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Abstract
Across many world regions, the informal slaughter of livestock occupies an important place in rural day-to-day realities. This article examines killing goats on São Jorge Island to show how attention to slaughter enhances our understanding of gendered selfhood, human–animal relations, and the impacts of depopulation. Building on ethnography of smallholder farmers who see their masculinity and livelihoods endangered by demographic decline, I argue that their idea of agrarian cultivation underwrites verbal hostility against animals. Male farmers' concept of cultivation, here conceived as productive order-making between a threatening 'natural' and a desirable 'domestic' domain, is hence an ambivalent moral idiom. In moments of slaughter, the frustration about the difficulties of cultivation is expressed as men deriding goats to salvage a desired image of manhood and competence.

As ethnographic fieldwork blurs the boundaries between 'private' and 'professional' life, ethnographers always appear to be on duty, looking out for valuable encounters and waiting for the next moment of disclosure. Yet what lies in the gaps and pauses of fieldwork? The contributions in this volume dedicated to anthropologist Martin Sökefeld explore methodological and ethical dimensions of multi-sided ethnographic research. Based on diverse cases ranging from hobbies over kinship ties to political activism, the contributors show how personal relationships, passions and commitments drive ethnographers in and beyond research, shaping the knowledge they create together with others.

As ethnographic fieldwork blurs the boundaries between ›private‹ and ›professional‹ life, ethnographers always appear to be on duty, looking out for valuable encounters and waiting for the next moment of disclosure. Yet what lies in the gaps and pauses of fieldwork? The contributions in this volume dedicated to anthropologist Martin Sökefeld explore methodological and ethical dimensions of multi-sided ethnographic research. Based on diverse cases ranging from hobbies over kinship ties to political activism, the contributors show how personal relationships, passions and commitments drive ethnographers in and beyond research, shaping the knowledge they create together with others.