Paper short abstract:

How do skilful practitioners comport themselves towards the unknown? This paper discusses not-knowing within wine production, and calls into question notions about what knowledge is, as well as assumptions about an omnipresent and unqualified desire-for-knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographers are in the business of procuring knowledge about the knowledge of others, and debates abound on the contents and nature of this object of study. Only recently, however, has non-knowing been raised as a topic. If ethnographers have long endeavoured to valorize marginalized knowledge, the fundamental question now concerns the extent to which they have also projected their own unqualified desire-to-know onto those whom they study (Mair, Kelly, and High 2012).

Based on long-term fieldwork with Italian producers of "natural" wine, this paper reverses the question of knowledge, in order to focus on domains of non-knowing in cellar and vineyard. It shows how producers comport themselves to what they do not know, and how such things belong within the course of their practice. While these producers do not tend to construe ignorance as a virtue in itself, their work is such as to expose it to the influence of things unknown. Their production cannot be confined within the domain of the knowable, nor can knowledge be extended to encompass all things relevant to production, without diverging from what is construed as a good manner of working.

On a theoretical level, this argument would have us question models of knowledge that assume it to be about prediction and control, forefronting instead ways of knowledge in forms always vulnerable in its exposure to the unknown. Methodologically, the paper raises the question of how we as ethnographers can write about non-knowing without purporting to know more than those about whom we write.