Abstract
This essay discusses textuality as category of anthropological discourse and the treatment of autobiography in the social sciences. The idea of text as a tissue of words – from the most ritualised to the less formal − is contrasted to the text as an artefact in which the past is legible not only as words but also as erasures. Then, the essay problematizes the assumption about a radical difference between historical and autobiographical memory that supports the opposition between biography as method of sociology and autobiography as literature. The metaphor of “palimpsest” is used as a tool of analysis of an autobiography from Angola whose historicity is legible as relation between words and erasures, interrogating the limits between objective and subjective knowledge.
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