Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

En el primero de mis tres comentarios bordo y profundizo algunas afirmaciones de Gustavo sobre la visibilidad y presencia pública de la antropología actual en México. En el segundo, vinculo esta situación con la transformación en proceso del sistema de ciencia y tecnología, que combina la refuncionalización y mercantilización de la institución universitaria con cambios profundos en el tipo de conocimiento llamado ciencia, y que me parece Gustavo tiene en la mira cuando habla de la desintelectualización actual. El tema del tercer y último comentario retoma una idea suya sobre la ética de la antropología y la analiza de un modo algo diferente.    

The essay presents the general conditions as well as some of the outcomes of three investigations into violent metro-Guadalajara gangs, undertaken in 2013 and 2016, designed to contextualize identity representations of the gang corps on the part of young adults that belong to these street-level groups. Collaborative dialogue is the point of departure, via group interviews, that jointly construct the main ideas here expressed, notably, questions of masculinity, emblems of power, physical appearance and gang loyalty as accords reached in the shared construction of body concepts and their use within gangs. With an understanding that this phenomenon gives rise to constant dangers and aggressions, gang bodies must always clearly enunciate group membership as well as cultural adscriptions, strength for direct physical confrontations, the capacity to protect one’s own kind and, above all, demonstrate what it is to be a man.

The study analyzes gender roles that certain Totonaco-origin men and women who raise coffee in the Zongozotla municipal jurisdiction, in Puebla’s Sierra Norte, take on, as a means of seeing which traditional practices are still being observed as well as to shed light on values and beliefs that have modernized. To reach our goal, we used the participant observation technique and undertook fifteen interviews with Totonaco-speaking women, in the company of their husbands. We interpret the outcomes from a gender-based perspective while respecting indigenous worldviews of all interviewees, women and men alike. We discovered traditional behavior patterns and certain elements that oblige us to re-think gender from first peoples’ perspectives.

The subject of the article is the partnership between Yawanawá (aka Pano) indigenous leaders from the Río Gregorio indigenous jurisdiction, in Acre State, Brazil, and the families of leaders of an urban church, Santo Daime, in Rio de Janeiro. I posit the problem of a partnership formed between different stakeholders, associated with the consumption of rainforest-based medicines, to ideologies of (symbolic and effective) consubstantiality and kinship production. The essay’s goal is to present an historical panorama on the partnership’s constitution as well as foster a discussion of its sociological and cosmological meanings. Data was collected as part of field work at the urban Church of Santo Daime, in Rio de Janeiro, from July 2015 to March 2017, as well as over twenty days in the Río Gregorio indigenous jurisdiction, in July 2016.

This article presents an overview of photography’s use as a methodological resource for scientific work in Mexican anthropology. Three periods dating from the 1840s to the present are emphasized. A first section looks at how early itinerant photographers who came to Mexico created a link to anthropology. A second section reviews three projects that led to the first ethnographic maps of Mexico’s indigenous populations. The third looks at twenty-first-century research that reviews and critiques the multiple forms and nuances this relationship has taken on.

A lo largo de 44 años Juan dedicó sus esfuerzos a la compilación de datos sobre el idioma, la historia oral, el arte sagrado y contemporáneo, así como los rituales del pueblo wixárika. Comenzando con el arte y siguiendo con la defensoría territorial a través de proyectos productivos autónomos, esta labor ha legado un acervo singular sobre la cultura wixárika. Los escritos de Negrín abarcan cuadernos, agendas, borradores múltiples escritos a mano y a máquina, pero también dejó centenares de audios, principalmente conversaciones con los artistas y ancianos kawiterutsiri,1 en donde se profundizan conceptos medulares de la cosmovisión wixárika.

An exhibition entitled Tejer con el hilo de la memoria: puntadas de dignidad en medio de la guerra (Knitting the Threads of Memory: Stitches of Dignity, Surrounded by War) toured Mexico over the course of three months and presented work by a collective of Colombian knitters, all women who had survived experiences of armed conflict. Through knitting they have both recounted their stories and denounced the injustices and violence they have suffered. The show was presented to knitters’ groups in Mexico City and the states of Chiapas and Guerrero; there were concurrent knitting and memory workshops as well as an audiovisual presentation. El hilo de la memoria is a documentary that follows the show’s Mexico tour in a reflection on the links that are woven between collective creation, creativity and the transformative potential of the reality inside spaces we share for knitting and storytelling.

In this video I present conversations with Claudio Oliveira, one of the visitors who came through the UFRGS Social-Sciences course Visual and Image-Based Anthropology students’ exhibition on appreciable ways of living in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Claudio’s images, gaze and conversations are mixed with images from the show. Stories, spaces and time foster circular communication for new resonances among those who see them. I invite you to converse with the images

Within the framework of discussions on multiple visual cultures, I describe self-portraits an indigenous community makes of themselves as well as the selfies its members take twenty years later, now that smartphones have reached their population centers. Based on selections from a 6000-print archive young Huichols assembled, I posit questions regarding visual cultures (in plural) and their relationship to Western and hegemonic culture.

Los problemas que se mencionan en el trabajo [de Gustavo Lins Ribeiro] provienen de cambios en la propia disciplina frente a otros modos de análisis como los estudios culturales, postcoloniales, de género, y de ciencia y tecnología que parecen haberse apropiado de conceptos como el de cultura y una aplicación aparentemente sui generis de la metodología etnográfica, los cuales, en lo que hace al conocimiento público y a las modas intelectuales, parecerían estar en un momento de crecimiento frente al aparente decaimiento de la antropología como disciplina.