Heterotopías etnográficas. Lo distante, lo imposible, lo oculto

Abstract

In this article, the notion of ethnographic heterotopias is developed as a way of thinking the limits of anthropological fieldwork. These limits are an excess that cannot be integrated into the research process and their strategies of formalization or is an impossibility that determines negatively its shape. The text distinguishes three types of heterotopias: spatial, that correspond to the places that an ethnographer fails to meet directly, but are relevant to your research; experiential, constituted by the experiences that emerge in a field in which the researcher cannot participate without altering the epistemological and methodological coordinates of fieldwork; finally, the interior, which trace a complex and ambivalent relationship between subjective processes of the ethnographer and what happens on the field. In order to illustrate these heterotopias, we work with an ethnography in Mexico's southern border, as well as others from around the world.