Ethnography and Fantasy (Small Epistemic Machines)

Abstract

In an ethnography that I carried out over 12 years in a city on the southern border of Mexico, I found two objects ―a plaster Niño Dios and a plastic rope― that marked the course of the investigation. These findings revealed, on the one hand, interstitial lives and, on the other, ways of thinking about the materialities of otherness, the ways in which these objects and forms of existence are libidinously invested and haunted by specters. The Niño Dios and la soga allow us to explore registers of subjectivity and social relationships that we are unable to discover through the usual research practices. If, as an argument, fantasies are neither “observable” nor directly questionable, I wonder how we can approach them. I propose that these objects function as small epistemic machines that condense some social fantasies and allow us to explore tensions between dissident forms of life and desire and veiled or avoided social antagonisms.