At the time of launching this book project, Edward Abse reminded us
that we ought also to pay attention to the darker side of the explora-
tion of other forms of knowing and of fieldwork entanglements. This
darker side is expressed not so much in “ecstasy” as in its opposite,
“paranoia,” from the Greek para, “beside” or “beyond,” and noos,
“mind.” Engaged in the world of sorcerers and healers, authors note
that “the insider/outside dialectic of ethnographic fieldwork (Thom
2004 , 117 ) produces a wide range of emotional and intellectual re-
sponses to tensions felt in the context of competing loyalties: to com-
peting hosts and to one’s profession; to one’s previous identities and
to one’s emerging, more complex self transformed through narratives
and experiences of the dark side of life.
In “Don Patricio’s Dream: Shamanism and the Torments of Secrecy
in Fieldwork among the Mazatecs,” Edward Abse reflects on the study
of shamanism and encounters with sorcery among the Mazatec Indi-
ans of southern Mexico to explore epistemological and ethical quan-
daries involved in the pursuit of ethnographic knowledge. The nar-
ration of a fieldwork experience describes a gradual shift of emphasis
in research activity away from relatively detached observation and
structured techniques of inquiry, toward an unwitting (and unwill-
ing) intensive participation in the tortuous social dramas of his hosts,
in which he finally appears as the alleged victim of aggressive magi-
cal attacks. He explores the ways in which co-participation in a cul-
turally specific form of paranoia ultimately became the intersubjec-
tive method of his field research, as well as the trembling grounds for
Part Four
Keeping Violence and Conflict in View