Abstract
More than ten years after her first ethnography in the Bocage, Jeanne Favret-Saada formulates a more polished, definitive methodological reorientation towards an ethnography that takes “being affected” as a crucial dimension of fieldwork and anthropological knowledge. One of the effects of this encounter of ethnography and witchcraft is that witchcraft is no longer assumed to be a system of beliefs, but rather as a linguistic pragmatics. The ethnographer and her ethnography, in turn, shift the purportedly invulnerable vantage point of the knowing subject, now affected by the relationship with people and the worlds they inhabit. The aim of this article is to present Jeanne Favret-Saada’s lessons in ethnography as contributions to contemporary anthropology. I thereby argue that Les mots, la mort et le sorts and other books and articles on experience in the field carve a path for a critical and creative ethnography based on a vulnerability of the knowing subject that, I argue, is a path for ethnography not traveled by the reflexive turn of the 1980s and 1990s.
Keywords:
Ethnography; anthropological theory; Jeanne Favret-Saada and witchcraft