20 years ago I began researching oral tradition. Motivated by my interest in ethnomusicology, my focus has been in the beliefs and rituality of peasant communities in central Chile, and indigenous communities in the country’s northern area. When one researches in depth, and for a long time, the same localities, some relations turn into friendship bonds. As that happens, the anthropologist disappears, and it only remains the simple human relationship in which, I believe, ethnography should be based.



Here, I would like to reflect into an experience that’s becoming frequent: the fact that many of these friends, whose lives I register, already walk their path to death.