Called upon to face these different modes of knowledge symmetrically – inside and outside the sciences, inside and outside academia – Anthropology finds itself implicated, if it wants to honor its vocation for dialogue, in a transformation of the “safe distance” created by it and other sciences to deal with other ways of thinking. The symmetrization operated by anthropology can therefore never be understood as an equivalence, insofar as it relates modes of existence and ecologies of practices that are irreducible to each other. And it is precisely in the possibility of an encounter between the different as different, the roughness of this encounter, the very divergence around the encounter, that we believe a true relationship can be produced, avoiding the ever-lurking trap of one of the poles ending up encompassing or overcoding the other.

But the ways of relating knowledge and practices in ReACT’s history” also evoke another important inflection in its path: that of shifting from the empirical study of techniques and sciences to that of their consequences, whether intentional or unintentional, which refers to the themes of climate catastrophes, the intrusion of Gaia, the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Plantationcene, the Xawara epidemic, among many other ways of naming and describing the ecologies of proliferation of death, toxicity and ruins currently underway. And in the possible alliances resulting from this inflection, it is the technical stories that matter – both in terms of the collectives that anthropology has historically tried to learn from, and the potentially creative scientific practices that are the object of anthropological investigation. In other words, what matters are experiences and situations in which successes, pitfalls and defeats are thought about in the company of those gathered around them, and who, by thinking about them together, find ways of transforming them.

These alliances make it necessary, in turn, to think by the milieu, in other words, for knowledge to always be situated in such a way as to remove from the sciences the pretension of establishing a point of view of the whole, as a precaution to their will to power, which subjugates, annuls and exterminates other ways of thinking and being in the world. In this sense, dialogues between scientific practices and knowledge and other practices and knowledge cannot be reduced to a movement of appropriating words and thoughts from people and collectives outside the sciences. It is precisely in the opposite movement – of an anthropology taken up by other knowledges and practices – that we understand that a sensitively interesting transformation can take place. Thus, by drawing inspiration from the thinking of Antônio Bispo dos Santos, considering his unrestricted counter-colonial stance, that of someone who does not allow himself to be conditioned and knows that it is in the dignity of his people that his strength lies, we aim to continue expanding the Anthropology of Science and Technology Network in its transversal relations between practices and modes of knowledge. The aim is that this transversality can evoke a vital and creative power capable of transforming worlds and making the Earth, or lands, habitable places worth living in. And may we then celebrate, at this tenth meeting, these ever improbable encounters that we hope are, and continue to be, germinating encounters.