Short Abstract

This panel explores extraordinary experiences that blur boundaries of reality and reveal ontologies beyond polarity, asking what experimental ethnographic methods might accompany rather than represent the world’s becoming.

Long Abstract

The panel opens a space to explore extraordinary experiences - spiritual, psychedelic, supernatural, or involving encounters with otherworldly beings - that blur familiar boundaries of reality. Engaging the conference’s theme of polarity, the panel explores how such experiences open perspectives that move beyond dualistic opposition, transforming relations between self and world, the visible and the invisible, the human and the more-than-human. These are not merely matters of altered belief but of reconfigured being.

We ask panelists to consider, first, what kinds of ontological insights or worlds such experiences disclose, and second, what methods might be responsive to them. How can anthropology approach realities that are relational, processual, or non-dual without reducing them to pre-given categories? Might they call for experimental forms of ethnography that accompany the world’s becoming rather than represent it?

By treating extraordinary experience as both an ethnographic and epistemic event, the panel seeks to explore how anthropology might rethink ontology through method - and method through ontology. In dialogue with the conference’s concern for polarity, we ask how these emergent worlds may open multipolar, metamorphic understandings of being -and how anthropology might learn to move with them.

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