How can anthropology approach transnational phenomena given that its method, and the kind of knowledge built through it, were originally based on the study of small local communities? This article tackles the traffic between micro and macro scales from the perspective of one of the (meta)theoretical proposals that have been put forth since the postmodern turn, inspired by the work of Marilyn Strathern. Based on the primacy of relationality and reflexivity across the two facets of the anthropological profession (fieldwork and ethnographic writing), this perspective adresses knowledge production operations routinely deployed by both anthropologists and their "natives": scaling, context-making, domaining, and analogy-making. The paper puts this analytics to work through the empirical case of Brazil's South-South cooperation with the African continent, understood as an emerging assemblage marked by context-making efforts and a quest for relational robustness.
Africa; Brazil; multisited anthropology; South-South cooperation