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An Ethnographic Inventory
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Intravention

Intravention refers to interventions inside our own disciplines occurring in collaboration and complicity with our ethnographic counterparts and epistemic partners. This notion reverses the traditional, and common figure, of anthropological intervention (or more generally research intervention). The last one signals the professional practices of anthropologists (and other social scientists) oriented to the transformation of social reality and their sites of investigation. Intraventions operates a reverse gesture by letting the ethnographic field intervene in our own discipline. The concept of intravention takes partial inspiration from architect Alberto Altés (2016) and contrasts with the more common and established concept of intervention. In bringing our epistemic counterparts into the interior of our institutional venues, intraventions assemble and make room in our scholarly contexts for those located beyond their boundaries, tensing in this gesture the academic condition of anthropology and blurring its disciplinary boundaries.

Sources: Altés, A., Jara, A., & Correia, L. (Eds.). (2016). The Power of Experiment. Lisboa: Artéria– Humanizing Architecture / Estalella, A., & Criado, T. S. (2019). DIY Anthropology: Disciplinary knowledge in crisis. ANUAC. Journal of the Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology, 8(2), 143–165.