ABSTRACT
“Me encanta” Venezuelan musicians would say about music, meaning that they are enchanted by it, that they love it. I describe the co-experience of enchantment as an ethnographic method for sensing the world-building potential of people’s engagement with music practices. Enchantment captures the transformative effect of aesthetic experience, as well as the dreams for the future that are conjured through it. In this chapter, I explore the limits of the notion of enchantment in encounters with violence and extreme precarity, and its eventual transmutations into disenchantment. Disenchantment brings into sharper focus our responsibilities as ethnographers, a process I explore through the notion of attentiveness. Attentiveness emphasizes responsiveness to others, to the past, and to our own personal and intellectual transformations. Attentiveness describes acts of striving – and at times failing – to experience with, listen, care for, and be with others. Attentiveness illuminates my own ethnographic labor of care toward my interlocutors. Reflecting on research I did more than ten years ago, I study the limits of ethnographic attentiveness by listening to the silences in my fieldwork archive and looking for ways to make space for them in my writing. One response to these silences is to consistently revisit my analytical frameworks, concepts, and positionality, creating what I call a constellation of concepts.
