Violence on the horizon: Horizography and serendipity in the ethnographer’s Zimbabwean field

Abstract

Horizons are notoriously difficult places to carry out research because they keep on shifting and thus deny researchers the necessary immersion to do participant observation, or even to gain access to such horizons for fieldwork. Drawing on fieldwork in southeastern Zimbabwe, this article critically discusses several horizons in a context of witchcraft-related violence and interparty political violence. Arguing that methodologies which focus on the past and present are not sufficient to research what is still on the horizons, that is, what is emergent and has not yet settled in the field for traditional fieldwork, the article postulates a methodology called horizography as suitable for researching what is still on the horizons. Put differently, horizography is partly premised on insights from the emergent quantum anthropology which is based on ongoing discoveries in quantum mechanics which recognize action at a distance in a world where there are entanglements between empirical reality and nonempirical reality, and, of course, different worlds. Besides, drawing on the emergent areas of foresight studies, anthropology of the futures and anthropology of anticipation, the article contends that there is need for innovative methodologies which focus on emergent futures.