ABSTRACT
This chapter reconceptualizes the anthropology of magic, conspiracy theories, misinformation, and other related phenomenon as the anthropology of low-verifiability beliefs. This reconceptualization focuses anthropological investigations into these topics on what is shared epistemologically across these categories of belief: that they are difficult (but not impossible) to verify even in the believers’ own epistemologies. Most misinformation research instead makes explicit ontological assumptions by defining the object of study to be false beliefs; that is, the misinformation literature usually defines “misinformation” as beliefs that do not correspond to ontological reality. Anthropologists can and should reorient the study of misinformation to avoid metaphysical assertions and instead focus on beliefs that are epistemically difficult to verify as true or false within people’s own ontologies. This reorientation of perspective explains otherwise oddball correlations of magical and scientistic (but false) beliefs with things like belief in both false and true (!) political conspiracy theories. In contrast to the application of CCA to event particulars, anthropologists can maintain a fully scientific and not humanistic study of misinformation by avoiding ontological assertions as regards the content of misinformation.
Ontological realities, however, tend to invade research paradigms. Because the truth or falsehood of misinformation is often of limited verifiability, it could be true and anthropologists at times will need to investigate directly the truth-value of low verifiability claims especially when they themselves have policy importance. This takes the researcher, once again, into an ontological space where strictly scientific epistemologies are not fully applicable.
