Enchantment as Method - McMaster Experts

SummaryThis article proposes enchantment as an ethnographic method that attunes us to the world‐building potential of dreams and the imagination, as well as to the structural forces that simultaneously constitute human lives. To be enchanted is to experience wonder, to let oneself be moved. This concept emerges from my fieldwork with young musicians in Venezuela who, as residents of urban barrios, confront structural violence and sociopolitical crises. I study how through music and stories they conjure worlds they call their own, acts of creation that persist in spite of social decay. By engaging in flights of the imagination of possibilities foreclosed by their material environments, and by portraying and experiencing themselves and their communities otherwise, they refuse to be determined by dominant logics and rationalities. Letting myself be enchanted by and with them allows me to account for spaces of experience that may escape measurement yet have latent social and political potential. A method of enchantment counterbalances the emphasis on structures of domination espoused by critical thinking in the social sciences. Holding the critical and enchanted approach in creative tension allows us to recognize the creative potential of play, fantasy, and music that emanate from their own force in the crevices of systems of power that sway people’s destinies.

Enchantment as Method Journal Articles