Full Description
Ethnographers of socio-cultural phenomena routinely face moments in the field that evoke no answers for our interlocutors, or in which answers come in entirely different forms from those anthropologists and other scholars expect. The over-emphasis on structure and meaning in social science, and anthropology in particular, has inhibited the study of a-conceptual "darker" spaces of cultural phenomena. In this book, Diana Espírito Santo and Sergio González Varela explore areas of social life often neglected by traditional ethnographers, analytically described as spaces of negation, of not-knowing, where bodies, environments and realities resist explanation or description, and where there are ultimately no answers - either for interlocutors or researchers. Examining fields as diverse as divination, parapsychology, monsterology, Brazilian capoeira, tattoo artistry, Afrofuturism, Umbanda, ufology, and Cuban Spiritism, they argue that radical uncertainty should propel novel forms of theory.
Contents
Introduction: thinking beyond reason; 1. Paradoxes, the weird, and the impossible; 2. Not-knowing, not speaking, negating; 3. Trauma, forbidden knowledge, and silenced voices; 4. Not-knowing through ritual theory and art; 5. Facing the limits of the extra-cultural; 6. Resisting interpretation and the negative in three ethnographies; 7. Monsters, the void, and the movement from the uncanny to the weird; 8. The excess of sense and the engagement of wonder; 9. From not-knowing to not-doing; Epilogue by Paul Stoller; References.
