Reflection: “It opened our eyes”: ethnographic encounters during the COVID-19 pandemic in Lisbon, Portugal

Abstract In 2020 and 2021, anthropologists confronted the obstacles of conducting fieldwork during the global COVID-19 pandemic. For months, we endured quarantine with others and grieved the loss what many consider the basis of our professional identity: participant observation. We were unable to predict how much our methodological toolkit would have to stretch and shrink to keep up with public health restrictions during a pandemic. We repeatedly asked ourselves: what, in fact, is ethnography and how can we do our work now? To address such a methodological predicament, this paper presents an ethnographic investigation conducted in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area during the summer of 2020 to show how several small-scale agricultural businesses managed to feed confined city dwellers during lockdown. Although concerns for these farmers’ dealings are practically absent from planning policies, they operate in the territory, changing the food system from within. This article also presents the pros and cons of investigating during a pandemic and the implications of reflexivity in the construction of ethnographic knowledge, even if our research needs to be done digitally and remotely for the time being.