Interlude: Meeting Don Agapito: Reflections on Fieldwork

This interlude offers methodological reflections on collaborative research. It takes the author’s encounter with a respected local poet in the small town of Guapi on Colombia’s Pacific Coast as a starting point to reflect on methodological and ethical considerations of conducting ethnographic research in a politically charged context. It outlines how the author’s prolonged presence among Afro-Colombians in Guapi led to a dialogical engagement, drawing on a rich tradition of experimental ethnographies and activist methodologies proposed by paradigmatic figures such as Paulo Freire and Orlando Fals Borda, in particular the latter’s participatory action research.