Drawing on what we call “experiments in ontology,” the article proposes inhabiting ontological conflicts without closing them down, sustaining their political, transformational and relational force in the face of unequal forms of worlding shaped by colonialism and extractivism.
It discusses situated ethnographies that approach anthropology as co-labor, political imagination, and a committed practice of engaging with a plurality of worlds in constant reconfiguration.
It is also the introduction to a dossier about the Kiriri people in Eastern Brasil we have been working on for a while now.
The reflections in this article point toward an ethnographic practice that, rather than describing worlds, is committed to their reconfiguration: an exercise that moves between territories, bodies, and writings, attentive to the potential that emerges from friction and to the alliances that allow plurality to be sustained as a living practice.
They offer neither answers nor recipes. As Rodrigues da Silva aptly states, it is not about turning riverine anthropology, or any of the proposals presented here, into a new program to be implemented.
Rather, it opens a space for accompaniment and conversation, founded on radical empiricism; a situated laboratory of thought and action to expand the possibilities from which to continue exploring ways of inhabiting and extending friction—that friction from which Krenak invites us to experience moving through the world.
