This book is an experimental interrogation in the crossroads of literature and anthropology (fiction and ethnography). “Southern Crossings” refers to travels in the Global South, i. e. India and, primarily, South Africa, whereas “contaminations” invokes a supposed tradition of genre transgression and cross-over writing. The form aims at being congenial with the subject: an exploration of purity vs. impurity, or racialisation vs. creolisation, and a reflection on identity and boundaries, personal and collective. Close readings of Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger), Edouard Glissant (Poetics of Relation) and others (Appadurai, Coetzee, Zimitri Erasmus) are interfoliated with a fictional autoethnography in third person (and third gender), spanning from 2007 to 2018. Many anthropologists have tried literary or journalistic forms of expression, but this book is an unusual, if not unique, approach to anthropology from the literary writer’s position. It ambitiously competes on both literary and academic merits.