Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the possibility of ethnography in the absence of an idea of "the self" as a coherent stable and rational entity. Building upon the incorporation of meditation in ethnography it address the possibility of research in a terrain informed by non-Western, non-dualistic epistemologies.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary neurosciences still have one fundamental riddle to solve today. Having been able to identify where most of our sensory and perceptive capacities are located, they still have not found the location of “the self”. Could be it be that this is because the self is not something internal to the human being? If this is true, then we ought to also re-think some key pillars of ethnography. Participant-observation, image-making, interviews and other ethnographic techniques all build upon the assumption of the existence of a coherent, stable, contained, permanent and rational self. Reflexivity, the key distinctive feature of anthropological research, is about the act of making ourselves (and our viewers and readers) conscious about the consequences of our own positionalities; of being acquainted with the extent to which the images (mental or material) that we collect and produce during fieldwork are caused by the particular vantage point from which we observe the world. Yet, what happens in the absence of the certainty of such a point of view? What if we were to realize that our perceiving subject is nothing but one of the images that we create? In other words, that “the self” does not really exist? Building upon experiments with the incorporation of insights gathered from meditation into the act of conducting ethnography the present paper will address the possibility of an ethnography enacted in a terrain informed by non-Western, non-rationality based epistemologies. One informed by non-dualism, by the Buddhist principle of double-negation, by intuition and affectivity.