Decolonizing ethnographies
Decolonizing ethnographies For this Currents section, we have called upon anthropologists across the global South and North in the attempt to mainstream the long overdue issue of decolonizing ethnographies. On…
The reluctant native: Or, decolonial ontologies and epistemic disobedience
The reluctant native: Or, decolonial ontologies and epistemic disobedience Anthropologists, in regular intervals, tend to ask a cardinal question: How do we know what we know? Storms about ethnography and…
Annihilating the “savage slot” from anthropology: Materializing reflexive practices
Annihilating the “savage slot” from anthropology: Materializing reflexive practices Calls to “decolonize” the social sciences have reverberated in academia since at least the 1950s. Anthropology, in particular, has been marked…
Listening to disrupt ethnographic representations
Listening to disrupt ethnographic representations Convinced that ethnography still provides a critical tool for studying and understanding our ever-changing and complex world, I present here a case for approaching ethnographic…
Surveillance, Radicalization, and Prison Change Self-Analysis of an Ethnographic Survey Under Tension
Surveillance, Radicalization, and Prison Change Self-Analysis of an Ethnographic Survey Under Tension Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Ahead of Print. This article is based on a sociological research, combining qualitative interviews…
Clay and earth: Excavating partialities and relations
Clay and earth: Excavating partialities and relations Inspired by the idea of “transculturation,” formulated as a contrastive metaphor and concept by Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s, this article seeks to…
Minhoto counterpoints: On metaphysical pluralism and social emergence
Minhoto counterpoints: On metaphysical pluralism and social emergence In his classic work Contrapunteo cubano, Fernando Ortiz shows how two different plants and the products they yield can be at the…
The intensive image: Transculturation, creativity and presence in the cult of María Lionza
The intensive image: Transculturation, creativity and presence in the cult of María Lionza The cult of María Lionza is an Afro-Latin American religion native to Venezuela which usually involves episodes…
Talking culture—revisited
Talking culture—revisited Go to Source
Talking culture: New boundaries, new rhetorics of exclusion in Europe
Talking culture: New boundaries, new rhetorics of exclusion in Europe In the contemporary debate concerning European integration and the “problem” of Third World immigration no less than in developments in…
“How Will You Give Back?”: On Becoming a Compañera as a Feminist Methodology from the Cracks
“How Will You Give Back?”: On Becoming a Compañera as a Feminist Methodology from the Cracks Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Ahead of Print. Issues of power, inequality, and representation in…
The Power to be Ethical: Controlling Moral Assemblages in Border Militias
The Power to be Ethical: Controlling Moral Assemblages in Border Militias Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Ahead of Print. Every year, hundreds of citizens patrol the Mexican border dressed in camouflage…
Strategies of dealing with the other: Coexistence and exclusion
Strategies of dealing with the other: Coexistence and exclusion The specific character of Ortiz’s theory of transculturation is dependent on the Cuban context in which, and for which, it was…
True brujos and imitators: A reading of Fernando Ortiz’s Los negros brujos (1906)
True brujos and imitators: A reading of Fernando Ortiz’s Los negros brujos (1906) This article offers a reading of Ortiz’s first book, Los negros brujos (). By following the theme…
The fetishes of Fernando Ortiz
The fetishes of Fernando Ortiz A materialistic way to account for the continuities and discontinuities of the extended work of Cuban researcher, writer, and politician Fernando Ortiz, is to follow…
The lexicographic studies of Fernando Ortiz Fernández
The lexicographic studies of Fernando Ortiz Fernández This article analyzes the lexicographical studies undertaken by the distinguished Cuban anthropologist and ethnologist Fernando Ortiz Fernández concerning the Spanish spoken in Cuba.…
The legacy of Ortiz’s Yorubization of Lucumí: Translation as transculturation
The legacy of Ortiz’s Yorubization of Lucumí: Translation as transculturation The contemporary retranslation and circulation of Lucumí songs for the orishas (deities) among devotees and scholars in Cuba inadvertently reproduces…
Ethnographic stews: Decennial reflections
Ethnographic stews: Decennial reflections Go to Source
Caribbean and Mediterranean counterpoints and transculturations
Caribbean and Mediterranean counterpoints and transculturations Probing the possibilities for transregional anthropological scholarship in light of the Cuban polymath Fernando Ortiz’s prolific work, this introduction surveys the development of Mediterraneanist…
Fernando Ortiz (and the spiritists?) in the Balearic Islands and Catalonia
Fernando Ortiz (and the spiritists?) in the Balearic Islands and Catalonia This article explores the social framework of spiritism in the Balearic Islands and Catalonia during the time Fernando Ortiz…