Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the opportunities and challenges, even failures, of reflexivity and collaboration in anthropological research. Building on a failed film project with people living with mental illness in Namibia, it argues for the value of "not-knowing" for novel anthropological imaginings.

Paper Abstract:

Reflexivity and collaboration in anthropological research open opportunities while simultaneously bringing forth complex challenges. Whilst these have the potential to address important ethical, methodological, and epistemological issues located at the intersection of power and representation, they also reveal the limits, even failures, of reflexive and collaborative approaches for anthropological knowing, especially when doing research with vulnerable subjects in a postcolonial context where race and the legacies of the colonial past intersect with the diagnosis and medicalisation of mental illness. Based on a failed collaborative film with people living with bipolar disorder in contemporary Namibia, this paper underlines the generative and transformative forces of reflexive and collaborative methods, simultaneously exploring their potential for stagnation and failure. In taking inspiration from Ben Moshe’s powerful call for “dis-epistemology”, this paper aims to critically examine the limits of knowing in anthropology by focusing on the complex emotional and personal entanglements in the field, the love and wounds we experience, but still, we cannot analyse, and how these have the potential to shape novel anthropological imaginings beyond current neo-liberal academic discourses and practices. By stressing the value of ‘not knowing’, this paper aims to open a dialogue on how we can create from a space of (dis)-epistemology collective and caring academic communities, potentially subverting hierarchies of power and knowledge in anthropology.