Abstract
AbstractThis piece interrogates aporias of epistemic certainty by thinking through categories of medicine and uchawi (witchcraft) in Tanzania. I open with an account of how I misrecognized the meaning of a newspaper article about “head‐switching operations” posted on a hospital bulletin board. I then offer a close reading of the colonial/anthropological archive and its epistemic disavowal of uchawi nearly a century ago to demonstrate this disavowal's similarities to my own mistake. I learned from this mistake to question the grounds on which I (like my colonial predecessors) separate and purify categories like medicine, religion, and witchcraft. I conclude by discussing how to interrupt that impulse: to recognize and refuse the epistemic conceits of singularity and closure, I propose epistemic humility enabled by “not knowing” and by inhabiting the undecided situation. This resists the colonial, anti‐Black violence of the single story about Africa and opens to the possibility of storying otherwise.
Published Version
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