Refusal and Aporia: At the Limits of Anthropological Knowledge

ABSTRACT As anthropologists increasingly take up refusal, opacity, and other forms of resistance to surveillance and subjugation, this paper questions what implications this has for the discipline in practice. Considering anthropology's enduring centrality in defining what it means to be human, including the various ways that this category has been used to exclude, enslave, oppress, dispossess, and dehumanize, I ask in what ways the ethnographic will to know reproduces anti‐Black and colonial ontologies. In particular, I analyze the many occasions on which, during research, my methodologies, ensnared in legacies of orientalism, necropolitics, and confessional language ideologies, ran up against my interest in how the people I worked with engaged with the unknown, unknowability, and not knowing. Building on these experiences, I outline the ways that refusal draws our attention to an aporia in anthropology's construction of the human.