Everyone has a story to tell: Collective book production and ethnographic writing in Recôncavo da Bahia

Abstract

This paper is based on the experience of the Cachoeiras Project: Women writing Recôncavo da Bahia, the result of a partnership between andarilha edições and imuê – Instituto Mulheres e Economia. Funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Engaged Research Call (2021), the project financed the writing process and production of books by five authors from Cachoeira, São Félix, Muritiba and Conceição da Feira, in Bahia, between 2022 and 2023. The collective writing methodology was inspired by the “poetic uprisings” (Barbosa 2020), remembering and storytelling meetings between women held in the city of Cachoeira, combined with individual research, online meetings and circulation of texts. The collective production of these books as part of a project of engaged anthropology is conceptualized here as an experience of counter-colonization (Bispo 2015), which makes it possible to build a reflection on the production of counter-colonial narratives and collective writing as part of the ethnographic practice. The aim of this paper is to show how this collective writing allows to produce tension and to displace the way that ethnography is done, as a method and form of writing.