For Mauss, the gift encompasses innumerable phenomena, but, more than a phenomenon, he considers it a relationship. They are goods, words, people, visits, parties, music, gestures, violence, signs, among other significant realities, which may or may not circulate as commodities, from which, once given, emanate some forms of retribution; they are "obligations," says Mauss.

Whe present essay seeks to show, through a singularity of images, how myths, in one of their many expressive ramifications, materialize in a narrative way in what we call plastic expressions of the good errant. Its minimal units operate with signifiers built on a multiplicity of objects that refer the errant to meanings linked to those beings of the universal endeavor. To demonstrate our plastic hypothesis, we will exemplify the mythological complex related to Śiva, one of the most outstanding deities of the Indian cosmogony, referring to various manifestations and presences of this god in the colorful streets of India.

[drocpap]T[/dropcap]his article presents an overview of the use of photography as a methodological resource in the scientific work of Mexican anthropology. The account goes from 1840 to date, emphasizing three periods. The first one shows how the first traveling photographers who arrived in the country established the relationship with anthropology. In the second, three projects that led to the first ethnographic maps of the indigenous population in Mexico are reviewed. On the third, we mention some researches of the 21st century that review and criticize the multiple nuances and forms that this relationship has adopted.

The decrease in the importance of the participation of anthropologists in public debates is the result of various factors, some internal to the discipline, others external. Triviality, high specialization, and neglect of issues of broad public interest are issues that need to be debated. Likewise, the current resurgence of discourses of intolerance and racism points to the possible arrival of a postmulticultural era where anthropological knowledge must be repositioned. The internet is another important variable in understanding contemporary anti-intellectualism, as it generates a renewed illusion of transparency that makes the social sciences seem useless. Ethnography, with its ability to bring us closer to agents, is a basis for anthropologists to take up a political / public role.

Lhe relocation of anthropological knowledge in the globalizing process, which has made most nations and ethnic groups interdependent, is one of the reasons why anthropology, as a knowledge devoted to the local, has lost relevance in recent decades. Lins Ribeiro rightly mentions other reasons: competition with other disciplines, hyperspecialization, changes in the culture/nature relationship, anti-intellectualism (partly due to the "empire of the screens" and the information vertigo caused by the Internet). The text points out some of the faults of anthropology itself: "the culture of auditing and productivism" associated with the business model with which academic life is reorganized, as well as "the absence of professors" from public debates.

TO In my opinion, Gustavo's diagnosis of our situation is very timely. Perhaps the voices of professional anthropologists are a bit more prominent in the world of "expert knowledge" linked to multilateral and international organizations and to advisory committees of governmental and non-governmental organizations, but in general I think we have to accept what he says about the weakness of our current professional public profile and our apparent inability to produce analyses of the "great challenges" of our time that manage to attract the interest of the general public and gain political weight.

Lhe problems mentioned in [Gustavo Lins Ribeiro's] work stem from changes in the discipline itself in the face of other modes of analysis such as cultural, postcolonial, gender, and science and technology studies, which seem to have appropriated concepts such as culture and an apparently sui generis application of ethnographic methodology, which, in terms of public knowledge and intellectual fashions, seem to be in a moment of growth in the face of the apparent decline of anthropology as a discipline.

Wn the first of my three comments, I discuss and deepen some of Gustavo's statements on the visibility and public presence of anthropology in Mexico today. In the second, I link this situation with the transformation in process of the science and technology system, which combines the refunctionalization and commercialization of the university institution with profound changes in the type of knowledge called science, and which I believe Gustavo has in view when he speaks of the current de-intellectualization. The subject of the third and last commentary takes up an idea of his on the ethics of anthropology and analyzes it in a somewhat different way.