Thanks again Marcio. I like the idea of an experimental 'I don't know' that can be used to foreground various combinations of ontological clarity and semantic obscurity or alternatively semantic clarity and ontological obscurity. This reminds me a little of Gluckman's notion that there may be a necessary kind of 'naivety' that comes with the need for ethnographic 'compression' ('Closed Systems, Open Minds')[/size]. Now I look at it again, I also have some doubts about Graeber's notion that his Malagasy informants saying 'I don't know', and his own 'I don't know', form something to 'talk about' a sort of common sense ground. The claim is intriguing but has not solved the question: everyone seems to be on the 'same page', there appears to be semantic and ontological clarity, but is there?
[/size]It makes me think on the one hand of the people I am familiar with in Jamaica who say 'I don't believe in Obeah' but do not mean by this that 'Obeah is not real' (which might have once been my first guess at a translation). Contrastingly I have often heard people say 'I don't believe in God, I know God'. This time 'believe' suggests 'not knowing for sure' whereas 'I know God' seems to underline rhetorically and semantically the absolute clarity of the ontological knowledge involved. But this cannot be transferred to 'I don't believe in Obeah' because 'believe' here means something like 'it has no efficacy when directed at me'.
[/size]Now I think of another situation I have written about where a friend of mine, Jeanette, hears the voices of spirits. She is in no doubt about the ontological characteristics of these spirit voices--they come at certain times of day, speak in certain tones of voice and so on. She does not absolutely know what they want. She does sometimes question her own sanity,--whether her knowledge is that of a notionally sane person. She equally does view herself as specially chosen to receive these spirit voices. So one sees a person sometimes committing strongly, sometimes doubting or ambiguating, sometimes strongly rejecting certain framings of knowing and so on.
I liked this comment of Avi's:
[/size]Hence what is of interest is not coherently describing 'a culture', nor attributing special others with radical alterity per se, but looking at the incoherency between people, their ideas, and between anthropologist and people, as from that one can start to recognise how 'unknowns' manifest themselves in people's cosmologies. And do so as part of negotiating, dominating, possessing, serving for/with the interests of living humans i.e. cosmopolitics. [/size]
Hence what is of interest is not coherently describing 'a culture', nor attributing special others with radical alterity per se, but looking at the incoherency between people, their ideas, and between anthropologist and people, as from that one can start to recognise how 'unknowns' manifest themselves in people's cosmologies. And do so as part of negotiating, dominating, possessing, serving for/with the interests of living humans i.e. cosmopolitics.
[/size]More a comment than a question, Marcio, but intended to indicate how suggestive I have found your discussion.