Search

This paper is an invitation to reflect on the importance eroticism may have in the different stages of anthropological work (gathering information, analysis, writing, presenting to an audience…), starting from a definition of eroticism as potential and creative force, which includes but not be limited to the sexual sense of the term; an approach that may serve to capture the dynamic, sensorial intensity of both pleasant and unpleasant human experiences. In order to do so, I turn to classic texts by Audre Lorde, Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari and Georges Bataille as well as current authors such as Maria Livia Alga, Alba Barbé, Adriana Guzmán and Elisa Lipkau. But, above all, I take inspiration from Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation”, published originally in 1966 and applied to art criticism. Following a brief revision of anthropological research in the field of sexuality, I address different questions relating to importance of commitment and erotic affectation in ethnography, developed above all in certain fields such as visual anthropology and feminist anthropology. One question guides my entire reflection: What would an erotics of anthropological research be and in what sense could that be of use? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to show the metonymical identification that exists between the male body and the Basque community and how this identification provokes a systematic exclusion of women from the spaces where cultural protagonism is displayed. To do so, it will examine how protagonism is performed in the sport of hand pelota, a sport in which the most popular modality is exclusively male and which has been central to shaping the Basque imaginary. The game of pelota has shaped many of the main squares in Basque villages and towns, as well as the Basque bodies placed in them. The place where pelota is played, the fronton, is the space used by the Basque community to hold their most significant events. And Pelota is the prototypical game played in that space. By deciphering the chain of signifiers generates in the game, it is possible to understand the imaginary which prevent women from becoming protagonists in the context of Basque cultural representation. The paper tells the story of one of them, the Navarrese pelota player Maite Ruiz de Larramendi, forced to give up pelota when she was a child, and attempts to provide keys for the interpretation of other cases beyond its ethnographic boundaries, such as the well-known case of the South African athlete Caster Semenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is focused on artistic creation, usually understood as transitivity, and separated from the idea of religious creation. Yet the artistic creation also involves a role as a believer, instead of a creator. The artist is born as a result of the experience of otherness, but as a consequence of an own belief. In a second stage, this birth is also tied to a search, driving the artist to the marginality, taking distance from the established social beliefs. In the case of music, that marginality is experienced in the pain, and gives way to hope. That is why pain and glory melt in the work of singers and composers, and the coincidence of these opposed feelings originates a powerful semantic force. This phenomenon is analyzed in the paper by the use of some examples of the work of musicians, taken from many different kinds of music and time periods: Juanito Valderrama, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Camarón, Antonio Vega or Amy Winehouse, among other examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance of affectivity in the human sciences implies not only the emergence of a new analytic field about an important aspect of social activity, but a reflection on the modalities of knowledge in these disciplines. In fact, to propose the affective dimension as an analytic object has consequences on how to approach knowledge, because the very existence of an affective dimension obliges to rethink the cognitive dimension inherent in the act of knowledge. In this paper I propose some methodological elements for reflection derived from these ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]