New Practices of Cultural Truth Making: Evidence Work in Negotiations with State Authorities

Abstract

AbstractThis article looks at negotiations with state authorities and the evidentiary criteria they create in culturally contrasting contexts when phenomena deal with elements that for the dominant society are conceptualized as “supernatural.” We draw from the level of experiences of other‐than‐human beings, especially spirits and “ungraspable” presences, as social practices in and of themselves as well as acts of mobilizing those which are meaningful for knowledge production in Indigenous Amazonia and North European contexts. Our two cases show how in state territorial protection debates and health services, visibility, quantification, measurability, Euro‐American dominant, mainly binary, and bounded concepts are employed to create the grounds of validity. Yet, for actual individual or collective experiences, new types of evidence work can emerge in collaborations. Thus, this article sheds light on the needs for contextual and communicative actions to overcome contrasting onto‐epistemologies in the context of the state.