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connectivities with our research partners and teachers. Recursive epis-
temology expresses the dynamics of the ethical and epistemological
process that concerns her.
In “Ethnographic Rendez-vous: Field Accounts of Unexpected Vul-
nerabilities and Constructed Differences,” Anahí Viladrich conducted
the first study on Argentines living in New York City (nyc), where she
entered tango-dancing halls (tango milongas), in which Argentines
(tango artists and customers) exchange valuable social resources on
the basis of social solidarity, common interests, and friendship. Vilad-
rich demonstrates how ethnographic data emerges from dialogues.
Study participants, it is shown, reinvent themselves by telling, retell-
ing, creating, and weaving more than one story from which to make
sense of their unthreaded migratory paths. From there, they assemble
(and imagine) promising migratory trajectories. Within the delicate
balance of structure of opportunity, social conditions, and serendip-
ity, Viladrich illustrates the games of social identification and diver-
gences between the ethnographer and her study participants as two
sides of the same coin bringing esthetic moments of mutual under-
standing, even when these are also the source of elusive resentments,
inconclusive demands, and somehow-painful acted-out expressions
of indifference.
“When the Extraordinary Hits Home: Experiencing Spiritualism,”
the book’s sixth chapter, consists of an account by Deirdre Meintel
of her extended field-based research among Spiritualists in Montreal
where she discovered that her own experience was crucial for even
knowing what questions to ask about matters such as clairvoyance
and healing. She is an intellectual originally from France, and they
are mainly francophone Québécois of working-class origin. Yet, in
the course of her research, she finds no radical distinction between
home and field, “us” and “them,” her experience and theirs. Meintel
initially expected to receive clairvoyance and healing as part of the
research; to her surprise, she was invited early on to learn how to do
them. She describes how being the subject of clairvoyance and heal-
ing and also becoming a clairvoyant and healer involves a great deal
of learning through nonverbal means, notably via bodily experiences
or mental ones that involve bodily metaphors (e.g., “hearing” and
Entanglements and Faithfulness to Experience
