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This article discusses implications and potentialities of anthropologically thinking and researching with documents, arguing that they consist of ethnographic artifacts, which can be particularly fruitful in certain research contexts. In order to do that, it resumes some movements of distancing and rapprochement between anthropology and documents and places two recent ethnographic experiences in dialogue. One a research through police inquiries of Brazilian Federal Police concerning "human trafficking for sexual exploitation" crimes, and the other focused on administrative procedures related to "missing persons" cases investigated by Rio de Janeiro Civil Police. In addition to revealing the heuristic potential of "following the paper" and calling attention to the micro politics of the interactions among those that document and those who are documented, the paper aims to contribute to larger discussions about the challenges that dealing with documents in field work situations poses to anthropology and its self-representations.

This article discusses the relations of mutual constitution between gender and state. The theoretical and methodological implications of this proposal are explored in dialog with ethnographies in which the theme of violence appears as a privileged heuristic vector for understanding this coproduction.

From the rapprochement between some aspects of the definition and management of the child sexual abuse and trafficking in persons for purposes of sexual exploitation as social problems, the present article argues that consent and vulnerability are complementary and key concepts for understanding the contemporary regimes of legal regulation of sexuality and of the social and political sensibilities which guide the perception of violence. By analyzing the assumptions of the concept of consent and its interrelations with the idea of individual autonomy, as well as the power and the ambiguities of the notion of vulnerability, understood as a category capable to deconstruct the central value of consent in the new sexual order oriented by liberal ideas and ideologies, I seek to illuminate some ethical and political dilemmas in the process of definition of violence and in the construction/deconstruction of the idea of victimization.

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