Surprises in a minor key: Doing ethnology and anthropology in post/socialist modernities

Abstract

What are the epistemological strategies of anthropology as a globally decentered discipline? How do anthropologists work beyond the colonially inflected geopolitics of surprise, in which knowledge supposedly emerges from a serendipitous encounter between the modern Western liberal subject and the non-modern Other? Ethnologists and anthropologists working in regions with historical experiences of socialist modernity have engaged with different modalities of surprise, only some of which have been theorized as relevant to disciplinary epistemology. Thinking through surprises in a minor key and drawing on the epistemological traditions of European ethnology, I suggest that conducting ethnology and anthropology in post/socialist modernities can be understood as a study of the unexpected in everyday life.