“Let me see your face, auntie”

meanings and ethical dilemmas raised by the use of masks in carrying out a face-to-face ethnography during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article aims to reflect on the ethical dilemmas and methodological issues that permeated my experience of field research in my master's degree, an ethnography carried out in person during the Covid-19 pandemic. The reports brought here are based on my experience carrying out an ethnography in a Shelter Institution in the state of Paraíba in 2021, which had as interlocutors children and adolescents who lived/traveled in that space and sought to understand how these subjects experienced the pandemic of Covid-19 in that unique context of institutional care. As the best strategy for elucidating the reports, I start from the presence of the use of the mask in the field relationship, enumerating the meanings and agencies that this object assumed in my relationship with the interlocutors and the situations caused by its presence, as well as the ethical dilemmas that this utensil raised during and after fieldwork. Therefore, the article intends to discuss, based on the reflections brought forward, the (non) neutrality of the anthropologist, as well as issues relating to the forms of affectation that permeated research such as the one carried out in this period, marked mainly by the fact that I was researching the Covid-19 pandemic while living through it.