Outline for an Ethnography of Doubt

Suspicious Surfaces and Affective Mistrust in the South Caucasus

“…It is this dialectic of trust and mistrust in the (re)making of sense and the (re)construction of selfhood that recent anthropological investigations of trust regimes have brought to the fore (Broch-Due and Ystanes 2016; Liisberg et al 2015) and that the findings of this article substantiate. When trying to understand the current inflation of conspiracy theories, then, it may be helpful to abandon the concern with the life-worlds they insinuate and instead analyze the regimes of mistrust and doubt that they are embedded in (see also Pelkmans 2013). Such an approach would resonate with other recent works that have investigated phenomena designated with the prefix mis-or dis-as not just absences, but as productive forces.…”

Suspicion and expertise: following the money in an offshore investigation

“…Another strand has focused on the everyday epistemic forms and orientations – suspicion, doubt, and indeterminacy – that are adjacent to but different from true, certain knowledge (e.g. Mühlfried 2018; Ochs 2011; Pelkmans 2013). Bringing the two strands together, some anthropologists have more recently ventured to explore the role of different forms of ‘not‐quite‐knowing’ in professional epistemic cultures.…”

“…My argument is indebted to Jonathan Mair, Ann Kelly, and Casey High's discussion of ignorance as not an opposite or inverse of knowledge, but ‘a substantive historical phenomenon that in each particular case might incorporate certain knowledge, logics, ethics, emotions, and social relationships’ (2012: 3). Their analysis is part of a growing literature that explores practices and states of not‐ or not‐quite knowing: for example, everyday and professional doubt, lived and trained suspicion, and mistrust (Brand 2018; Kelly 2010; 2012; Mühlfried 2018; Ochs 2011; Pelkmans 2013; 2018; Rees 2016; West & Sanders 2003). Mair et al .’s work exemplifies the attempt to expand our understanding of how ‘other people orient themselves to the unknown’ (Yarrow 2019: 262), and challenge the way in which anthropologists implicitly attribute ‘to the people they study the same unambiguous desire for knowledge, and the same aversion to ignorance, that motivates their own work’ (Mair et al .…”

“…Indebted to Cartesian epistemology, which uses doubt as a ground‐clearing technique, this characterization reveals the importance of ignorance and doubt to scholarly discovery. The recognition of the uncertainty and limits of one's understanding, as argued by Rees (2016: 102, 221‐2; also Pelkmans 2013: 8), keeps open the possibility that things will turn out otherwise than currently thought. Investigative suspicion relies on this destabilizing effect of doubt: to suspect is to think that something might not be the case.…”

The Curse of Displacement: Local Narratives of Forced Expulsion and the Appropriation of Abandoned Property in Abkhazia

“…To capture the "cycles of hope, belief, doubt and disillusionment" (Pelkmans 2013, 3) characteristic of the human experience, this article takes a distinct ethnographic approach aimed at gleaning "the meanings that the people under study attribute to their social and political reality" (Schatz 2009, 5). As anthropologist Mathijs Pelkmans (2013) has noted, through its practice of "living for prolonged periods of time in the midst of people who are pondering different options, who are voicing their hopes, frustrations and disillusionments," ethnography is particularly suited for "catching doubt in midair" (5). The data was therefore collected during eight months of fieldwork over a period of two years (starting in late 2016) in Abkhazia's capital Sukhumi and a village in the Ochamchira district, which had a mixed Georgian-Abkhaz population before the war and is now predominantly Abkhaz.…”