ABSTRACT
Proceeding from a perspective guided by Wittgenstein’s “second philosophy”, this essay aims to probe the limits of the ethnographic endeavor vis-à-vis worlds unthinkable in terms of the ethnographer’s own “hinge propositions” around which doubt can turn, but which cannot themselves be allowed to fall into doubt. To do so, I revisit a set of ethnographic data from my first fieldwork among practitioners of Afro-Cuban ritual traditions in Miami where I was repeatedly told that the spirit of a dead slave named Tomás was watching over me. I had originally used the “idea of Tomás” as an analytic device to establish my own implication in a violent Atlantic modernity whose (however unwitting) heir I, like all “moderns”, am. Here, however, I explore how a Wittgensteinian approach may help us overcome facile representationalism, give the dead – Tomás, no less than Wittgenstein – a place in the scaffolding of our mind, engage them as metapersons, and so perpetuate their presence in our worlds or forms of life.
