Abstract
The research method outlined in this chapter started from a question of whether agribusiness companies had a different understanding of what land ‘is’ than farming communities in Sierra Leone. From there, I ran into a ‘problem’ in research design: what kinds of methods can social scientists use to investigate these diverse experiences of being? If there is a radical difference in understanding the nature of being, then the ability to experience that difference—to truly know it—is hardly resolvable. However, it is possible learn about these diverse understandings. This chapter illustrates this with a method of ‘community mapping.’ Rather than a ‘flat map’ produced on a surface, this is a ‘living’ map of relationality. In the method, relations between people, ancestors, crops, chickens, goats, and stones (among others) are ‘acted out’ for the benefit of me, the researcher. Though acting out these relations, communities can ‘show’ other understandings of the nature of being.
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Further Reading
Garuba, H. 2013. On Animism, Modernity/Colonialism and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections. In L. Green (ed.) Contested Ecologies. Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa, 42–54.
Gill, B. 2016. Can the River speak? Epistemological Confrontation in the Rise and Fall of the Land Grab in Gambella, Ethiopia. Environment and Planning A: Economics and Space 48(4): 699–717.
Todd, Z. 2016. An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: “Ontology” is just another Word for Colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology 29: 4–22.
Tuhiwai Smith, L. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.
Yusoff, K. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Ryan, C. (2021). Knowing of Ontologies: Map-Making to ‘See’ Worlds of Relations. In: Chandler, D., Müller, F., Rothe, D. (eds) International Relations in the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_20
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