Contribution short abstract:

Facing uncertainty, in multiple dimensions, stimulates creativity as a response to unexpected experiences. In this presentation, creativity is discussed as a tool for stimulating the emergence of original forms of creating and sharing ethnographic knowledge-practices.

Contribution long abstract:

In times of uncertainty, the ethnographic efforts are forced to redefine their aims, strategies, and methods. The contemporary overlaps of multiple crises, being these, social, environmental, military, economic, and so on, are producing a concomitant epistemological indeterminacy. The proliferation of multiple voices, also via the dissemination of digital tools, on the counterpart, is challenging the idea of academic paradigms with the inclusion of previously silenced actors. In the meanwhile, such epistemic uncertainty enables to alternative and original strategies in the ethnographic effort to emerge. This presentation will concentrate on the indeterminacy of the definition of "ecosystem" generated by a dialogue between academic scholars and the Mebengokré people in the Amazon. The ecological crises affecting their Indigenous Land, caused by development projects as well as by illegal invasions of the land, stimulated the Mebengokré to engage in a dialogue with academic scholars for trying to create innovative bridges between the two knowledge-practices. On the counterpart, the emergence of the digital tools enabled the dialogue between the parts to assume the dimension of a continuative and diary exchange. The idea of the presentation is that the ecological uncertainty can be faced not only in its environmental dimension, but it can produce a epistemological uncertainty which lets the emergence of original ecological understandings.