Field Aporias in Minho (Portugal)

• Autor(a) principal: Pina-Cabral, Joao
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/56402
• topic: aporia; community; company; empathy; fieldwork; Portugal

Basing itself in the three aspects of the world that Kant proposed (as source, as domain and as limit), this article argues that the ethnographic gesture is correspondingly marked by three registers of encounter: empathy, company, community. Taking recourse to an ethnographic vignette about an encounter with a man on a bike, it explores the sense of community that marked my ethnographic presence in Alto Minho (northwest Portugal) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The article proposes that ethnography depends on the determination of a ‘field’ for fieldwork and that this is aided by the identification of field aporias – that is, challenges to interpretation that both stop the ethnographer in her tracks, engaging the need for further determination, and provide momentum to the ethnographic narrative.