Ethnographies of Doubt: Faith and Uncertainty in Contemporary Societies

Religious and secular convictions have powerful effects, but their fundaments are often surprisingly fragile. Because of the conspicuous role that nationalisms, populisms, and fundamentalisms have in our globalizing world it is essential not to take their strength for granted, but to acknowledge that conviction and doubt are part of the same dynamic. The chapters in this volume demonstrate that doubt and hesitation are daily concerns even among the Maoist movement in India, right-wing populists in Europe and newly pious Somali Muslims in London. In fact, new converts are often such stringent believers precisely because they need to dispel their own lingering doubts, while revolutionary movements survive only through the denial of ambiguity. By studying everyday doubt this volume unravels the mechanisms by which convictions gain and lose their force, and analyzes the dynamics that propel loosely held ideas into committed action. Whereas a focus on overcoming doubt highlights the exclusionary effects of committed action, attention to the breakdown of belief serves to better understand the cycles of hope, conviction, and disillusion that bespeak the human condition. This is the central theme in several chapters looking at ideological break-down. The collapse of communism, for instance, produced an epistemological crisis in which all knowledge became unstable, prompting gold-miners in Mongolia to go as far as to doubt the cosmos. The post-ideological environment of Western democracies also produces anxieties, as the break-down of the bonds of trust between governments and citizens results in feelings of betrayal. Questions of truth and action are always related: if nothing is worth fighting for then apathy and hopelessness may become symptomatic. By paying attention to the mechanisms and dynamics by which specific ideas gain and lose their credibility this volume sheds important new light on the role of ideas in social and political action.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: towards an ethnography of doubt / Mathijs Pelkmans PART I: WHAT IS TRUE? EPISTEMOLOGICAL DOUBT 2. Believing in spirits and doubting the Cosmos in the Mongolian gold mines / Mette High 3. ‘Believe but don't be superstitious!’ Discourses of authority and authenticity in a Taiwanese spirit- Medium shrine / Friedrich Binder 4. Old Believers’ passion play: faith and doubt in an Orthodox ritualist movement / Vlad Naumescu 5. The frontier between doubt and certainty in a Malagasy ethnopsychology / Maurice Bloch PART II: WHAT TO DO? UNCERTAINTY AND HESITATION 6. Suspense in retrospective ethnography / Henk Driessen 7. Fragile ideas and uncertain action in a Central Asian industrial wasteland / Mathijs Pelkmans 8. In search of certainty in revolutionary India / Alpa Shah PART III: Doubt and Modernity 9. Betrayal and its modern consequences / David Napier 10. Doubt and the anxieties of the everyday / Thomas Blom Hansen 11. Afterword / Matthew Engelke

About the Author :
Mathijs Pelkmans is Lecturer in Anthropology at the London School of Economics, UK. He is the author of Defending the Border: Identity, Religion and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia (2006, Cornell University Press) and Conversion after Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union (2009, Berghahn Books).

Review :
To come