Émilie Guitard: On the traces of the sorcerer – combining oral and material data on ethnographic fieldwork

HUMA Doctoral Seminar Series

Speaker: Émilie Guitard (CNRS, France)

Based on a scientific debate initiated in France in 2017 on the materiality of witchcraft practices in Africa, this presentation looks at the ways to combine data on speeches and representations on the one hand and data on practices, traces and materiality on the other hand, as they can be collected during ethnographic fieldwork. From a personal experience of research on this theme in connection with waste management in Cameroon (Guitard, 2018), the aim is to encourage (young) social science researchers to pay also attention to the non-verbalised practices (notably involving the body), the spatial arrangement or the objects, being part of a specific material culture, to capture other aspects of a social phenomenon left unaddressed by people's discourses, to highlight the discrepancies and gaps between what people are saying and what they are actually doing, or to anchor their speeches in more concrete data.

 Reading: Between Municipal Management and Sorcery Uses of Waste. Émilie Guitard (2018). Cahiers d’études africaines.
Article made available with the kind permission of the author

About the speaker: Émilie Guitard is a permanent researcher in Anthropology at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), France. She studies the relationship to nature in several cities in sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria, Cameroon, Zimbabwe). On the field, she combines ethnographic research, methods from ethnoscience and collaborations with artists to understand waste management practices in line with relations of power, local knowledge about urban biodiversity, the role of nature in defining urban identities, and the place given to plants in city governance in the era of the "sustainable city". More recently, she has also been developing a reflection on artistic productions featuring Africa, particularly urban, with a focus on the imaginaries of African cities in the future, as expressed in speculative fiction.