Ethnographic creations along the São Francisco River: field reencounters and stories toward a riverside anthropology

Abstract

This article presents stories of lived experiences during the fieldwork of a master’s research project, highlighting how a willingness to dwell in that time, with its unease, doubts, and openings, was essential for transforming and expanding the questions initially planned. The ethnographic experience was deeply shaped by childhood memories, reunions with people and places, and by the sensitive creations of local artists and fishers, such as davi de Jesus do Nascimento and Geraldo Babau. By allowing oneself to be situated by field relations and by the concerns of subjects in riverside worlds, it became possible to slow down analytical expectations and open space for forms of knowledge that escape the logic of neutrality, distance, and presumed rationality. In these stories, the São Francisco River is understood as worlds in constant ethical, aesthetic, and political composition, whose existence challenges colonial projects of occupation and extraction. The article reflects on the connections between researcher and interlocutors, recognizing that their worlds are not identical, but neither are they completely separate. One possibility that emerges from these connections is that of a riverside anthropology, which allows itself to be affected because it is part of the river’s worlds and contributes to the recomposition of threatened existences. Rather than seeking a single form of struggle, the ethnography proposed here values sensitive and plural alliances, in which research is carried out relationally and in motion.