Spirited encounters: Notes on the politics and poetics of representing the uncanny in anthropology

This essay returns to two foundational ethnographies in the anthropology of spirit phenomena by E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Vincent Crapanzano, as well as Jean Rouch’s controversial Les Maîtres Fous, to problematize the ongoing and subtle ways in which cultural relativism and its subsequent critiques reproduce disengagement from and disavowal of the uncanny metaphysics of others, even while we anthropologists represent them. Arguing that the stakes of what gets to count as ‘real’ in anthropology have had and continue to have profound consequences for how we imagine sociality as well as practice encounter across ontological difference, I trace, with Marily Strathern, James Clifford, and Michel de Certeau's help primarily, how incommensurability with ‘uncanny’ phenomena is both created and sustained at three points in the anthropological project: fieldwork, the writing of ethnography, and the reception of ethnography. I close by advocating that we risk opening ourselves to the ontologies of others.