Modes of Existence

Is AIME taking magic, spirit and other invisible entities seriously? > The answer is definitely yes. It would be astonishing for an anthropological project not to take the invisible entities with which informants build their world very seriously. What is original about the AIME project is that it raises a set of questions that allow to the inquirer to define, for each claim to existence, the specifications of these entities. Thus, instead of a general division between the visible and invisible, the real and imagined, spiritual and material agents, a much larger gamut of possibilities of existence is envisaged, and as far as possible, precisely delineated. The expression ‘to take seriously’, when applied to these entities, is pushed to a new degree of precision because, contrary to all of the critical social sciences and much of ethnographic research, these specifications have to be ‘talked back to’ by those who are seriously engaged with them