No dia 12 de dezembro, Iracema Dulley (ICS-ULisboa) será a oradora convidada do Seminário do Grupo de Investigação Diversidades. O tema desta sessão será Witchcraft, suspicion, ethnographic theory: Notes from Central Angola. A partir das 11h, na Sala Maria de Sousa do ICS-ULisboa e online.

Proposing an ethnographic theory of suspicion, this paper draws on my encounter with narratives of witchcraft and sorcery during fieldwork in Angola between 2014 and 2019 as well as on Samuel Chiwale’s autobiographical account, in which he relates accusations of witchcraft and treason directed at him and others in Jamba, the territory controlled by UNITA during the civil war (1975-2002) in Angola. Through a discussion of how witchcraft and ethnographic theorization face a similar methodological challenge in dealing with the relationship between the general and the particular, I argue for an investment in affirmative suspicion that acknowledges the provisional and comparative character of generalization in ethnographic theory.

Iracema Dulley holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of São Paulo and is Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. She has published on colonial and post-colonial Angola; research methodology; translation and naming practices; witchcraft and sorcery; and processes of differentiation related to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. She has held fellowships at ICI Berlin, Free University Berlin, IFK in Vienna, the London School of Economics, Columbia University, the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning, and the Federal University of São Carlos. Recent publications include the monograph On the Emic Gesture: Difference and Ethnography in Roy Wagner (Routledge, 2019), the co-edited collection Displacing Theory Through the Global South (ICI Berlin Press, 2024), and various peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She is also the author of the monograph Deus é feiticeiro: prática e disputa nas missões católicas em Angola colonial (Annablume, 2010).