Springing from Charles Briggs’ (1986) interrogation of the interview as a metacommunicative regime challenging competence and models of socialization, this paper reflects on the critical role of language as social action by discussing the role of interviewing and asking questions as anthropological and worldly practice. Interviewing is one of the principal mediums through which academic anthropological work is in contact with a public beyond academia. Given the prevalence of the practice of interviewing across anthropological disciplines and how anthropologists have long recognized the role of interviewing as a political tool, how do we go about interviewing across our different ethnographic contexts? Considering reflexivity, and Summerson Carr’s (2023) recognition of historically situated pragmatic interviewing as a theorized motivator for social change, I pursued ethnographic research in my hometown in Costa Rica for a public issues anthropology master’s degree. With ethnographic data studying up (Nader 1964) with employers of domestic workers in Costa Rica, I discuss how interviewing is a limited yet public engagement of anthropology, with a crucial political role as a site for reflection, negotiation about labor conditions, and destabilizing subjectifying gazes towards people. This paper openly concludes about the relevance of anthropological practice as patchy, hypothetical, feral, and critical in unsettling logics sustaining racialized capitalism and colonial structures of power.