The paper defends thevalidity and relevancy of ethnography/historiography as a specific modality of knowledge production. It does so by presenting and discussing the cases of an archaeologist who says he is one thousand years old, of an anthropologist who decided to make a poem about his ethnography, and of and ethnographer-historian who analyzes, under the name of "history", the production of Nasa and Cumbal memorialistas. The central argument is constructed around a commitment to the ethnographic/historiographic truth. It uses the metaphors of inside/outside with which Joanne Rappaport analyzes the commotion she goes through in her relationship with Nasa intellectuals. This inside/outside topic is read initially as the transit between the field and the archive. The outside is taken as the "conceptualizing knowledge" positioned between two forms of socio-historic reality, one existing within the discourse and the other without. The first takes in, describes and re-describes the second.