“We know that nagas [water dragons] exist, because people see them all the time” claims my friend Nok. It is a hard claim to reconcile with my own world, one in which the Mekong River does not contain vast fire-spitting serpents. Recent anthropological work advises us to deal with different ontological worlds, ones that are irresolvable and which should not be equated with the anthropologists’ own (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). Here, the anthropologist is to analyze Nok’s world as a separate one, taken on its own terms. Other anthropologists, taking up the notion of incommensurable ontological worlds, have noted their political possibilities in challenging the taken-for-granted-ness of colonial or white supremacist worlds (De La Cadena 2015).
But this attention towards incommensurable worlds has the distressing effect of erasing Nok’s own status as an observer, theorist, and thinker, and reducing her to a Thai thinker. She does not give a caveat and say “Thai people see nagas all the time”. Here, then, it is worth thinking through the kinds of evidence that Nok gives – in this case, dreams. In this paper, I address the quality of dreams as a way to address and deal with an uncertain, uncanny or “weird” (Fisher 2016) occurrence within the world, and how dreams come to express possibilities, suppositions, or uncertain claims without the requirement that they be resolved. Dreams, here, are evidence of a sort, ones that allow an open-ended ontological world, one that does not call for resolution nor enforces boundaries (e.g. a “Thai” world and a “Western” one). It is also a way to pay attention to and respect our interlocutors as theoreticians in their own right, rather than relegating them to their own, separate reality.
Day 2 (May 28, Fri HK/SG time / British Summer Time (BST) / Central European Summer Time (CEST))
Panel 6: Beliefs in Theory
9-10:30pm HK/SG / 2-3:30pm BST / 3-4:30pm CEST / 9-10:30am EDT / 6-7:30am PDT