnographic approach that attends to limitations heuristically. My first case recounts how what my interlocutors described as a failed fog capture project foregrounded connections between ground touching clouds and airborne pollution, which ultimately helped envisaging the reconfiguration of relations between the city’s margin and the Peruvian state. A second example shows how a similar initiative instead exceeded expectations about the volumes of water suspended in the air. As such, it instigated a science fictional impulse to trace connections between the atmospheric, vegetation, and the underground, thus rendering conceivable a set of relations that together constituted the landscape as an interconnected ecosystem. In both instances, fog catchers turned into speculative devices for imagining different urban political ecologies. Analogous to framings of the fieldsite as a device to redirect the ethnographer’s questions, aims, and intentions, fog capture effected a lure that brought something unexpected into view and changed the course of events. Against the background of these examples, the approach proposed in this paper not only acknowledges the many exclusions inherent in anthropological inquiry, but taps into limitation as that which might allow for the field to symmetrically or laterally bear upon ethnographic creativity and experimentation.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I ponder the meanings implicit to an Ayoreo (a Zamucoan speaking group living in Paraguayan Chaco) notion of ‘comparison’ through the idiom of what they describe as -acãrájai and the sets of transformations it enacts.

Paper long abstract:

Social anthropologists have long appreciated the notion of comparison as an important conceptual tool in the discipline. In this paper I ponder the meanings implicit to an Ayoreo (a Zamucoan speaking group living in Paraguayan Chaco) notion of ‘comparison’ through the idiom of what they describe as -acãrájai and the sets of transformations it enacts. In proposing that Ayoreo ontology is inherently comparative, the aim of this article is not just to provide an ethnographic account of different contexts of Ayoreo lived world, be that as it may, but also to optimistically present a daunting task to an anthropological way of thinking about the notion of comparison. By addressing a question on how we can experience ethnographically how the differences compared by Ayoreo people are themselves differently comparing and redefining everything as their variants, I attempt to list similarities and dissimilarities between the concept of -acãrájai and the anthropological notion of comparison and they appeared to me through my own comparative/ethnographic apparatus and to raise awareness of misunderstandings between them, to redefine our own way of making identities and differences through the notion of comparison by defining it by its diferential relations to the notion of -acãrájai. For it, this paper examines how one intellectual object twists the other and how the background from which each one of them emerge are placed on the same footing, in a manner that -acãrájai and comparison are reciprocally constitutive of each other.

Paper short abstract:

As a result of an ethnography with Ignatian Catholics, I radicalize some of the methodological proposals framed within the ontological turn. I test the limitations and possibilities of the production of anthropological knowledge under modalities such as radical participation and being affected.

Paper long abstract:

Recently, in the context of a meeting of the research project to which I belong, I presented my position of radical participation in a context of Ignatian spirituality. In this proposal of ontography, following Holbraad and Pedersen (2017), I try to deepen and radicalize those anthropological demands, emerging a series of questions that my own colleagues highlighted: What does it mean and how do we conceive a radical participation, while maintaining reflexivity? How do we deal with our ontological assumptions in that methodological work of abandonment and letting ourselves being affected? To what extent does our arrival baggage limit the conceptualization and symmetrical production of knowledge? How do we achieve that radical experimentation through our own body/mind/spirit without suspending our academic belief system?

These are the questions I try to answer in my ethnography. For now I am betting on total immersion, trying to incorporate the practices-concepts on which the experience of God's presence is built, around the so-called Itineraries of God's Experience. And it happens that, in the moments when I stop to reflect on the path I have walked, I feel that I lose that potential that radical participation brings to me, at the risk of being trapped in it.

Paper short abstract:

Insights from applied anthropological research in a Czech Catholic diocese. We analyse the positions of observers and observed in participatory design of research as the positions of power and helplessness, reflecting on theory production as empowerment.

Paper long abstract:

In the Czech Republic, known as the "most atheist country in Europe", it is not "normal" to belong to the Church. It requires a legitimation on personal, social, and political levels. Especially now, a few years after the so-called restitution law returned a considerable amount of property and financial means to churches (against the will of the majority of society) to "mitigate the damages" caused by the communist regime. In this situation, two years ago, we started an applied anthropological project in cooperation with one of the Czech dioceses. Our research team, consisting of members and non-members of the Church, explores the participation of different actors in the Czech Roman Catholic Church's decision-making processes while also seeking to support such efforts. We are also looking for ways in which a church can become more meaningfully involved in secular society. In the participatory design of the research, we are both observers and observed. It is more the ascribed power to change something and intervene at the powerful positions in the church or society, which sometimes pushes us to observers' position. It is often the anthropological theory that empowers us to return to the field with some applied output. In this paper, we want to analyse the dialectics between our ethnographic openness (achievable only when acting not as pure ethnographers but also as engaged actors in the studied topic) in the field and the production of theory, between immersion, distance, and re-immersion.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I deal with some particularities of my epistemological colleagues in my fieldwork: an artivist collective, with its own philosophy and research method. The particularity of their activism lies in their ironic conception of reality. How their practice speaks of ours?

Paper long abstract:

I consider I deal with epistemological colleagues in my fieldwork, but not only because they are a extremely reflexive collective (that’s usual) also because they do social experiments in the public space. They use performative actions to introduce a calculated element (like a “semiotic bomb”) through the flow of events and they observe and record the reactions. Later, they upload the action through internet ("the communicative action"). That is the second part of the experiment which produce even more reactions among a chosen audience. Their actions attempt to challenge dogmatic points of view in society. These points have usually elements of a contradiction or an absurd, and their work often consist just to stretching those elements up to the limit. They only do what other people could be done, that’s the “realistic” limit they use. In their hands, irony works as a weapon against dogma, but at the same time irony prevents them from their own dogma. In that sense, irony appears as a powerful reflexive tool working in both directions: towards the observed subjects and the observant subjects. Moreover, irony works mediating the activist face of the collective and the philosophical or analytical one. There is a tension here. Irony and critical thinking work on doubt, while doubt becomes ambiguity in the field of political action, what brings them several troubles and haters. With all this in mind, I will give some examples of these actions and consider how this experience teach us something about anthropology and militancy.