Sacred cites: Engaging the spiritual in ethnographic knowledge (re)production

Abstract

In this article I offer a Black feminist sacred citational praxis supported by considerations of how subjectivity, relationality, and epistemology speak to questions, such as: which voices contribute to the stories we tell, the arguments that we make, and what is our responsibility to marking and naming those voices? Certainly, the calling of academic names, those thinkers and scholars recognized in academia largely through peer-reviewed writings, is both commonplace and normative. This includes both people who are living and those who have passed. That is, part of our accepted normal praxis is being in conversation with the dead. Yet largely we don’t speak of the “normative” citations as a spiritual practice, or recognize the naming, quoting, and reproducing of people’s voices after they have passed on in that vein. What if we did? What would that look like?