Emotions have historically played a marginal role in many arenas of anthropological analysis, often limited to describing certain aspects of research informants' lives, or explaining the ethnographer's own fieldwork experience. This paper proposes a more nuanced approach, pointing to the analytic potential of what we call emotional overlap. Emotional overlap occurs in ethnographic moments when the emotions of both the informant and the ethnographer are uncovered and acknowledged. Using evidence from a cumulated 28 months of fieldwork in an American prison and a poor Brazilian neighborhood, we describe the analytic potential for emotional overlap in qualitative research. We argue for the importance and necessity of privileging emotions as sites of epistemological reflection, in order to reaffirm what is most compelling about the discipline of anthropology and to maintain its relevance in the 21st century.

Reflecting on our recent experience of online teaching with mainly historically marginalized students at the U.S.-Mexico border, we emphasize the importance of engaging a critical pedagogy of place by creating communities of trust. We describe how the COVID-19 pandemic was experienced among us and our students, focusing on how it impacted practical aspects and the context of our teaching. We discuss four teaching strategies we implemented during the pandemic that highlight the importance of communication and flexibility in allowing students to self-pace their learning. These strategies proved useful as we began to reach a level of trust among students and gained knowledge of their needs. We conclude by describing the pandemic as a period of opportunities in which anthropology students can apply concepts from assigned readings to confront and analyze a historical moment that neither we, nor our students, had previously experienced.

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A case study of the Palmas Bank project, on the periphery of Fortaleza, Brazil, explores the contradictions inherent in the country’s solidarity economy project. The solidarity economy, rooted in the local practices of the liberation theology movement, can hardly be seen as a human or alternative economy because its proximity to party politics through funding and the institutionalization of the movement has affected not only its long-term social sustainability but also its capacity for a political voice. The study sheds light on the challenges of grassroots organizing under progressive regimes at a moment when the end of the Pink Tide in Latin America has obliged activists seeking more sustainable forms of community organization to learn from the past. Un estudio de caso del proyecto del Banco Palmas, en la periferia de Fortaleza, Brasil, explora las contradicciones inherentes al proyecto de economía solidaria del país. La economía solidaria, arraigada en las prácticas locales del movimiento de la teología de la liberación, difícilmente puede verse como una economía humana o alternativa porque su proximidad a la política de partidos a través del financiamiento y la institucionalización del movimiento ha afectado no solo su sostenibilidad social a largo plazo sino también su capacidad para una voz política. El estudio arroja luz sobre los desafíos de la organización de base bajo regímenes progresistas en un momento en que el final de la Marea Rosa en América Latina ha obligado a los activistas que buscan formas más sostenibles de organización comunitaria a aprender del pasado.