The Death of the Angel: Reflections on the Relationship between Enlightenment and Enchantment in the Twenty-first Century

Tango artist Astor Piazzolla’s composition, ‘La muerte del angel’, serves as inspiration for a few reflections on the relationship between enlightenment and enchantment in the 21st century. Piazzolla wrote the fugue as accompaniment to a play, ‘Tango del angel’, about an angel who tries to heal broken human spirits in Buenos Aires and ends up dying in a knife fight. Drawing on tango’s melancholy, longing, and hesitant hoping, I share stories from my travels where I engage with the struggle to sustain an ethnographic art that brings heart to the process of knowing the world.