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Paper short abstract

Drawing on West African ontologies, this paper examines how (the agency of) the dead influences anthropological practice but also shapes new approaches to understanding reality. Researchers’ intimate experiences of extraordinary events also raise unique ethical questions about academic writing.

Paper long abstract

Anthropologists study death as a social and cultural phenomenon related to situated realities. In West African ontologies, the dead not only connect to the living through complex social relations, but also possess agency, which can affect the living in positive or negative ways. Yet, as a frame for the study of spiritual beliefs and practices, these ontologies have certain implications for researchers, as the dead can know, observe, validate or disagree. What happens to anthropologists’ modes of being when they enter a world of otherworldly connections, relations and recollections? Can they intimately feel the influence of the dead on them and on their work? When working within the processual relationships linking the living and the dead, researchers may suspend their own beliefs, while experiencing uncertainty as familiar boundaries between visibility and invisibility, or permanence and impermanence, progressively blur. This paper addresses the possibilities of embracing a different ontological reality, by which the ‘familiar’ is both abandoned and preserved along Mannoni’s line (1964) ‘I know well, but all the same…’ With reference to several supernatural and spiritual experiences during the author’s fieldwork in Sierra Leone – the appearance of a spirit, the manifestation of a dead person and a funeral – this paper questions researchers’ ability and authority to convey such events into academic narratives. It argues that the unique entanglement between personal experience, social relations and collective belief requires a type of existential writing that reflects renewed reflexivity, complex emotions and critical changes in the researcher’s ways of understanding reality.