Not-Knowing. An Anthropological Account

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.

• Offers an anthropological analysis of not-knowing and the blind spots in anthropology
• Introduces a compelling argument about the absurd, the weird, and thinking the impossible from an interdisciplinary perspective
• Engages with the issue of radical alterity in politics, religion, literature, and art

Authors

Diana Espírito Santo , Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Diana Espírito Santo is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She has performed fieldwork in three countries, co-edited several books, and written four monographs, including Spirited Histories: Technologies, Media and Trauma in Paranormal Chile (2022) and UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge (2024).

Sergio González Varela , University of Warsaw

Sergio González Varela is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. He is the author of several books, including Resistir: Hacia una Antropologia de la Resiliencia (2025) and Capoeira, Mobility, and Tourism: Preserving an Afro-Brazilian Tradition in a Globalized World (2019).