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KNOWABLE AND THE UNKNOWABLE IN ETHNOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTERS: A CASE OF SORCERY, RUMOUR, AND GOSSIP AMONG TUAREG IN NORTHERN NIGER

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Rasmussen S.

Slovenský národopis (Slovak Ethnology)

2022

vol. 70

issue 3

392 –410

This article explores issues of knowledge production, its limits, and uncertainty and suspicion in ethnographic field research through the lens of what anthropologists conventionally call “sorcery” beliefs and practices involving a love target, its treatment, and its aftermath of “shapeshifting”, occurring in the social context of gossip, rumour, and suspicion among the Tuareg, sometimes called Kel Tamajaq after their language, in Niger, West Africa. Sorcery, I show, provides a useful lens for exploring how gossip and rumour can reveal social critiques and ways in which a crisis is handled. In these processes, matters of “truth” and “ignorance” are complex, thereby allowing scope for broader discussion of ontology. The focus is on an unexpected, serendipitous field encounter with sorcery similar, though not identical to the re-directing of power of Islamic objects, words, and writing in some other African Muslim communities, with emotions awakened and then cast away in a puzzling outcome. The analysis explores how far and in what ways sorcery and responses to it, like conspiracy theories, allow the creation of multiple narratives about political tensions. This analysis is inspired by, but also hopefully builds on approaches to ontological ambiguity and uncertainty and approaches to the role of gossip and rumour in reviewing “reality” from different sense modalities and philosophical assumptions. The challenge here is to interpret events and avoid, or at least minimize imposing the observer’s own concepts of “truth” onto endogenous knowledge and its local expressions.

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1 Slovenský národopis (Slovak Ethnology)

1 Rasmussen S.

1 2022

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KNOWABLE AND THE UNKNOWABLE IN ETHNOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTERS: A CASE OF SORCERY, RUMOUR, AND GOSSIP AMONG TUAREG IN NORTHERN NIGER