Rakowski discusses how pretextual knowledge is produced in anthropological studies. Pretextuality is mainly understood as an active process, an embodied formation of knowledge that takes shape as a series of recognitions filling the ethnographical experience as it emerges in the research field. Thus instead of the logic of interpretation that is based on the practice of ‘thick description’ Rakowski proposes an interpretation through the logic of action, related to the practice of ‘thick participation’ and at the same time to the creation of a chain of headnotes. Rakowski also reconstructs attempts to build a second pillar of pretextual ethnography, i.e. the collection of phenomenological idioms referring to embodied field experience and at the same time to the permanently deforming anthropological understanding.