WHEN DOES QUALITATIVE RESEARCH BEGIN OR END? IN DEFENSE OF AN ANTI-HANDBOOK OF ETHNOGRAPHY

Abstract

The challenges of social distancing that were imposed by the pandemic times have provided an important moment to discuss the movement between distancing and closeness in ethnography. In order to achieve this aim, this article not work as if it were a handbook of ethnography, but rather, with a kind of anti-handbook. The purpose is present the problems and challenges of ethnographic research. Thus, it discusses, based on different bibliographic references, mainly from Brazilian anthropology, how there are many possibilities of producing distances in relation to the field and to the “natives”. In this way, this produced temporal and spatial distancing creates an exercise in hierarchization, that appears in the way the ethnographer, from the fieldwork to the text, describes a dialectic between proximity and distancing. Therefore, this essay concludes that ethnography, as an innovative and creative proposition in the field of social anthropology, must simultaneously and paradoxically disregard a rigid attachment to theoretical and methodological perspectives and also cultivate a profound intellectual rigor.