Paper short abstract:

Proceeding from a perspective guided by Collingwood and Wittgenstein, I aim to probe the limits of the ethnographic endeavor vis a vis worlds unthinkable in terms of the ethnographer’s own “hinge” propositions around which doubt can turn, but which cannot themselves be allowed to fall into doubt.

Paper long abstract:

Can we talk about what we cannot conceive of? How far can the ethnographic gesture, however well-intentioned, guide us into worlds not our own: worlds that seem to call into question what Collingwood called our own (historically mutable) “absolute presuppositions” from which we, like it or not, must spin our ethnographic propositions. “Witches, as the Azande conceive them, cannot exist” wrote E.P. pretty much at the start of a 500-page monograph aiming to prove the eminent rationality of Zande witchcraft beliefs. Taking as cases in point, Evans-Pritchard’s famous equivocations on the issue of coming to inhabit worlds of thought and action that the ethnographer takes to be based on mistaken premises (as well as an example from my own Afro-Cuban ethnography calling in question the authorship of my own research), I argue that what Wittgenstein called “hinge propositions” – that is points on which doubt can turn, but which can never fall into doubt themselves – have long, and all invocations of “radical alterity” as a remedy to the contrary, both enabled, and plagued the ethnographic enterprise from the start. A tentative conclusion might be that the entire conundrum ultimately devolves to an undue exaggeration of the “problem of other minds” – explored by mid-twentieth century analytic philosophers without proper attention to sociological issues; or to the problem of “multiple realities” explored by Alfred Schutz – without proper attention to the issue of cultural difference. Can we really become “unhinged”, in Wittgenstein’s sense?

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