ABSTRACT
This chapter is about context of the interview and its materiality: an audiotape and memory of what was not recorded after the recorder was stopped by the occurrence of an unexpected event. Collecting is a kind of inscription that differs from prophetic writing. Anthropologists acknowledged long ago that the difficulty of delimiting a relevant field of study is not a methodological shortcoming but the very speciality of discipline. On the other hand are social constraints on how individual researchers can remain ‘open minded’ in practice given that practice of anthropology should be seen in its relation to particular life styles. In the official discourse the topography of feitiçaria was an implicit local knowledge of who ‘the Bakongo’ were and of where they could be found. The classification in ‘North’ and ‘South’ was used to communicate an intimate knowledge of different relations to the authority of the state to decide who was and who was not a legitimate citizen.
