Bodies and Otherness in Anthropology as a Practice of Correspondent Observation and Ethnography as Writing to Dwell

Abstract

The text argues that the widespread idea that anthropology takes place in the encounter with otherness and that ethnography as a text is its product stems from the confusion between anthropology and ethnography, as well as from the lack of attention to the bodies in each one of them. The article shows that when conceiving anthropology as a practice of “correspondent observation” (INGOLD, 2017) the problem of otherness — existential condition or discursive result — does not arise. Although it could be thought that this question reappears in the writing of the ethnography, resorting to the author's own research process with brickmakers and electronic engineers in Mexico, four conditions are proposed in the writing so that this does not happen: 1) to make visible the bodies that write ethnography, 2) to recognize that bodies are involved in similar materialization processes, 3) to vindicate the body that reads ethnography, and 4) to move from ethnography-text as a finished object to ethnography as writing to dwell. Ultimately, what is questioned is the belief that the body and the subjectivity of the anthropologist and the ethnographer are given.