“They think they come to study Daime. In fact, they come to know themselves”: on anthropological intelligibilities, perspectivisms and postmodernisms

Abstract

This manuscript approaches relevant events both from an academic and ethnographic point of view. One event was to have heard from the leader of the Santo Daime, Sebastião Mota de Melo, a sentence that I memorized as “They think they come to study the Daime. In fact, they come to know themselves”. Another synthetic and guiding event of the discussion is a passage of my field research in which I found myself before an extraordinary event. The two events articulate themselves to think the craft of ethnography, as well as anthropological intelligibilities, perspectivisms and postmodernisms. I approach and recall the articulation of the authors' thought motivated by an invitation to participate in a meeting at the Federal University of Acre. The intention is to raise questions that unsettle certainties and conventionalisms in the training of researchers in anthropology, and their consequences for the formulation of ethnographic texts.