My work as an anthropologist is the result of over fifteen years of engagement with colonial and post-colonial Angola as well as social theory. Drawing from both archival research and fieldwork, I have considered processes of subject constitution from a sociocultural, political, historical, and discursive perspective.

I am especially interested in the imbrication of symbolic and material aspects in processes of differentiation related to race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. My publications address topics such as translation and naming practices, colonialism and post-colonialism, witchcraft and sorcery, ethnographic theory and the case study. Research methodology is a key area of concern. 

Some questions I have addressed include: What is the relationship between subject constitution and the sociocultural, political, historical, and discursive contexts in which it takes place? How do subjects express themselves in language? What and how do they perform? What is the relationship between the singular and the general, the empirical and the theoretical, the object and the signifier, the language and the body? What happens in the process of naming? What does translation do?