Ethnography and Co-Creation in a Portuguese Consultancy: Wine Branding Research as an Example

Abstract

As ethnography branches into the fields of business, marketing research, innovation and design research, anthropologists working outside academic contexts are developing a set of practices that in many ways mirror the work of academic anthropology and in other ways diverge from it. Drawing from the anthropologist Viveiros de Castro’s notion of controlled equivocation (Castro, 2004), this paper explores the relation between academic anthropology and applied business anthropology, clients and anthropologist as a particular kind of ‘equivocation’. A wine branding research case is given as an example.