Policies of evidence: Between truthfulness, objectivity, and ethnography

Abstract

Throughout the last decades, a number of analytical sensibilities within the social sciences, and in particular within anthropology, have endeavored to decolonize alterity by creating new conceptual and empirical spaces that respect and make room for the sociomaterial coexistence of multiple worlds. Embracing this intellectual and cosmopolitical project, this article explores, conceptually and ethnographically, what kind of evidence emerges in different worldings, from the premise that we do not know what evidence is until we know what its capabilities are. Based on a critical analysis of two perspectives that afford a dangerous foreclosure to other possible horizons, namely, post-truth politics and objectivizing Science, this article considers ethnography as a fundamental ally in the collective attempt to make space for other worlds. We are thus interested in multiplying the notion of evidence beyond its understanding as a modern artifact. To this end, we suggest the idea of evidence to make think as a heuristic that accounts for the necessary relational hyperreflexivity needed to questioning the absence of thought, which is inherent to post-truth politics univocality of modern evidence. Following this discussion, we present the articles that are part of this dossier by foregrounding how they promote this respectful evidence towards many possible worlds.