Not-Knowing

Through an anthropological analysis of not-knowing, this book explores experiences that can be described as a-conceptual and absurd.

This book deals conceptually with ethnographic realities that resist explanation and definition. Through an analysis inspired by literary and performance theory, art, science fiction and Afro-Futurism, theology, philosophy, as well as anthropology, it explores diverse areas of social life to provide clues to how to approach not-knowing.Ethnographers of socio-cultural phenomena routinely face moments in the field that evoke no answers for our interlocutors, or in which answers come in entirely different forms from those anthropologists and other scholars expect. The over-emphasis on structure and meaning in social science, and anthropology in particular, has inhibited the study of a-conceptual or 'darker' spaces of cultural phenomena. In this book, Diana Espírito Santo and Sergio González Varela explore areas of social life often neglected by traditional ethnographers, analytically described as spaces of negation, of not-knowing, where bodies, environments, and realities resist explanation or description, and where there are ultimately no answers – either for interlocutors or researchers. Examining fields as diverse as divination, parapsychology, monsterology, Brazilian capoeira, tattoo artistry, art and aesthetics, Afrofuturism, fantasy fiction, ufology, and Cuban Spiritism, they argue that radical uncertainty should propel novel forms of theory.