This dissertation is a response to the poem-essay The Anthropology of Water, from the book Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1995), by Canadian writer Anne Carson. Paying attention to how her pictorial poetics establishes what is understood in her terms as stereoscopic imagination, I investigate how the writer invents her anthropological approach to running water. Her extensive seven-part text consists of travel diaries of journeys made on foot, by car or by swimming - about a pilgrimage to Compostela, about camping in the United States, and also about swimming, a section written in the third person. By relating the aquatic element to the foreign cultures of men and taking the sign of anthropology as a kind of method for getting to know them (Poutanen, 1998), poetic images that function as erotic ruses are composed (Carson, 1986), both moving the course of the writing and arranging alliances between mysteries, named facts by Carson (Martins, 2023). Starting from this single essay, I propose the elaboration of a pilgrim map of unstable objectivity, a kind of critical wandering through her poetics.