Navigating epistemic disarticulations
这篇研究笔记探讨了在多重认知体系下研究问题的挑战，以1988年英国游客在肯尼亚遇害案为例，分析了盲目接受关于非洲的既有知识、文化无知以及谣言作为知识生产形式对研究的影响，呼吁更深入地理解非洲人作为特定认知共同体成员和现代国家公民的双重身份。
This research note reflects on the challenges of conducting research on issues framed by multiple epistemic regimes. Using insights drawn from my work on the 1988 murder of 28-year old British tourist Julie Ann Ward in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya, I discuss the problem of opacities created by a combination of uncritical embrace of received knowledge about Africa/ns and cultural illiteracy in competing knowledge systems around which Africa/ns frame their worlds. I also examine rumour as an influential genre of knowledge production, contestation and critique in African societies—what has been termed a form of ‘community intelligence’—that challenges single-lens conceptions of credible knowledge. The research note argues for a more attentive grasp of Africans’ fluid self-conceptions as both ethno-cultural citizens of particular epistemic communities and as citizens of the modern state with its attendant institutions. Serious engagement with Africans’ shifting senses of themselves and the epistemic and ethical protocols they deem themselves subject to, under different circumstances, can have productive implications for our understanding of Africans’ lives, options and choices.