Historical Anthropology

Los ensayos que integran el libro que el lector tiene entre sus manos se plantean como objetivo contribuir a desentrañar las ambiguas relaciones existentes entre demonología cristiana y cultura folklórica en un escenario específico –España y el mundo ibérico- y en un período determinado –la modernidad clásica. Para ello, la primera parte de Strix Hispanica se dedica al análisis de la historiografía de la caza de brujas europea, manteniendo como hilo conductor los debates en torno a la compleja mitología del sabbat. La segunda parte incluye una serie de estudios de caso en torno a dos figuras paradigmáticas del folklore ibérico tradicional: la bruja y el saludador. A poco que el especialista se aboca al análisis del complejo de la bruja peninsular detecta una superposición idiosincrásica de mitologemas que pone a prueba las más elaboradas herramientas teóricas y metodológicas al alcance de los historiadores profesionales. En efecto, el problema de la profunda originalidad del estereotipo de la bruja ibérica no puede abordarse sin recurrir al apoyo de otras disciplinas, llamadas a cubrir las lagunas, los silencios, que la historia académica no puede, no osa interpelar. El saludador, por su parte, es una de las figuras más irreductiblemente originales del folklore vernáculo. Aún cuando los saludadores no integraron de manera permanente el sistema de la brujería popular española, durante gran parte de la Edad Moderna hicieron de la detección de brujas y de la neutralización de maleficia una de sus actividades más lucrativas -más allá de su convencional virtud para curar la hidrofobia y de su espectacular dominio sobre el fuego. El complejo del saludador constituye un tema particularmente apropiado para encarar el estudio de las interacciones entre demonología erudita y cultura local, pues sus trazos específicos exigieron hasta sus mismísimos límites a los más sofisticados dispositivos diseñados por la teología tardo-escolástica.

Published as " When is a Haida Sphinx: Thinking about Law with Things " (2017) Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 68:3 391-402.
The ‘law and . . .’ field of legal scholarship verges on consensus about the co-constitution between law and nearly everything else. Co-constitution raises questions about how to differentiate law from other things. The contemporary turn from words towards the material brings fresh perspective on these questions by suggesting that law’s differentiation is fabricated through materiality. This article considers whether and how material techniques that differentiate law might fabricate the difference of a thing not commonly understood by Western law as law. Its focus is an object created in Haida Gwaii in the late nineteenth century and now displayed in the British Museum. It shows that while techniques common to Western law differentiate this thing, competing materialities are also at work. Furthermore, jurisdictional choices are embedded in the fabrication of this thing’s difference. Understanding law as differentiated materially does not escape the social and jurisdictional forces that underpin how the matter of law comes to matter.

The present study scrutinizes the outlawry and outlaws that appear in the Icelandic Family Sagas. It provides a thorough description about outlawry on the basis of extant law and saga texts as well as an analysis of referential connotations attached to it. The concept of outlawry was fundamental for the medieval Icelanders conceptions of their past. Indeed, understanding outlawry is essential for understanding many of the Family Sagas. Outlaws appear in saga texts in significant roles.

The Icelandic Family Sagas comprise a group of prose narratives that were written down in the 13th and 14th century Iceland. They are based on events and personae that belong to the 10th century Iceland. These narratives introduce many outlaws, out of which some 75 are named.

The Family Sagas are studied here as one corpus and special emphasis is given to those narrative features that repetitively appear in connection with outlawry and the outlaw characters. Therefore, the eventual objects of this study are the medieval Icelanders general conceptions of the historical outlawry as well as the variations of these conceptions throughout the period of saga writing. The medieval Icelanders general conceptions about the 10th 11th century, which are reflected in the Family Sagas, are here referred to as the Saga World. The Saga World is the historically based taleworld to which all of the Family Sagas refer.

The medieval law texts, which were derived from centuries old legislative traditions, reveal that outlawry meant banishing from the society and being denied all help, and that the outlawed person lost the protection of the law. In practice, outlawry was a death sentence.

However, outlaws occupy many differing roles in the saga narratives even in connection with recurrent narrative motifs. These roles reflect the social and spatial structures of the Saga World. The inspection of outlawry within these structures reveals that the definition of outlawry as it appears in the law texts is insufficient for understanding outlawry in the saga texts.

The social and spatial structures also provide a basis for the connotations of outlawry. In this study, these connotations are inspected primarily from the referential connections between outlawry in the Family Sagas and corresponding phenomena in other concurrent literature. This is done by studying the implementations of the basic elements of outlawry in the Family Sagas marginalization, banishing, rejection and solitariness within other literary genres and the taleworlds to which they refer. It is argued that these taleworlds reflect the same ideas that were associated with outlawry in the Family Sagas albeit in different forms and that these different forms reciprocally contributed to the conceptions of outlawry.

The variety of denotations and connotations of outlawry that is visible in the medieval Icelandic texts reflects the ambiguity of outlawry in the Family Sagas. This ambiguity may shed light to questions such as why an outlaw could be perceived as a hero in a literary genre that predominantly promoted law and order and why the same outlaw could be perceived as a villain on another occasion.

Analizar la brujería tradicional húngara en clave de chamanismo, no es tan desacertado (Aunque no soy fan de Eliade) considerando que el pueblo Magiar fue uno de los grupos étnicos túrquicos seguidores del Tengri que acompañaron a los hunos de Atila en sus bonitas aventuras europeas... Y el trabajo es muy fino. Por los que se le perdona el termino paraguas universalista de "chamán" pues tiene sus raíces en los pueblos túrquicos altaicos (siberianos y mongoles) de los cuales se supone que los húngaros actuales son descendientes.
Muy interesante la reflexión que hace sobre las concepciones de interioridad tradicionales del pueblo húngaro y balcánico medieval y precristiano... Eso del doble, eso de la sombra... Me suena a la Sierra Mazateca, seguro se lo copiaron los húngaros a los mazatecos, je. (es broma)

Powerful historical artefacts vitalize their potential agencies in specific historical moments and cause fractures in our perspectives. In this thesis, I argue that objects' power can be examined by looking at their supernatural, political, cultural, practical, and economic agencies. The thesis is based on a case study of looting in Turkey and archival research on nineteenth-century travelogues of Asia Minor. Rituals of looting attest to the supernatural agency. Rituals challenge the common perception of time and space. The contradictions between European travelers' approach to and the Ottoman locals' interpretations of historical artefacts signify objects' cultural agency. Locals' multitemporal framing of antiquities and travelers' perception of time as linear has resulted in an epistemic antinomy that defined the Ottoman experience of modernity from below. Such encounters in the Mediterranean conjuncture often necessitated the Ottoman state to fill in the power gap. I argue that this involvement sutured the antiquities' political agency in designing the Ottoman's modern statecraft and perception of cultural heritage. Besides these three agencies, antiquities have a practical agency that locals attached to their everyday lives. The economic agency of antiquities is relevant in the global market of the illicit antiquities trade. In the sphere of the antiquities market, the exchange value subsumes the antiquities' other agencies. Through in-depth case studies from Laodicea in Turkey to Heraklion in Crete, the thesis demonstrates how artefacts' times have undergone singularization. As their historical and social context unfolded, the shared sense of space within eclectic temporality has come to a halt. I contend that attempts to singularize the past narrow the culturally effective possibilities of conviviality between diverse social groups. The thesis argues that archaeologists, heritage scholars, and policymakers can contribute to the culturally viable and socially equitable ways to organize cultural heritage, should a holistic analysis, involving all the five types of agencies, be applied to the cases of looting of antiquities.

‘Shamanism’ is a problematic and contested concept. After Westerners first heard the term in Siberia at the end of the seventeenth century, it rapidly acquired a remarkable range of meanings in different contexts. Theologians saw shamans as sidekicks of the devil, enlightenment thinkers considered them as mentally ill or retarded. From the eighteenth century onwards, the Romantic image of the shaman as an artistically gifted mystic became fashionable, whereas nineteenth-century folklorists, in turn, used the term ‘shamanism’ in nationalist quests for the essence of the Volksgeist of their nation. Twentieth-century psychologists identified shamans both as schizophrenics and as primal therapists. During the 1960s shamans came to be perceived as psychonauts who used hallucinogens to gain access to the divine essence of life.
During the 1970s an American anthropologist created workshops that, he claimed, were based on universal shamanic principles and practices. Through so-called archaic techniques his students could get in touch with the healing forces of nature. Contemporary forms of shamanism present themselves as countercultural, but a historical-sociological interpretation suggests that it is no coincidence that shamanism especially gained popularity at the time that neoliberal capitalism became dominant. Neoliberalisation disempowered people over their working lives and forced them to exert self-authority and make choices in their lives. Contemporary shamanic practices are also focused on self-authority, can be consumed in a free market and offer opportunities for empowerment. Instead of changing society, however, contemporary Western shamanism contributes to structure the structures it claims to resist.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

This most recent edition of the bibliography contains almost 21,200 titles in English (64%) and French (36%), with an introductory section on historiography. It deals with every aspect of Italian history and culture from the Late Renaissance to the French Revolution.

“Wanderings Beyond Codification and Desire,” in Anthrohistory. Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline. Edward Murphy, Chandra D. Bhimull, Fernando Coronil, Monica Eileen Patterson and Julie Skurski eds. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2011.

Die Vielgestaltigkeit des menschlichen Körpers und die Wandlungen, denen er im Laufe eines Lebens unterworfen sein kann, bilden den Ausgangspunkt der Disability History, die die historische Bedingtheit dieser Phänomene systematisch auf gesellschaftlich-kultureller Ebene erforscht. Die Arbeit verbindet diese innovative Forschungsrichtung mit der historischen Selbstzeugnisforschung: Untersucht werden Texte und Bilder, die die körperliche Verfasstheit als Teil alltäglicher Existenz thematisieren. Dazu gehören Lebensbeschreibungen, Haus- und Familienbücher, Kalendarien, Diarien, Rechnungs- und Haushaltsbücher sowie Briefe. Auf diese Weise rücken Aufzeichnungspraktiken, Kategorisierungs- und Benennungsfragen in den Blick. Zugleich werden die fließenden Übergänge zwischen ›Gesundheit‹ und ›Krankheit‹, ›Funktionsfähigkeit‹ und ›Untauglichkeit‹ deutlich. Die Studie zeigt die differenzierten Erwartungen, Haltungen und Inszenierungen auf, die sich mit dem ›gebrechlichen‹ Körper innerhalb bestimmter sozialer Gruppen verbanden und diesen als Teil der familiären Gedächtniskultur festschrieben.
Disability History versteht sich als eine neue, umfassende Forschungsperspektive, die nicht auf die Erforschung eines Teilgebiets begrenzt ist, sondern den Blick auf das soziale und kulturelle Ganze richtet. Die Arbeit stellt einen weiteren Baustein zu diesem Unternehmen dar.

Beginning in the early 1950s there were tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese who chose to ‘return’ to the People’s Republic of China (prc). Until fairly recently, little attention has been given to the approximately 600,000 ethnic Chinese who chose to immigrate to China from locations throughout Southeast Asia, as well as further afield in the first few decades after the founding of the PRC. There were many factors influencing their migration to a country that many had never stepped foot on. However, it is clear that the Chinese state made a concerted attempt to rally the support (capital and immigration) of overseas Chinese communities. Many of the returnees were resettled on one of dozens of ‘Overseas Chinese Farms’ (huaqiao nongchang) scattered throughout the provinces of southern China. Outside of China they were considered ‘Chinese’ and foreign, juxtaposed against the local or ‘indigenous’ identities that had taken shape in
tandem with the independence of former colonies in Southeast Asia and the rise of modern nationalism. Upon their ‘return’ to what was, for many, an imagined ancestral homeland — a country many of them had never seen — they were confronted with a
different type of discrimination and suspicion than they faced ‘abroad’. This was despite, and in some cases because of, certain favorable policies enacted by the party state to assist in their relocation and assimilation into society. Ironically, some of the same policies that sought to gradually assimilate them into Chinese society actually reinforced their position as ‘permanent outsiders’: the creation of an official ‘huaqiao’ legal status;
institutionalized segregation in the form of huaqiao nongchang, huaqiao villages, and huaqiao schools; and a resultant pariah status that did not begin to recede until after the reforms of the late 1970s. While the concept of ‘huaqiao’ (overseas Chinese sojourners) was falling out of use among Chinese communities abroad, the word was taking on a new meaning in the prc, both for the Chinese party state, and for those who would come to self-identify as huaqiao/guiqiao.

Death march in 1873 in the town of Detva and its surrounding area
leaving behind a real trigger. For the whole year have died in the
parish of up to 998 people, which was three times the average number
of dead people per year in the decade, said a total of one tenth of the entire Detva‘s population. In this "memorable" year thus significantly
dominated the number of dead over the birth (468). Significantly,
although on the other hand, a short demographic crisis essentially
recorded throughout Hungary.
Abrupt population declined and to return to its original
staffing levels needed to five years. After 1873, the territory of
Slovakia emerged in a devastating wave of smallpox, cough and
cholera, which history called epidemic. Smaller its manifestations
Although they appeared until the First World War, but with the
exception of Czarist Russia on the European continent had
pronounced fatal.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE RENAISSANCE MONSTER STUDIES: HYBRID BEINGS AND OTHER CREATURES
Abstract: The views on essence and causes of hybrid, human-animal, monsters’ birth prevailing in academic circles of the West in the 16th – first half of 17th Cс. are explored on a vast material of primary works in medicine, natural philosophy and natural history. Understanding the
monstrous as the other in relation to the human the author considers these spheres as cultural constructs. Thus an analysis of the Renaissance conceptions in the field of Monster Studies sheds light on shady sides of the contemporaneous anthropology. It gets clear,
in particular, that a) there was a realm of constant species of hybrid beings stretching between the human and the animal domains; b) essential causes of hybrid individuals’ birth were based on acceptance of such possibilities as conception via copulating with animals and production of physical effects on a fetus by power of mother’s imagination; c) evidence of natural and significance of divine causes of individual monsters’ appearance usually were thought to be
inversely proportional while these causes themselves – as mutually complementary. Eliminating of those and related notions completed in the Enlightenment caused decline of Renaissance “monstrology” as well as a revision of fundamental presumptions on which the prior anthropology had rested.

На материале первостепенных медицинских, натурфилософских и природоведческих трактатов в статье исследуются воззрения на сущность и причины появления гибридных, «человеко-животных», монстров, доминировавшие в учёных кругах Западной Европы XVI – первой половины XVII вв. Понимая монструозное как иное по отношению к человеческому, автор рассматривает эти сферы в качестве взаимосвязанных культурных конструктов. Таким образом, анализ монстроведческих концепций проливает свет на теневые стороны ренессансной антропологии. В частности, выясняется, что а) в основе последней лежало представление о том, что между человеческой и животной областями пролегает сфера существ переходных видов; б) основные причины рождения гибридных индивидов связывались с признанием таких возможностей, как зачатие при скотоложстве и действие на плод пластической силы воображения матери; в) очевидность естественных причин и значимость божественной причины
возникновения индивидуальных монстров обычно считались обратно пропорциональными, тогда как сами эти причины – скорее дополняющими друг друга. Устранение этих и связанных с ними воззрений, завершившееся в эпоху Просвещения, произвело
разрушение ренессансного монстроведения и вызвало ревизию фундаментальных презумпций, на которых покоилась прежняя антропология.

The aim of this paper is to situate the Sardinian village within the flux of contemporary social transformations that stand poised to redefine it. Specifically, it examines the highland village of Orgosolo, understanding it as a site that concentrates a clear set of cultural self-definitions that stand opposed to perceptions of life beyond the locality. A key element of local discourse is a view of the collective historical experience that
underscores the social, political, and cultural marginality of rural life in central Sardinia, and associates the village with a dissident identity that is reaffirmed by a social memory of violence suffered at the hand of powerful outsiders from Antiquity onwards. Yet, this perspective on the locality is not the sole one, and as such the village presents a contested site where the normative traditionalist vision holds little traction among an ascendant generation of urban-oriented youth who, for their part, reject the past and any definition of village identity explicitly associated with it.

Open access:  http://sh.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1092923&dswid=-7744

After falling under the power of the Russian Crown, the Northern Black Sea steppe from the end of eighteenth century crystallized as the Russian government’s prime venue for socioeconomic and sociocultural reinvention and colonization. Vast ethnic, sociocultural and even ecological changes followed.  Present study is preoccupied with the marriage of the immigrant population from the German lands who came to the region in the course of its state orchestrated colonization, and was officially categorized as “German colonists.” The book illuminates the multiple ways in which marriage and household formation among the colonists was instrumentalized by the imperial politics in the Northern Black Sea steppe, and conditioned by socioeconomic rationality of its colonization. Marriage formation and dissolution among the colonists were gradually absorbed into the competencies of the colonial vertical power. Intending to control colonist marriage and household formation through the introduced marriage regime, the Russian government and its regional representatives lacked the actual means to exert this control at the local level. On the ground, however, imperial politics was mediated by the people it targeted, and by the functionaries tasked with its implementation. As the study reveals, the paramount importance was given to functional households and sustainable farms based on non-conflictual relations between parties. Situated on the crossroads of state, church, community, and personal interests, colonist marriage engendered clashes between secular and ecclesiastical bodies over the supremacy over it. The interplay of colonization as politics, and colonization as an imperial situation with respect to the marriage of the German colonists is explored in this book by concentrating on both norms and practices. Another important consideration is the ways gender and colonization constructed and determined one another reciprocally, both in legal norms and in actual practices. Secret divorces and unauthorized marriages, open and hidden defiance, imitations and unruliness, refashioning of rituals and discourses, and desertions – a number of strategies and performances which challenged and negotiated the marriage regime in the region, were scholarly examined for the first time in this book.

One of four known ancient Maya books, the Grolier Codex depicts different manifestations of Venus; the column of glyphs on the left of each panel records days in a 104-year Venus almanac. These plaster-coated bark-paper pages, carbon-dated to the 13th century, represent only half of the 20-page original. This article is an excerpt of pages 98-99 from the March 1990 National Geographic Magazine article "America's Ancient Skywatchers" by John B. Carlson with a numbered photographic arrangement of the Grolier Codex depicting the author's discovery that Codex pages 10 and 11 are actually two parts of the same "page 10".  Carlson clarifies the identities of Venus deities depicted in the Grolier Codex from a comparison of images from the Cacaxtla murals and links the images of the Grolier Codex with ancient Maya astronomically timed ritual warfare and sacrifice. (Grolier Codex photographs: Enrico Ferorelli; Mural photograph: Bob Sacha)

This article has been posted on Academia.edu as part of the Grolier Codex Project of the Center for Archaeoastronomy under the directorship of John B. Carlson, Ph.D.  The Grolier Codex Project seeks to further advance the study of the Maya Grolier Codex.

The situation at the turn of the century has largely “fueled” interest in studying the myths of collective memory, which support the claims of one or another community for high status, material, territorial, political and other advantages in the present and are based on stereotyping procedures. Today, in historiography (following sociology and anthropology), the problem of studying the role of memory in the historical construction of collective identity has come to the fore. Historical memory is always mobilized and updated in difficult periods of the life of a nation, society or any social group, when they face new difficult tasks or a real threat to their very existence. In this regard, there is a need for analysis of the formation of individual historical myths, their existence, marginalization or re-actualization in the everyday historical consciousness, their use and ideological reappraisal, including successive or competing narratives of national history. Conflicting identity narratives are an effective tool for mobilizing the masses around political programs. It is known that the struggle for political leadership often manifests itself as a rivalry between different versions of historical memory, as a dispute over which episodes of history a nation should be proud or ashamed of. Historical myths, built on the opposition of “us” and “others”, represent the reverse side of social myth, which serves as a condition for the integration and reduction of internal conflict of society based on rejection, foreignness of the “alien”. The conflicting historical memory aims to concentrate the attention of society on the image of the enemy, distracting from pressing problems and obscuring the real needs with the imaginary, while the spread of myths of a destructive orientation creates only a temporary effect of rallying and mobilizing society, provoking internal conflicts. The myths of historical memory can also serve as a motivation for external conflicts. In connection with the foregoing, the question arises about the prospects of the problems of historical memory in conflict resolution. The study of the images of social conflicts and crises of different eras preserved in historical memory involves an important, but only one of the possible conflictological perspectives. In another, yet unopened, but very promising perspective, we should talk about exploring the role of particular versions of historical memory in the consciousness and behavioral strategies of its individual and social carriers. Such research optics allows revealing the own logic of behavior of participants in social interaction, including their behavior in a conflict situation, and, thus, giving a new interpretation of these situations through the prism of cultural ideas, beliefs, emotions, values, ideals of historical actors.

This is the student work (later reviewd and published) of an Seminaire containing the making of an remembrance site in an Hamburg district called "Hammerbrook" (which former structures were destroyed during the WWII bombing and wasn't rebuild in that form). - This particular work is the first of three, which consider the history of this district in cases of the social-political-history and the perceiption of it's "undergoing" due the "firestorm" 1943. The second paper focusses the social-politically circumstances of this former left-wing (socialdemocrat & communist) district due the Weimar Republic and early stage of the Third Reich times.

The early ethnological works of Alfred Métraux are analysed bearing in mind his first fieldwork trip to the Chiriguano, in 1929. The paper discusses personal, academic and professional features of Métraux’s ethnological experience, the nature of the 1929 trip and his concrete relationships with the Chiriguano groups and individuals. Next, we analyse his ideas on material culture as a privileged means of understanding the synthesis of Andean, Chaco and Amazonian cultural influences. Finally, the dilemmas and limitations of his analytical approach regarding Créole cultural influence and social and cultural change are discussed. [Key words: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, material culture, change.]
Se analiza la etnología temprana de Alfred Métraux a la luz de su primer viaje de campo a los chiriguanos, en 1929. Se discute el perfil personal, académico y profesional de Métraux, las peculiaridades de su trabajo de campo en 1929 y sus relaciones concretas con los indígenas chiriguanos en el terreno. Se examinan luego sus ideas sobre la cultura material como campo experimental privilegiado para rastrear procesos de síntesis de influencias culturales andinas, chaqueñas y amazónicas, así también sus dilemas y límites a la hora de interpretar el factor de la influencia criolla y el proceso de cambio social y cultural en un sentido amplio. [Palabras clave: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, cultura material, cambio.]

Na São Paulo de finais do século XIX, a chegada da ferrovia, dos bondes, da iluminação pública urbana e de outras benfeitorias, anunciavam a modernização trazida pelo crescimento econômico. É neste cenário que Fraya Frehse propõe-nos um passeio fictício pela cidade, ao longo do qual procura desvendar a modernidade que se instalava e suas formas de coexistência com os aspectos tradicionais. Nesse passeio, a antropóloga parte de notícias publicadas em jornais, como “A Província de São Paulo”, “Correio Paulistano” e “Diário de São Paulo”, editoriais jornalísticos, crônicas e cartas, atas da Câmara, fotos de Militão e charges de Agostini, entre outros, o que lhe permite identificar os conflitos existentes no espaço das ruas, onde novas formas de sociabilidade se instauravam. Lado a lado com os transeuntes, que se manifestam sobre seu dia-a-dia nas ruas, a autora nos conduz pela São Paulo das décadas de 1870 e 1880, com o objetivo de compreender antropologicamente a história urbana.

Until 1993 there were conducted first excavations in what promised to be the site of one of the most important buildings of Petra, the stunning capital of the Nabataean kingdom. Its construction, whose initiation century BC, several changes, reconstructions and landslides along its more than five hundred years of operation. But despite this still unknown for certain functions for which it was designed and that, regardless of the construction elements, materials have been located just still less inscriptions that shed some light on a mystery that will try here exhibit various theories that enable closer to resolution.

Resumen.
En este trabajo, se presenta una reflexión teórica en torno a los retos metodológicos
en el estudio de sociedades donde la diferencia étnica y cultural es la condición
intrínseca y donde diferentes lógicas de transformación coexisten de manera tensa,
contradictoria y mutuamente constitutiva. El argumento central gira en torno a la
necesidad de que la mirada histórica se distancie de sus propios esquemas del
cambio, a fin de aproximarse a contextos donde la variabilidad cultural es simultánea
en el tiempo y en el espacio. Se hará énfasis sobre la mirada de la múltiple alteridad
hacia el mundo del analista, la variación en el tiempo, las diferencias de otros
tiempos y otros espacios y las multiplicidades culturales solapadas en los mismos tiempos y espacios. Asimismo, se argumentará en pro de la relevancia de las
relaciones mutuamente dependientes, pero con horizontes contradictorios de estos
universos multiculturales, a fin de superar los obstáculos epistemológicos de la
Historia Unilineal.
Palabras clave: miradas analíticas, crítica cultural, sociedades multiétnicas

Abstract.
This article presents a theoretical reflection around the methodological challenges in
the study of societies where ethnic and cultural differences are intrinsic conditions,
and where different logics of transformation coexist in a tense, contradictory, and
mutually constitutive way. The main argument sustains that the historical glance
must create a distance from its own schemes of change to approach to contexts
where cultural variability is simultaneous in time and space. The main emphasis will
be on the multiple otherness towards the analyst’s world of reference, the variability
of time, the differences in other times and other spaces, as well as the overlapping
between cultural multiplicities in the same times and spaces. In addition, there will
be an argument in favour of the the relevance of the relations mutually dependants,
but with contradictory horizons between different multicultural universes, to go
beyond the epistemological obstacles of Unilinear History.

Keywords: analytical approaches, cultural critics, multiethnic societies.

As a research collective we have discussed a range of methodological issues here and simultaneously worked towards dissolving existing boundaries between self with the field as the Other (Grossman and Kimball, Dass) while constituting or understanding social memory (Wood and Latham, Weber) and framing them as a field for our enquiry. Long-standing epistemological divisions between object and subject (Grossman and Kimball, Wood and Latham, Dass, Weber), observation, participation and performance (Grossman and Kimball, Dass, Rossmanith, Ila Jones and Arries, Winkewinder), notions of inside and outside (Dass, Karl, Weber), and place, space and imagined spaces (Rossmanith, Peaslee) need to fade away. We take positions in the field, off the field, in writing and by not writing ethnographically (Arora 2006). Far from arrogantly claiming to represent others, some of the contributors admit the transformative impact of ethnographic research on themselves (Weber, Grossman and Kimball, Hurst). The evolution of us as persons and as researchers undertaking fieldwork is intertwined and not distinct or separable.
We arhue that in as much as we are governed and shaped by our disciplinary roots, in traversing these disciplinary boundaries we are equally in turn shaping future fields. We value disciplinary appropriation and are committed to translation and the evolution of shared vocabularies. Interdisciplinary methodologies can blur or change existing boundaries but not erode them altogether.