THE PERSISTENCE OF THE METHOD OR A HUNDRED YEARS OF MISUNDERSTANDINGS?

Abstract

This article aims to raise some questions concerning the method and fieldwork in Anthropology. Motivated by the celebration of Malinowski’s centennial work, which redefined parameters and conceptual and methodological approaches, we recover ethnographic accounts that bring to the debate some analytical proposals developed by contemporary authors who dealt with the problem of translation, mobilizing the notions of sociability, common sense and “controlled equivocation”. Guided by the misunderstandings inherent in all communication, which through different differences produce signification, we transit through different ethnographic landscapes in the demonstration of the vitality of a discipline that defines itself more by its method than by its object. This method has in the Argonauts of the Western Pacific a reinvigorated inspiration.