recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.eCstatIC enCounters • 8 the symbolic order. Yet they also gave themselves over to the debauchery of their Gypsy bars and to the ecstasies of war, in a desperate attempt to access a 'really real' beyond all narration and daydreaming.I have never been back to Serbia -but I still listen to the music and hum those deeply melancholic songs. Moreover, the research themes that Serbia held in store for me have remained at the top of my research agenda. The confrontation with people being 'chased out of the stories they lived by' was such a powerful, painful and overwhelming experience that two decades later I still find most of my research questions 'Serbianized' . Wherever my research activities have taken me -to the Dutch underworld (van de Port 2001), to the Lisbon fado (van de Port 1999) or to the Candomblé temples in Brazil -I ended up studying the same issue over and over again: what happens when people have to face up to the fact that their understandings of what is 'real' are dependent on a particular, and ultimately contingent narration of what life is like? And how do they, once they are lucid about the contingency of their reality definitions, produce a sense of the really real?So if my decision to accept the invitation, in 2001,
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.