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Abstract

The comments my article received inspire a response that focuses on both the convergences and divergences between my colleagues’ readings and my own. The broader convergence has to do with the timing of my critique of decolonization. For Macagno, such opportunity is basically due to the overall context of Brazilian Social Sciences, in which decolonization’s conceptual package has gained an unusual (and I would say, uncritical) popularity. According to him, such package comes with a way of thinking that turns its back to anthropological knowledge. The opportunity thus has to do with the contradiction between the academic success of a not very anthropological way of thinking and the rise of a kind of anthropology that increasingly turns its eyes beyond Brazil, that is, to spaces that were until recently either part of the colonial world or direct heirs of it. Given this context, I can conclude that without a deeply critical look at the decolonization package itself, any anthropological endeavor to go beyond our borders would be a suicidal initiative, an anthropology of self-denial.