Paper short abstract:

Addressing epistemological uncertainty generated by a witchcraft diagnosis, I argue that conceptual humility in the face of experience pushes us to keep epistemology and ontology as open, liminal spaces of playful refraction with our participants, rendering them as modes of connection among worlds.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes as its point of departure an experience of epistemological disorientation stemming from receiving a witchcraft diagnosis. Ethnographic fieldwork typically stages an encounter between anthropologist and research participant, an encounter which often produces incommensurable ways of knowing and being in the world, as each party applies their epistemological and interpretive resources to the other. Likewise, each party to the encounter can undergo experiences which seem to push against the limit of experience, or which cannot be epistemologically, conceptually, or even ontologically domesticated within either party’s own experience. How, then, to think with experiences which seem to resist interpretation within familiar epistemological frameworks? How to conceptualise (or even narrate) that for which we have a limited or impoverished conceptual language? How to interpret an experience where the status of the experience remains murky and uncertain?

This paper argues that such uncertain encounters may be both epistemologically and theoretically productive; by showing us the limits of our conceptual vocabulary when confronted with unruly experience, they prompt us to re-frame what we think we know about the world (and indeed our procedures for knowing the world(s)). Such productively recursive uncertainty reminds us of the need to make pluriversal connections, leaving epistemology and ontology as open, liminal spaces of play - as meeting grounds where each party can take the measure of the other one without either interpretive or epistemological tradition dominating the other, but collaboratively generating a 'ch'exi' or 'motley' (or 'worldly') epistemology out of a hermeneutics of suspicion.