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Interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and counter-disciplinarity are the hallmark of cultural studies and qualitative research, as scholars over the past three decades have discussed through extensive self-reflexive inquiry into their own unstable and ever-shifting methods (Denzin and Lincoln, 2018; Dicks et al., 2006: 78; Grossberg, 2010). Building on the interdisciplinary thought of Jacques Rancière and Caroline Levine on the one hand and traditions of participatory action research and activist anthropology on the other, we bring the methods conversation forward by shifting the focus from disciplines to forms and by making a case for aesthetic practice as qualitative research process. In this paper, the question of methods is approached through the action-based Cartonera Publishing Project with editoriales cartoneras in Latin America – community publishers who make low-cost books out of materials recovered from the street in the attempt to democratise and decolonise literary/artistic production – and specifically through our process-oriented, collaborative work with four cartonera publishers in Brazil and Mexico. Guided by the multiple forms of cartonera knowledge production, which are rooted not in academic research but rather in aesthetic practice and community relations, we offer an innovative 'trans-formal' methodological framework, which opens up new pathways for practitioners and researchers to work, think and act across social, cultural and aesthetic forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a democratized account of heterodoxy that draws attention to how heterodoxical discourses may implicitly arise through social interaction. The analysis is based on one rural Brazilian woman's claim that it tastes better to eat beans and rice by using one's fingers. Formerly common in Brazil prior to the 20th century—across identities, regions, and classes—the practice of "eating by hand" was gradually erased from public life, and reconstituted as a mark of non-whiteness, through what Norbert Elias described as a "civilizing process." The woman's claim registers as a heterodoxical response to hierarchized and racialized notions of taste arising from this process of historical erasure. The analysis draws on Pierre Bourdieu's practice theory to situate the woman's claim within a wider field of taste, while engaging with Hannah Arendt's suggestion that aesthetic judgments may implicitly disclose shared and more equal worlds. Whereas Bourdieu's famous account of heterodoxy focuses on leaders, experts, and spokespersons of the dominated skilled in the "work of making explicit," the contribution draws on scholarship in analytic philosophy to argue that critical historical awareness may emerge in what philosophers of language and linguistic anthropologists call pragmatic presuppositions. The heterodoxical pragmatic presuppositions implicit in the woman's claim conjure a notion of semiotic equality, which is disclosed as a defeasible presupposition of the ethnographic situation in which she makes her claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can a material approach to public manifestations contribute to a wider understanding of performative practices and their transformative potential? The article takes two roads in illuminating answers to this question. First, a re-reading of Turner’s work on performance in the light of newer performance theory; secondly, an application of insights from materialist theory in elaborating how subjects are constituted as political and self-objectifying within the performative frame. Two ethnographic examples serve as light illustrations to the overall argument. One is a classical religious procession by The Sisterhood of the Good Death in Bahia, Brazil. The other is the Climate Demonstration at the COP 15 in Copenhagen. Style and aesthetics are discussed, and pointing is introduced as a key phenomenon. Within the performative frame the material subject brings forth the transformative potential of the liminoid in public manifestations. The material subject creates presence and materializes the virtual by pointing to a possible future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]