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Maxwell's Demons: Disenchantment in the Field
Author(s) -
McIntosh Janet
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
anthropology and humanism
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1548-1409
pISSN - 1559-9167
DOI - 10.1525/anhu.2004.29.1.63
Subject(s) - disenchantment , meditation , ethnography , field (mathematics) , sociology , epistemology , indigenous , politics , habitus , philosophy , anthropology , political science , law , ecology , theology , mathematics , pure mathematics , biology
This is an account of the fluctuating spiritual beliefs of my research assistant, Maxwell, and me as we moved through his cultural world side by side—I, initially, as an agnostic ethnographer; he, initially, as the passionate would‐be leader of a revival movement for a marginalized indigenous religion. The article is intended as a meditation on the fine line between belief and disbelief, on the politics and pain of adhering to a stigmatized belief system, and on the underexplored complexities that may arise from the mismatch between ethnographers' epistemology and that of their assistants in the field.