Conversation with Ginno Martínez - November 30, 2025
 

In Peru, undergraduate anthropology students must write a research thesis to obtain their bachelor’s degree (licenciatura). In this context, Ginno Martínez recounts his early experience as a young professional in the community relations department of a hydroelectric company and how that work raised questions that later became the central issues of his research.  After finishing his job at the company, Martínez transformed those “professional questions”—born in the field, in daily interactions with local actors, and in the management of conflicts—into genuine research questions.

​

Martínez explains that his professional experience allowed him to acquire contextual knowledge of the transformations that the communities he worked with were undergoing, knowledge that later became fundamental to his undergraduate thesis. Although he had to complement that foundation with additional information during the writing process, he maintains that “the ethnography had already been done for him” while he was carrying out his professional role. In saying this, he highlights the depth of the situated learning he had accumulated and how it became a decisive input for his academic research.

​

Martínez's experience reveals the complex professional–academic assemblages that shape many anthropological trajectories in peripheral academic contexts. For many anthropologists, research does not emerge solely from a “pure” field imagined from within the university, but also from professional practices that generate questions, sensitivities, and ways of seeing that later become analytically fertile. This articulation—sometimes tense, at other times creative—between professional responsibilities and intellectual aspirations shows that, far from being separate worlds, professional practice and academic work can profoundly inform one another. In contexts where research faces structural limitations, these intersections not only help sustain intellectual projects but also enrich anthropology itself by anchoring it in concrete, situated, and deeply lived experiences.