This article proposes a reflection on "ethnography", focusing on the researcher's learning of and engagement with research practices. Starting from discussions of this theme in ethnomusicology and in the anthropology of techniques, we trace a dialogue across the research fields of the authors among repentistas in the Brazilian Northeast and fishermen in Amazonia. Through this dialogue, we reflect on the implications of the anthropologist's insertion in ethnographic activity, which is not seen to be an end in itself, but a privileged means for accessing knowledge and tacit values, perceiving hierarchies among the diverse types of relations involved in the execution of an activity and analyzing peculiar forms of learning. The comparison between ethnographies of singing and fishing is not intended to affirm the epistemological privilege of practice, the body or experience over structures, discourse or thought. The very nature of the comparison, rooted in the engagements of an activity that is eminently verbal and another that mostly involves perceptive and motor abilities, distances our aim from this approach. Engagement is here understood not as a general principle, but as a malleable ethnographic posture, capable of adequately favouring the accomodation of anthropological questions and empirical regimes in specific situations.
Ethnography; Learning; Experience; Anthropology of Techniques; Ethnomusicology