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In relation to the idea of keeping Trickster – as master of chaos and disorder, boundary-crosser, and culture-giver – in our ethnographies, the second strategy that I would propose is to “keep it messy”, disordered, to let there be loose ends and dissonances.

— UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge by Diana Espirito Santo (Page 153)

I approached ufology, first, as a researcher interested in paradigms of evidence. But then I began to focus on those stories about experiences that made no sense to the experiencer. I could have brushed them off; or archive them to later sort out. They represented the conceptual void, or nothingness, of fieldwork. What did not fit the data. But I was drawn like a moth to a fire.

— UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge by Diana Espirito Santo (Page 149)

the fragmentation of knowledge and its incompletion; the inability, and sometimes, even irrelevance of conceptual knowledge on a society’s cosmology. Additionally, there is often an irrelevance of the concept of cosmology itself. Order gives way to fracture and ambiguity (analytically, at least), if there ever was order in the first place. It is thus not simply the ufological “absurd” in Chile, as I have described it, that “lacks” an idea of order or principle. Many complex shamanic or religious cosmoses are also patently “lacking” it, at least from the perspective of those who live them through and through.

— UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge by Diana Espirito Santo (Page 141)

Whether it is convincing or not, what I hoped to do was to dismantle the notion that our ethnographies have to say something that correlates in an immediate and binding way with theoretical and conceptual structures. This is not to suggest that we leave the ethnographic data to its own fate, but that, in thinking through it we can also allow it to simply be, perhaps even without a communication prerogative.

— UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge by Diana Espirito Santo (Page 131)