Search and find: trends, narratives and some forgetfulness

Abstract

This text discusses some theoretical/methodological trends that dominate current anthropological production and which tend to bias, hide, or exclude processes, problems and even social actors in spite of the fact that these can be decisive for understanding, at least in certain aspects, the studied realities. It is specially analyzed the tendency to avoid reflecting on -or even to exclude - the role of social and ideological presumptions in the development of research; as well as the tendency to reduce the majority of the studies to the description and analysis of social representations, narratives, discourses, stories and/or experiences, excluding the description and analysis of practices because they are not taken into account or because it is explicitly or implicitly supposed that social representations, narratives and experiences are equivalent to practices. Finally we suggest several methodological criteria that might reduce the negative impact of the analyzed theoretical/methodological trends.