Ethnographic Sorcery

West, Harry G.

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226894126.001.0001

Cited by 96 publications

(44 citation statements)

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“…Methodological literature regarding fieldwork in Mozambique is limited, although Hanlon () and Sidaway () have previously discussed local community frustrations with researchers flooding Mozambique after the civil war and leaving barely any trace of their findings with the communities with whom they worked. Several historians and anthropologists have written extensively about the problematic positionalities of white foreign researchers in rural Mozambican contexts and the suspicions, fears, pranks and complex relationships that emerge (see Isaacman ; West ). More broadly in ‘Africa’, scholars have discussed the subjective gaze and diverse positionalities involved in both foreign and domestic researchers facing dramatic changes in negotiating everyday household chores and neighbourhood relationships to adapting mixed‐methods research protocols in culturally and politically relevant ways (Adenaike and Vansina ; Mandiyanike ).…”

Section: Qualitative Methods Mundane Moments and Embodied Comportmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The allure and privileging of danger over everyday practice in field research

Nelson

2013

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Many geographers in 'closed' research contexts focus on the problem of coerced subject responses in a 'climate of fear' , the challenges of protecting respondents' identities and the potential political or physical harms that research results might produce once published. However, I argue that privileging possible harm from research products (including sensitive data and results) diverts attention away from crucial details that are seemingly less exciting and dangerous, yet are key for understanding power dynamics playing out in and shaping these sites. Shifting our focus towards the everyday details of embodied comportment in the research process reveals other potential harms, such as what we eat beyond the forest grove and the actions of the research intermediaries with whom we work (such as drivers). Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mozambique, I draw attention to embodied practices and intermediary relationships that are crucial for the larger project of locating practices of closure across diverse scales and for examining the roles of researchers in closed contexts.

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Section: Qualitative Methods Mundane Moments and Embodied Comportmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The allure and privileging of danger over everyday practice in field research

Nelson

2013

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“…While this made some anthropologists turn away from topics such as sorcery (cf. West ), others instead chose to describe their interlocutors’ enchantments as rational responses to the pressures of capitalism, violence, and bureaucracy (Rubin ; Caple James ; Comaroff and Comaroff ; cf. Kapferer :2) .…”

Section: Between Critique and Enchantmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To be able to catch that experience, to take advantage of it, we have to be open to the possibility and to allow ourselves to be transformed. A method open to surprise and wonder in turn elicits a theoretical openness, such as allowing our interlocutors to challenge our understanding of what is real (Rubenstein ) or to let them contest our views (West :85). Todd Ramon Ochoa describes how his interlocutor Isidra insisted that he embrace her way of seeing the role of the dead in Cuban palo : “So that before long I surrendered the terms of my research and together we spoke about the dead in her words alone” (:480).…”

Section: Between Critique and Enchantmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enchantment as Method

Stainova

2019

Anthropology and Humanism

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Summary This article proposes enchantment as an ethnographic method that attunes us to the world‐building potential of dreams and the imagination, as well as to the structural forces that simultaneously constitute human lives. To be enchanted is to experience wonder, to let oneself be moved. This concept emerges from my fieldwork with young musicians in Venezuela who, as residents of urban barrios, confront structural violence and sociopolitical crises. I study how through music and stories they conjure worlds they call their own, acts of creation that persist in spite of social decay. By engaging in flights of the imagination of possibilities foreclosed by their material environments, and by portraying and experiencing themselves and their communities otherwise, they refuse to be determined by dominant logics and rationalities. Letting myself be enchanted by and with them allows me to account for spaces of experience that may escape measurement yet have latent social and political potential. A method of enchantment counterbalances the emphasis on structures of domination espoused by critical thinking in the social sciences. Holding the critical and enchanted approach in creative tension allows us to recognize the creative potential of play, fantasy, and music that emanate from their own force in the crevices of systems of power that sway people’s destinies.

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“…Within this new theoretical terrain, scholars have carved out space for gender (Geurts 2002, Sanders 2008; extraordinary experience (Straight 2007); sensory cosmopolitanisms (Farquhar & Zhang 2005); refigurations of the nature/culture divide (Viveiros de Castro 1992) and of the interactive human and spirit ontology (Parkin 2007); various forms of synaesthetic experience (Meneley 2008); the social production of heightened mind-body awareness (Chau 2008); healing, diagnosis, and well-being (Desjarlais 2003, Farquhar 2002, Kuriyama 1999, Stroeken 2008; and truth-making in ethnographic encounters (Straight 2007, West 2007. The multisensory becomes a primary means of understanding conflict and suffering, not as a social aberration as in Turner's model but as a component of lives lived in struggle in relation to a fractured globalized political economy (Frykman et al 1998, Herzfeld 2001.…”

Section: Integrating the Sensesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Reorganization of the Sensory World

Porcello

Meintjes

Ochoa

et al. 2010

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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Although anthropological and critical social theory have a long interest in sensory experience, work on the senses has intensified within the past 20 years. This article traces three sensory genealogies within anthropology: the work of Ong and McLuhan as critiqued and advanced by David Howes and the Concordia Project; phenomenological studies as advanced by Paul Stoller; and a focus on materialities as advanced by Nadia Seremetakis. Studies of individual senses, which we survey, led to calls for a more integrated approach to the senses, both within anthropology and from cinema and media studies. In various ways, the senses are constituted by their imbrication in mediated cultural practices, whether mediated by technology, discourse, or local epistemologies. We argue that integrating language and discourse into the study of the senses along with new media insights more fully articulates the significance of body-sensorial knowledge.

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Ethnographic Sorcery

Cited by 96 publications

References 0 publications

The allure and privileging of danger over everyday practice in field research

The allure and privileging of danger over everyday practice in field research

Enchantment as Method

The Reorganization of the Sensory World

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