As an intellectual tradition, ethnography is a technical skill, an analytical endeavor, a literary genre, an epistemic field. Whoever decides to write a monograph today must operate in at least two fronts: before the people they are writing about and before the intellectual ancestors of the genre. If literary critics can claim that all modern novelists are influenced by Don Quixote even if they have not read it, we could likewise argue that Junod or Rattray lay secretly behind any modern ethnographic work on Africa...
even if our students no longer read them. Whatever comes to happen to the anthropological monograph, the masters of the past will forever affect the future.  In its production, a monograph is the result of an individual effort to make sense of personal experience; in its consumption, it is a milestone to be followed or fought against; as cultural agent, the monograph comes to intervene in the very reality which it pertained to describe.

This seminar is also a book launch where we propose to discuss several recently published Africanist monographs - some of these are texts of the past whose contemporary relevance demands re-reading; others are fully contemporary works. We want to make them talk to each other so that the past and the present can consciously interact. The seminar is organized by João de Pina-Cabral and Ramon Sarró with the collaboration of the Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, where two of the works under presentation are being published.

 Org.: João de Pina-Cabral and Ramon Sarro