Violence on the horizon: Horizography and serendipity in the ethnographer’s Zimbabwean field

Abstract

Horizons are notoriously difficult places to carry out research because they keep on shifting and thus deny researchers the necessary immersion to do participant observation, or even to gain access to such horizons for fieldwork. Drawing on fieldwork in southeastern Zimbabwe, this article critically discusses several horizons in a context of witchcraft-related violence and interparty political violence. Arguing that methodologies which focus on the past and present are not sufficient to research what is still on the horizons, that is, what is emergent and has not yet settled in the field for traditional fieldwork, the article postulates a methodology called horizography as suitable for researching what is still on the horizons. Put differently, horizography is partly premised on insights from the emergent quantum anthropology which is based on ongoing discoveries in quantum mechanics which recognize action at a distance in a world where there are entanglements between empirical reality and nonempirical reality, and, of course, different worlds. Besides, drawing on the emergent areas of foresight studies, anthropology of the futures and anthropology of anticipation, the article contends that there is need for innovative methodologies which focus on emergent futures.

Introduction

As scholarship shifts from focusing on the past and present toward emergent futures which are still on the horizon, it is inevitable that there will be methodological and theoretical innovations to deal with the relevant transformations in different disciplines and in the empirical worlds. In the 21st century, shifts in scholarship are witnessed as disciplines are introducing foresight studies; anticipation studies, expectation studies, and futures studies which are set to enable new imaginaries and insights about the worlds. Indeed, even in decolonial studies, scholars are arguing that another epistemology is possible in the futures; scholars on the environment are similarly focusing on energy imaginaries of the futures beyond the Anthropocene; and scholars in economics are thinking around economic imaginaries of the futures beyond the industrialization which is responsible for polluting the environment. Besides, researchers on vaccines are thinking in terms of nanovaccine imaginaries of the futures beyond the traditional vaccines which took close to a decade to produce. There are health and medical imaginaries of the futures, particularly in the 21st century world of the Internet of Medical Things, Internet of Health Things, One Health, and so on (Nhemachena, 2023). In the context of such developments, disciplines, including anthropology are also transforming in the sense of adopting new areas such as anthropology of the futures, anthropology of anticipation, anthropology of expectations, foresight studies, anthropology of imagination, and so on (Amanatidou et al., 2012; Bengston, 2013; Hines et al., 2018, 2021; Khan and et al., 2023; Kristof and Novaky, 2023; Padbury, 2020; Poli, 2018; Urquhart and Saunders, 2017). Such transformations toward futures-orientedness in disciplines require methodological innovations which would make it possible to do foresight studies, anticipation studies, expectations studies, and futures studies in the research fields. It becomes imperative to have innovative methodological research designs which make it possible to focus on the emergent futures which have not yet settled in the field to constitute objects of traditional fieldwork.

Foresight studies help to understand how the futures, which could be on the horizon, would evolve and what surprises could arise; they help anticipate futures particularly in contexts of rapid and turbulent changes; foresight studies help anticipate emerging issues which are not yet current; they help to examine possible futures conditions and trends as part of the planning processes; thus, strategic foresights help to understand possible, plausible, and preferable futures (Bengston, 2013; Hines et al., 2018, 2021; Padbury, 2020; Thornton, 2020). To act intelligently, people need to be able to anticipate plausible, possible, preferred, or alternative futures which are on the horizons; people need not only know what is happening now but also what might happen, what could happen or what will happen in the futures given certain conditions (Bell, 1999; Kristof and Novaky, 2023). Because of the importance of understanding futures, for all of human history, people have tried to develop methods for anticipating plausible, possible, preferred, and alternative futures; premodern attempts to understand the futures focused on astrology; however, scientists, sociologists, researchers, and others are now developing methods for anticipating futures; to enable people not necessarily to predict the futures but to help them understand futures possibilities, to reduce uncertainties, to manage uncertainties; understand the likely ranges of futures possibilities, and so on (Inayatullah, 2014; Prallagon Consulting Group, 2021; Reinhardt, 2020). However, to develop and become an autonomous field of research and application, futures studies should develop relevant methodologies, different from those of already established fields (Poli, 2018).

As a method for understanding futures, horizon scanning is widely used in healthcare, including public health; it is used in environmental studies; besides, it is used in strategic studies to provide early warning signals (Amanatidou et al., 2012; Khan et al., 2023; Urquhart and Saunders, 2017). Indeed, contemporary developments in health and medicine are premised on anticipation studies. For instance, preventive medical care focuses on preventing health problems from occurring, it focuses on diagnosing problems before symptoms or complications develop, that is, when chances of recovery are greatest (Lenartowicz, 2023). Thus, nanomedicine involves comprehensive monitoring and scanning of human biological systems, it works at molecular levels to diagnose and prevent diseases; in this regard, nanobots navigate and circulate through the body to monitor it by scanning for diseases which are still on the horizon and, thus, yet to emerge (Aggarwal and Kumar, 2022; Koeker, 2009; Rajendran et al., 2023; Saadeh and Vyas, 2014; Saha, 2009; Saxena et al., 2015; Wickman and Waterhouse, 2019). Horizon scanning involves efforts to understand emergent futures, that is, to understand what is still on the horizon and then take it as an early warning sign.

Because it understands the world in terms of entanglements between empirical and nonempirical reality, quantum anthropology allows anthropologists to consider emergent events and processes that are still on the horizon in the sense of them not having yet settled in the field to enable ethnographic fieldwork. Because events and processes do not always wait for ethnographers to observe them, it is time that anthropologists begin to enhance their senses in order to observe not only what is past and present but also what is still on the horizons, that is, the emergent. The complexities of entangled empirical and nonempirical realities in quantum anthropology call for more sophisticated methodologies beyond the ethnographies that focus on participant observation of what is past, present, and observable.

Retooling methodology beyond ethnography

Pointing out the need to radically retool methodologies, scholars have argued that reality is so complex that the methodologies used in the past are not adequate (Cofield, 2017; Henry, 2020; Law, 2004; Muller, 2022; Trnka and Lorencova, 2016). It has been argued that much reality is ephemeral, elusive, complex, messy, and that we need to use methods unusual and unknown to social science; it has also been argued that due to quantum entanglements, particles or apparently isolated entities are in fact entangled no matter how far apart they are. Besides, it has been argued that due to quantum entanglements, it is possible to have action at a distance where bodies can interact and that communication between bodies is not limited to physical contact, but includes immaterial entities (Henry, 2020; Law, 2004; Muller, 2022). There are arguments that there exist subatomic particles that connect bodies no matter how far apart they are; the particles can communicate instantly over vast cosmic distances; furthermore, there are interconnections between microphysical reality such that humans are interconnected, and their reality is one of both potentiality and actuality (Cofield, 2017; Russell, 2013). The universe is comprised of entangled energy-knots such that all particles are entangled with other particles in the universe including across vast astronomical distances such that space and time intervals do not matter (Glelser, 2021; Splane, 2004). Writing about quantum anthropology, which is premised on these finding from quantum physics, Trnka and Lorencova (2016: 14–30) note that:

Quantum mechanics does not only explain phenomena that are observable by our senses as material entities. This may be a little bit surprising for those researchers who still hold an idea that physics is a natural science investigating solely material things and measuring their behaviors. But, in contrast to this idea quantum mechanics works with the concept of wave functions, and also with the realm of the ‘nonempirical’. This extension of focus makes quantum theory a perspective that is able to describe both empirical as well as nonempirical phenomena, and as such, it could be a science that may serve as a framework for building a new perspective of sociocultural anthropology [...]. On the contrary, reality appears to us in two domains: the empirical domain including material entities relating to the realm of actuality and a hidden invisible domain of non-empirical, nonmaterial forms that relate to the realm of potentiality. Both domains are not separate areas, but interconnected areas of a one indivisible wholeness [...]. The nonempirical domain contains the preexisting empirical possibilities or virtual states that can be manifested in the empirical world. It may be considered the background of empirical reality. It is a level behind the phenomena, inaccessible to our sensory organs when they are working in normal, non-altered states of consciousness [...]. Potentiality refers to what ‘could be’ actualized in time and space, and actuality denotes already actualized entities.

The upshot of the foregoing is that researchers have to think beyond a focus on the past and present if they are to remain relevant in a world where methodologies are being radically transformed to suit new theoretical insights about the world that is entangled in the empirical and nonempirical, emergent, and actualized aspects of reality. Indeed, other scholars have suggested the need to adopt nonrepresentational research which calls methods into question; nonrepresentational research argues that standard methods provide a false sense of security that knowledge is stable; also, nonrepresentational research invites alternatives to methodological orthodoxy; through nonrepresentational research, it is necessary to consider what else the future of methodology might hold or become (Ulmer, 2017). It has also been argued that it is necessary to focus research on emergent sociocultural events. Such emergent sociocultural phenomena appear in nascent forms with minimal performance in the real world or not yet occurring in people’s social life, but such emergent phenomena may become a reality and get established in the near future. Emergents are phenomena which are not out there yet, they are in the process of becoming, they are potentialities and they may be relevant objects of anthropological inquiries but a field site may not yet exist for them (Singh et al., 2021). Such a focus on the emergent phenomena which have not yet settled into a field call for rethinking anthropology beyond ethnography.

Ethnography is produced out of participant observation in which the researcher is immersed in a group; historically, ethnography focused on remote ‘tribes’, researching the history and present of the people; ethnography uses participant observation to do fieldwork where the ethnographer has to maintain professional distance while immersing himself/herself in the culture; in other words, the ethnographer lives and works in the community for several months or years (Fetterman, 2015; Van Voorst, 2020; Wynter, 2019). Ethnography has been part of anthropology since the origins of the discipline, it has focused on knowing human society, documenting traditions, beliefs and institutions of people around the world; ethnography is an embodied, experiential field-based knowledge practice, thus fieldwork is often used interchangeably with ethnography, which involves immersion in a community or a number of communities for long periods of time. In anthropological literature, the future is remarkably absent as an explicit object or subject of research because anthropologists are more interested in the past and present (McGranahan, 2018; Persoon and van Est, 2000). Partly because of the foregoing weaknesses of ethnography, some scholars have called for decoupling anthropology from ethnography.

The decoupling of anthropology from ethnography opens up space for the emergence of philosophically oriented anthropology which decenters classical ethnography; it has been argued that anthropology must not be mistaken for ethnography because, whereas ethnography describes life as lived and experienced by people, anthropology is an inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of human life in the world. It has also been contended that ethnography is an end in itself and not a means to an end; besides, it has been argued that anthropological education gives us the intellectual means to speculate the conditions of human life in this world, and that it is necessary to acknowledge the speculative nature of anthropology if the voices of anthropologists are to be heard (Ingold, 2017; Rees, 2018). Furthermore, it has been argued that anthropologists must not stake their work in ethnography because ethnography risks preventing anthropological insights from having wider transformative effects that we might hope for; in other words, it has been argued that ethnography holds anthropology hostage to the popular stereotype of the ethnographer as one bound to the retrospective chronicling of lives that are always on the brink of disappearing (Ingold, 2014). In addition, it is argued that anthropology and ethnography are different things even though they may depend on each other; anthropologists must not treat ethnography and anthropology as equivalent. In this regard, anthropology opens our eyes and minds to other possibilities of being and the questions that anthropologists address are philosophical, including what it means to be human or a person; anthropology, it has been contended, can be carried out anywhere regardless of whether we might imagine ourselves to be ‘in the field’ or out of it; and, to do anthropology one does not need to imagine the world as a field (Ingold, 2008). Other scholars have contended that there is a growing interest in futures within contemporary anthropology which goes beyond merely describing the past and present of the lives of peoples in particular locations. Contemporary anthropology is increasingly focusing on anticipation and on the futures; anthropology is now beginning to focus on studying uncertainty, precarity, contingency, vulnerability, hope, aspiration, imaginaries, and so on (Kreibich et al., 2011; Stephan and Flaherty, 2019). In these ways, anthropology is distancing itself from classical ethnography which focused on the past and present (Graber, 2015). The point here is that if anthropology is to become more innovative, it has to rethink its relationship with ethnographies which focus on the past and present of societies. And of course, such innovativeness is often connected to serendipity.

Serendipity is research that focuses on finding unexpected things, it resists focusing on solving rigid questions as doing so limits the chances of the serendipitous; it requires being alert to opportunities; serendipitous events may initially irritate the researcher, they may be contradictory and confounding to current beliefs; serendipity requires a perceptive and prepared mind to recognize and use the opportunity. In serendipity, researchers have to get out of their comfort zones to try different moves (Kennedy et al., 2022). The point here is that serendipity is the reason for unexplained outcomes in research; serendipitous findings refer to unexpected experiences prompted by the researcher’s valuable interaction with others or with phenomena; in this sense, it is unplanned discovery, it is the rational exploitation of chance observations, emergents, or experiences in research (Campbell, 2005; McCay-Peet and Toms, 2014; Reville, 2020). To capitalize on serendipity, the researcher must have an open mood, free time to turn opportunities into action, ability to perceive and analyze serendipitous cues; serendipity requires inquisitiveness, flexibility, openness, creativity, willingness to make mistakes, tolerance for ambiguity, a passion for discovery and readiness to seize upon chance (Olshannikova et al., 2020; Ricciardi, 2005). The point here is that the ethnographic focus on the observable, the empirical, the past and the present have limited the openness that is required from anthropologists to exploit serendipitous moments in research. The fieldwork which I did in rural Zimbabwe generated insights on matters of serendipity and what other scholars have called horizon scanning. However, horizon scanning as currently conceived is humancentric in the sense of focusing on scanning what is in the human world, yet in Shona (the Shona are an ethnic group in Zimbabwe) metaphysics there are different worlds including the human world and the ancestral world called Nyikadzimu.

Fieldwork beyond the field

When I arrived for preliminary fieldwork in southeastern Zimbabwe, I had the air of self-importance typical of one who had spent many years in university studying various disciplines, including anthropology, which had become my specialization. The air of self-importance was of course hidden below the ‘ethnographic humility’ which I had been trained to exude in order to be functional in an ‘ethnographic’ field typical of those which many anthropologists defined as simple societies. Of course, I was convinced that I was not one of the simple ones, having studied for and attained several degrees. And of course, villagers who got to know that I was researching for my PhD studies at university looked at me with an air of wonder about the humility that I exuded – carrying a notebook from day to day, walking from point to point and requesting the participants to be part of the research; sitting and listening patiently to stories which villagers narrated. During the fieldwork, I made connections with some villagers and such connections helped a lot to generate the necessary sense of trust. The connections also generated vulnerabilities in a village where residents were divided through interparty strife and violence.

One morning, I decided to walk to a homestead of a man I had connected with. I will call him Alex. I found him sitting outside and so I greeted him, sat down and conversed. I was not prepared for ‘ethnographic’ research that day and so the conversations were not focused on my study. While we were conversing, I saw some people approaching. They were in white garments and carrying Bibles. Then Alex looked at me and said, ‘church members are arriving so I will have to get into the hut for prayers with them’. Wondering what I would be doing alone outside the hut, I asked Alex if he would allow me to join them in the prayer inside his hut. He agreed. The men, including me, sat on the earthen benches and the women sat on reed mats on the floor. They sang and prayed for about 2 hours and then came the session for prophesies. About 10 people were prophesied. And then the prophet pointed at me and said that he had a prophesy for me. Having noticed that those being prophesied had to stand up, I stood up. The prophet said that he had seen me having a painful leg and that some envious villagers would bewitch me. He told me that he was not saying that the event was going to happen that day, or the following day, or the following week or month but that it would take more than a year to materialize, and it would be in the summer season. I thanked him and sat down but, stupidly, I did not ask for a prayer to forestall the event.

I concluded my preliminary fieldwork and then went back to Harare; upon which arrival I realized that I had been invited to the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) which is based in Dakar, the capital city of Senegal. I was asked to submit copies of my passport so that they could book flights and hotel accommodation, to get everything ready for my trip. After submitting the necessary documents for the trip, I decided to go to another church in the capital because all this time I had been wondering about the prophecy back in the village. One morning, I went to a church where I found the members lying on the ground, looking sleepy and tired. The prophet in that church then walked up to me and directed me to kneel down. He then sang a song for a while before he prophesied about me. He told me that I was going to travel to South Africa shortly, but I would be stabbed by some men on arrival because some witch was using remote surveillance to get me eliminated. He then gave me a small stone and said I should put it in water and bath in order to forestall the event. I got even more terrified, and this time, I decided to follow the instructions. What puzzled me further was that the prophet already knew that I was going to travel to South Africa.

When I submitted my passport details to CODESRIA, I had asked them to book the flight such that I would board from O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, South Africa. The reason why I wanted to board the plane from there was that I wanted to use my South African medical aid to get a yellow card which was needed for me to fly to CODESRIA. So, I intended to travel by road to Johannesburg and then use medical aid to get the yellow card, to certify that I had been vaccinated against yellow fever, before the trip. I intended to spend the night, before my trip, with a friend who lived in Johannesburg and was studying at a university in the city. He would also assist me with directions to a doctor at a nearby travel clinic because I was not very familiar with Johannesburg: I was staying in Cape Town. So, I bathed with water in which I had put the small stone as advised and then departed on board a bus to Johannesburg. I arrived the following morning, but the bus did not stop at Johannesburg Park Station which I was familiar with.

Passengers disembarked and fetched their luggage. I did so too. But just a few steps from the bus, two men approached me with knives in their hands. They asked me to give them money or they would stab me. I looked around to see if there were people that could assist me, but it appeared everyone was busy with whatever concerned them. In fact, when I tried to solicit assistance from some people, they edged away, seemingly afraid that they could also be stabbed. As I was walking away, the men following me, I got close to a restaurant and quickly stepped in. The men gave up and walked away. I bought some coffee from the restaurant and then called my friend so that he would come to pick me up. My friend eventually arrived, and he accommodated me at his residence.

These events set my mind wandering about a lot of things, particularly my ‘ethnographic’ fieldwork in the village. I had set off to study political violence resulting from interparty violence in Zimbabwe but now I was a subject of witchcraft-related violence. The prophet back in the village had prophesied about witchcraft-related violence that would bring excruciating pain to my leg. And the prophet in the capital city had prophesied about me getting stabbed in Johannesburg and I had witnessed attempts, by two men, to stab me when I disembarked from the bus on my arrival in Johannesburg. Having narrowly escaped being stabbed, I thought I needed to follow through what the prophets, in general, advised, as preventive measures, when they prophesy bad events. Right from the moment when the two men accosted me, up to the time I boarded the plane at O.R Tambo International Airport, my mind relentlessly ruminated over what had happened and the implications for my future when I would return to the village for fieldwork. The prophet in Harare did not have to be in Johannesburg to know that I was going to be stabbed, he was not even in the Internet café in Harare when I sent an email to CODESRIA to ask them to book my departure flight. I ruminated over the events until I fell asleep on the plane. I arrived in Dakar at about midnight but fortunately the CODESRIA driver was already waiting at the airport to drive me to the hotel.

From Dakar, I flew to Cape Town where I was based for my studies. I stayed there for 5 months before I returned to the village where I had earlier settled to do fieldwork in Zimbabwe. But before I traveled back to the village, I asked my wife to regularly attend an apostolic church’s services while she remained in the capital city. This time I had learned that the field site in the village was not too isolated and remote. Places were so connected that some people with enhanced visions or spiritual gifts could see what was happening in one place while they were physically located in another place. Observation did not require the physical presence of the body and eyes of the observer. For these reasons, I was confident that the prophets in the apostolic church in the capital city would be able to assist, even in my absence, should I get into trouble back in the village. I had to go back to the village where I had settled to do ethnographic research.

I got so involved with my studies that I nearly forgot about the prophecy that foretold me about an excruciating pain in my leg. In November, one and a half years after the prophesy, I started feeling pain there. However, one day, I had a dream where I was walking toward an unknown mountain, and my shadow was in front of me. While I was walking, a voice said I want you to go to the Dandarecha Mountain. I had by that time learned a lot about how villagers survived violence, whether political or witchcraft related. They would get prophecies about what was emergent, that is, about what was on the horizon and then they would evade the violence through prayers or simply by avoiding going to particular places where violence was set to occur. They would keep diaries about their dreams and prophesies so that they would always reference and read to see which ones had been fulfilled and which ones were yet to be fulfilled. I also kept a diary of my dreams and prophesies such that I entered the dream wherein I was walking toward the mountain. However, I failed to go to the mountain in time, I kept on postponing, and I also needed to find out from other people where the mountain was because I had never been there before.

In February the following year, I went back to Cape Town although I was already feeling the pain in my leg. In Cape Town, my leg got so painful that I could not sleep and I had to go back to Zimbabwe to consult the prophets who had prophesied the pain, years before I started feeling it. Because I did not want to go back to the village, I decided to go to another apostolic church in the capital city, close to my place. They said some prayers for me, but the pain did not go, at least not immediately. Then one day, my wife had a dream where I was dying. She narrated the dream to me the following morning. I became unsettled and suggested we did a prayer on our own before we did anything else or consulted anyone else. During the prayer, I heard a voice saying, ‘you will not die, I will take care of you but go to the Dandarecha Mountain today’.

I frantically called church members trying to get directions to the Dandarecha Mountain. After several failed attempts, we called one prophet from another church: the mountain was in Guruve, about 300 km from Harare, the capital city. My wife and I packed our bag and left the house even though it was already afternoon and raining. We arrived at the Market Square in Harare to pick up the transport to Guruve. We asked drivers whether they knew where the mountain was but many of them did not. Eventually, we found one who knew the mountain and waited for the journey to begin. It was already late when the minibus left the city.

After what I thought was a long drive, I asked the assistants to the driver whether we had not yet arrived. One of them said we had not yet arrived, but the other one said we had already passed our stop. I felt so confused, when we got off at the next bus stop, it was almost midnight. To our left, we saw a beer hall with some candle lights. We decided to go there to ask for directions to the mountain. But it seemed dangerous because the people in the hall would then know we were strangers, and we could be targeted. We changed our mind and walked up to a house that had a light on, and I thought it would be safer to ask people there. We knocked on the door and window but there was no response. We found a place a few meters from the road where we could sit until the next morning when we could safely ask people to give us directions.

When the daylight came, we asked a woman who was walking along the tarred road, to give us directions to the Dandarecha Mountain. She confirmed that we had passed the bus stop already and so we needed to go back. On another minibus, we went one bus stop back, disembarked, and asked the villagers for directions. They pointed at the mountain, 5 km away from where we stood. We walked toward the mountain and like in my dream several months earlier, my shadow was in front of me because we were facing west, and it was early in the morning so the sun was behind us. On the mountain, we said some prayers and then I heard a voice telling us to go to two more mountains to say prayers. We did that and the pain in my leg went away. I learned from some villagers who live close to the mountain that some Shona chiefs were buried in the caves of the Dandarecha Mountain centuries ago, and that it was the reason why people would heal when they went to the mountain.

While these events risk being misinterpreted in terms of therapeutic landscapes, it is important to notice that it is not the landscapes themselves that healed me but the spiritual force that advised me, while I was still at my house, to go to the mountain. Writing about therapeutic landscapes, other scholars have argued that health and well-being unfold and develop through physical, social, and symbolic dimensions of landscape encounter; they argue that humans find assurance in nature and that therapeutic sanctuaries in natural environments have been sought out through the ages by individuals with a sense of disorientation or likely future ambiguity. It is also argued that the higher cognitive centers of the human brain can rest and reset in the therapeutic sanctuaries (Bell et al., 2023; Marques et al., 2021). Others have argued that studies on the relationship between landscape and health show that attraction of humans to nature and their presence in these spaces induce mental peace and improves mental and physical health (Razmara et al., 2021). Therapeutic landscapes are understood as places, settings, situations, locales, and milieus that encompass physical and psychological environments associated with treatment or healing and maintenance of health and well-being. It has been argued that simply being in nature can have therapeutic effects; besides, it has been contended that the retreat experience entails specific practices in conjunction with nature (Lea, 2008; Williams, 1998). The point here is that my healing should not be reduced to my presence on the mountains, but it must be understood in terms of the chain of events that saw me going to the mountains. The chain of events includes the spiritual prophesies even before I started feeling pain in my leg the dream which I had wherein I was advised to go to the Dandarecha Mountain, and the spiritual voice I heard when I set off to the mountain. Put differently, the logic is more like a doctor (spiritual) advising a patient to go to a place (mountain in this case) so that he or she can be healed. The healing is not performed by the mountain or by the place as is assumed in the discourses on therapeutic landscapes. The argument here is akin to what Lambek (2009) calls traveling spirits, to describe spirits that move independently of their mediums or along with them, appearing and withdrawing from materiality. But for the Shona people, ancestral spirits travel from the ancestral world, and not just within the human world. For this reason, instead of writing in terms of healing landscapes, I would argue for what I call healing spiritscapes, which are not necessarily reducible to landscapes in the human world, to emphasize the spiritual nature of the healing processes.

Of course, I learned a lot as I walked up and down the mountains and across forests but as members of African Independent Churches know, it is not the forests or mountains themselves that are therapeutic. The African Independent Churches are known as machurch emweya (spiritual churches) because the members know that it is the spirits that do the healing and not the landscapes. In this sense, there was an element of wayfaring in Ingold’s (2007) sense because I went out and walked across forests and up and down the mountains (see also Harding, 2021). In wayfaring, humans are in touch with surroundings as feet get in contact with the ground, as we talk with people, observe, and navigate; wayfaring is the embodied experience of walking or moving along paths in our research landscape (Cunliffe, 2018). The point here is that for me what was important was not that I was walking with my feet on the ground through forests and mountains, rather the most important thing was about meeting the spiritual force that had advised me to go to the particular mountain. In other words, a focus on attributing healing to the mountain or forest repeats the mistake of focusing on the ethnographic present – it focuses on the immediate present and on my physical presence on the mountain – ignoring the spiritual voice that I encountered even before I knew the directions to the mountain. Put succinctly, what heals is the spirit and not the mountain. Zimbabweans talk about healing spirits which can advise people as to which place to go to get their healing. The point here is that when one invokes spirits, through prayers, before traveling one does not only walk in a landscape but also in a spiritscape as well; during the sojourn one can hear spiritual voices and not just observe landscapes and other geographical features in the immediate environment. I will argue that prayers have the effect of drawing landscapes and spiritscapes close together so that we are no longer just in the landscapes of the human world but also in the spirit world at their points of intersection. The Shona people conceive of the human world and the ancestral world known as Nyikadzimu, and these worlds are separate even if there are times when they intersect (Fontein, 2016; Nhemachena, 2017). In Shona metaphysics, ancestors in the spirit world are described as varimberi, which means they are ahead of the human world. And, in Shona conceptions, there are exchanges between worlds whose intersections constitute horizons.

As anthropologists, we often focus on the ‘ethnographic’ present, on the here and now of fieldwork, yet the field is often on the horizon and not yet settled. Indeed, the field at the intersection of the human world and the spirit world defies time and space in the sense that it cannot be ordinarily confined to physical, geographical, and temporal spaces. In this regard, the different worlds defy the logics of what has been called multisited ethnography which is still confined to the human physical world. When the human world and the spirit worlds are drawn closer together at their points of intersection, the time that matters is not only the human time or time as experienced in the human world but it is also time as experienced in the spirit world. In other words, there is intersectionality of human time and spiritual time which is irreducible to human phenomenal experiences in the human world or to humancentric durations of time. When I delayed my trip to the Dandarecha Mountain after my dream, I was defying spiritual time even as I was honoring human time in terms of focusing on my studies. In fact, in the African Apostolic Churches, there is what they call spiritual time (nguva yemweya) when the spirits come to reveal and deliver prophesies. Time is not only humancentric in the sense of lying in the domain of humans, but it is also spiritual time in the sense of it also lying in the spiritual world. This is not to say that humans do not have their own time either in terms of kairos or chronos or their equivalent. Indeed, villagers depended on time, often relying on quantitative time as reflected on mobile phones and clocks or on time which relies on qualitative experiences or kairos.

Indeed, the field is not always in the human world or in the physical landscapes but also in the spiritscapes or the spirit world to which one is often drawn or draws on. It is important to note that anthropologists need to practice what this article calls horizography as part of their methodology in order to understand what is emerging from the horizons, located at the intersections of different worlds, instead of waiting for events to settle in the field and to catch up with them. While horizography borrows insights from horizon scanning as conceived in other disciplines, it differs in that it envisages the existence of different worlds at the intersections of which are horizons. To conceptualize the kind of research which emerged from my experiences and describe research which focuses on the futuristic horizons in contrast to traditional ethnography which focused on the past and present of the participants, I use the term horizography.

Horizography in research

Horizography is a kind of research that focuses not only on the past and present of the human world but also on the horizons, which is to say on what is emerging from the horizons. By horizons, I do not only mean horizons within a humancentric world but also horizons in the spiritual world to which the human world is understood to be connected in Shona metaphysics. In other words, horizons include the intersections of the human world and the spirit world, so by emergents or futures I also mean what is coming from another world, including from the spirit world. Horizography is irreducible to the human world in that such horizon scanning is also performed by those that can walk not only in the human world but also in the spirit world. It is walking within as well as beyond the world of the ethnos or people which enables horizography at the intersections of human and spirit worlds. In this sense, horizography is not limited to human imaginations as indeed the spirit world is understood in Shona metaphysics to be capable of also bringing things beyond human imaginations. Besides, horizography is not simply about events yet to come but it is also about events which may be departing or even stuck, that is, neither coming nor going. It is simply about what is on the horizons for horizographers to discern.

Horizography is a kind of research which focuses not necessarily on the past and present of the ethnos but on the emergent or regresses, some of which may still be shaping up to enable description. By horizography, I describe a kind of research where the researcher scans the constantly shifting horizon, including intersections between worlds, exercises patience and humility as the horizon presents events. In other words, horizography cautions researchers not to take apparently simple societies, communities, and participants for granted precisely because, just like in a natural horizon, appearances are often deceptive. Something on the horizon may appear to be going away when it is actually coming, it may appear to be stationary when it is actually moving, and it may appear to be graspable when in fact it is not, and vice versa. When I first received the prophesy about my leg, I was standing in a humble rondavel that appeared to be simple and primitive. When I received the prophesy about the knife attack, I was kneeling down in the open before a prophet who looked tired, sleepy and impoverished but the prophesy was pithy, future-oriented and beyond my own comprehension. When I received the prophesies, there was no evidence of the upcoming events in the human world yet. In other words, the events were neither coeval nor coterminous with where I was temporally and geographically located. The events were somewhere on the horizon, waiting for me or appearing slowly.

The upshot of the foregoing is that an anthropology of the futures (Bryant, 2020; Pels, 2015) would help in understanding the futures-orientedness of the prophecies. Writing about anthropology of the futures, Strzelecka (2013: 264–267) argues that:

Anthropology has the potential to deliver high quality research about the future that keeps the present perspective by critically analyzing contemporary fears, hopes and cultural trends... It is an area that adopts perspectives, theories, models and anthropological methods to anticipate behaviors [...]. Anticipatory anthropology focuses on anticipation of different alternative scenarios of the future [...]. Anthropology uses different terms to express the same idea: futurology, futurism, anthropology of future, speculative anthropology. All these terms relate to ‘thinking about the future’. The anthropological study of the future is about creating future scenarios, of which potential comes from peoples’ dreams and fears [...]. The study of the future does not involve studying facts understood as events that occurred at a particular place and time. The study of the future is more about anticipation of future plausible events. Anticipatory anthropology relies on facts understood as visions, expectations and preferences expressed by members of society [...]. The future is a great area of study for cultural anthropology, because of interdependence between future study and culture.

To study the futures, and to do horizography, it is necessary to engage in horizon scanning (Hines et al., 2019; Rowe et al., 2017; Van Rij, 2008; Washida and Yahata, 2021) in the sense of scanning the intersections of different worlds. Horizography includes intersections between human and spiritual worlds such that it also includes scanning spiritscapes. Horizon scanning, which does not include scanning the spiritual world, is also known as environmental scanning, it is a foresight method used for discovering early signs of potential change; it enables spotting trends before they emerge into the mainstream and then identify key action points to proactively shape the desirable futures. Horizon scanning is the systematic examination of potential future problems, threats, opportunities and likely future developments; (Van Rij, 2008). Horizon scanning helps to guard against the threats of being blindsided; it involves a special ability to grasp the kinetics of real situations, using sensory parameters to prevent a crush (Petryna, 2018). Horizography borrows insights from horizon scanning but it is not limited to scanning what exists in the humancentric world. Writing about horizon scanning, Bishop (2009: 1–3) argues:

But rather than just wait, we can take steps to reduce surprise even if we cannot eliminate it altogether. Horizon or environmental scanning warns us about change coming in the future. The term evokes images of lookouts on old ships or modern-day radar scanning the horizon. Lookouts and radars report sightings or signals from objects that are far off before they have the chance to harm a vessel, a plane or a fortified encampment. It takes time for the objects to get to the lookouts or the radar’s location, time that people can use to prepare. The farther away the object is, the longer it takes for the object to arrive and the more time there is to prepare [...]. The horizon scanner is to the future what the lookout is to the sea. Most change does not occur suddenly, out of the blue, even if it appears that way at first. When we look back, we usually find precursors, signs that the change is coming. Of course, those signs are not as clear as the outline of a ship or the blip on a radar screen. In fact, the signs are often so weak that we ignore them completely until it is too late. And most signs do not amount to anything anyway, so it is usually safe to ignore them. As a result, we develop the bad habit of ignoring all signs of change [...]. Horizon scanning attempts to break the habit of ignoring the early signs of change [...]. Horizon scanning is part of strategic foresight because it recognizes the inherent uncertainties in preparing for the future and allows people to report plausible outcomes rather than just lock-solid certainties [...]. A weak or early signal of change is called a scanning hit – an event or a new piece of information that signals that change is coming. The hit itself is something new or different, something out of the ordinary, a discrepancy in the pattern. It is not itself a significant change, but it could someday develop into a major change with important consequences for a domain or an enterprise [...], what counts as a scanning hit depends on what that person already knows and expects to happen [...]. Scanners therefore are sensors comparing new items on the horizon with their knowledge and experience of what is usually there.

The point in the foregoing is that horizography researches and describes what is on the horizon including between different worlds. It is about scanning the horizons in order to describe them, just as ethnography is about researching ethnic groups in order to describe them. But horizography is about scanning [moving] objects, vital objects featuring or beginning to appear on the horizon, whether emerging, regressing or static. Of course, objects on the horizons may be discerned by some but not by others; they are objects in the sense that they are discernible and observable by those that are gifted to do so. However, in terms of process ontologies (Seibt, 2022), nothing prevents objects from becoming subjects and vice versa. The essence of horizography is consistent with the Shona people’s (a people of Zimbabwe) warning against those that are stupid enough to wait for unfortunate events to occur. The Shona people warn against kuyeuka bako wanaiwa (remembering a cave when you have already been pounded by a heavy rain). The idea in this Shona saying is that clever people do not just focus on the past and present: they are constantly scanning the horizons for danger, and they hide before unfortunate events begin to occur. Put differently, horizography does not focus on the ethnographic past and present but takes into account the dangers and hopes that are still formative and on the horizon. Horizography does not only focus on studying formations, but it also focuses on studying what is still formative in the sense of still being formed and shaping up.

While I was doing ‘ethnography’ in the villages, the prophets and healers who warned me about what was emergent were doing something completely different. They were engaged in horizography, scanning the horizons at the intersections of the human and spiritual worlds and warning me and other villagers about events that were emergent and regressing. The problem was that my ethnographic training didn’t allow me to develop my senses to scan the horizons and do intersectional horizography rather than ethnography. While the villagers survived the multiple forms of violence including political violence and witchcraft-related violence through such horizography, my own ethnographic training poorly equipped me to survive in the village because I could not scan the horizons outside the temporal and spatial present of ethnography. The argument here is that both prophets and healers are in fact horizographers in the sense that they focus more on scanning the horizons between human and spiritual worlds than on the past and present of the human world. Describing them as traditional healers therefore is inaccurate because it misses the essence of their work, which is scanning and describing the horizons beyond time and space, and between human and spiritual worlds. Surely, one who scans horizons beyond time and space, and beyond the human world, cannot be simplistically described as a traditional healer. Rather he or she is a horizographer who scans the interworld horizons for dangers and happy events that may be on the way. In the vernacular Shona, there is no term that collectively refers to prophets and healers, and this is why I would prefer to collectively address them as horizographers, noting the commonalities of their work and the ways they scan the intersections of the human and spiritual worlds.

While ethnography’s projections of the future begin with the past and present of the human world, horizography’s descriptions of the future begin with what is on the horizon or what is at the intersections of the human and spiritual worlds. This is why a horizographer may not start by asking the patient or interlocutor to narrate his or her past and present. For a horizographer, the beginning point is describing what is on the interworld horizon and not describing what is past or present, as ethnographers do. And, of course, as horizographers, prophets, and healers attune to horizons but the agential horizons also attune to prophets and healers in the sense, for instance, of ancestors reaching out to them from another world. Horizography is not the same as conventional horizon scanning because it also deals with the metaphysical aspects of intersections between human and spiritual worlds. Horizography is not synonymous with multisited ethnography because, unlike multisited ethnography, it deals with sites in different worlds, the spiritual and human worlds.

Because their beginning points are different, they need to have completely different methods to capture what is emergent or the realities. Horizographers do not privilege physically entering the field, sharing time and space with the interlocutors or with whatever they want to describe. Horizographic methods defy time and space, but ethnographic methods are bound by time and space. Horizographic methods focus on scanning the horizons for emergent events. Whereas ethnographic observations are premised on correspondence theories of truth, horizographic methods rely on what I call metaphysical triangulation to distinguish between what is true and what is not. By metaphysical triangulation I mean that to tell whether something is true, horizographers constantly compare what has been described by one horizographer and others who would ideally be unknown to one another and located very far away from each other. After comparing the descriptions, they compare the descriptions with what they are experiencing and have experienced. So, in horizography, one does not start by looking for correspondence between what has been described and what is happening – as is done in correspondence theories of truth which provided foundations for traditional ethnography. Instead, the first thing is to compare the different horizographic descriptions to check for coherence, similarities, and differences – and then correspondence will be expected later when the events materialize. However, in correspondence theories such as those underlying ethnographic observations, one looks for correspondence between what is said and what is observed – and later there could be comparisons between what was described by different ethnographers. The point here is that what has been dismissed by some as mere belief is in fact simply a different method of carrying out research. While one method begins with seeking correspondence between what is observed and what is happening, and then ends with comparisons of descriptions; the other method begins with comparisons between what is described and ends with seeking correspondences between what was described and what is actually happening.

Horizography does not begin with assuming what Jacques Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence (White, 2017) as is the case in ethnography premised on correspondence theories. It simply starts by comparing descriptions and then wait to see correspondence, and emergent presences of what has been described. In this sense, horizography does not dismiss correspondence theories of truth, but postpones correspondences to a point when the events begin to materialize beyond the horizons. Thus, while some methods begin by checking for reliability and validity by triangulating correspondences, others begin by checking for validity and reliability by triangulating descriptions of what is on the horizon. Put succinctly, horizography does not dismiss correspondence theories of truth, it shelves correspondences up to the point of concretions of events.

Horizography implies that events have agency and do not wait for the researchers, including ethnographers, to capture and describe them. Horizography is not merely about capturing events, rather it is about tracing events as they emerge, metamorphosize and/or coalesce into concretion. Of course, in my case, I did not only trace events, follow or go along with them, I also had to strive to block or forestall some unfortunate events including the incident where I was nearly stabbed, and the pain in my leg. Whereas ethnographers assume that events are invariably waiting to be captured and described, horizographers assume that events are in motion and not in states of waithood, even though they can also be blocked. Put differently, ethnography assumed the existence of humancentric societies in waithood, waiting for the ethnographer to arrive, observe, and describe them. While anthropologists traditionally assumed that the natives were backward-looking, primitive, and so on, horizography underscores the fact that it was the anthropologists steeped in the ethnographic past and present who were backward-looking in the sense of failing to scan the horizons to see what was emerging in the future tense. In this regard, horizography is a decolonial methodology insofar as it frees former subjects of colonial anthropology from assumptions of backwardness, primitivism, archaism, barbarism, and so on. Horizography shows that the subjects of colonial anthropology were in fact more forward-looking than the colonial anthropologists who ironically described natives as backward-looking.

Besides, horizography is a decolonial methodology in the sense that it dispels colonial assumptions that colonial subjects could not imagine their own futures independent of colonialists. It also dispels colonial assumptions that they were bounded in isolated, remote, backward, barbaric, and savage societies. Indeed, horizography underscores the fact that the communities that were anthropologically depicted as isolated were in fact closely connected to their ancestral spiritual worlds and not just in the human world. The point is that whereas for instance historiography focuses on the historical past, and ethnography focuses on the past and present, horizography focuses on the emergent futures located at the intersections of the human world and the spirit world. Horizography also relates to ethics insofar as it underscores the fact that it is unethical to assume that a people only have the past and the present but no futures that can be studied. It is a matter of ethics to study the past, present, and futures of different peoples so that they are not boxed in the temporal cells of the past and present. The point in horizography is not that the past and present must not be studied, but that the emergent futures which are on the horizon should also be studied and researched. While it retains the value of researching the past and the present, horizography also studies the future so that the ethnographic chronopolitics, which confined some people to the realms of the ethnographic past and present, is defeated.

Conclusion

Coining the neologism horizography, this article has argued that anthropologists need to focus on studying the horizons to understand the futures they herald. Unlike traditional ethnography, horizography does not preoccupy itself with researching the past and present of a people but it focuses on the emergent that is on the horizon. Because it researches the emergent, what is in the process of becoming, what is not yet settled in the field for ethnographic fieldwork, horizography is also the suitable methodology to use in quantum anthropology and in anthropology of the future, anthropology of anticipation and foresight studies. Horizography is also the methodology that would enable anthropologists and designers with future-oriented vocations to interface. Put differently, horizography is the methodology that should be applied to study the futures as envisaged in the discourses on Anthropocene, energy imaginaries, technoscientific imaginaries, environmental imaginaries, economic imaginaries, pandemic imaginaries, political imaginaries, medical imaginaries, and jurisprudential imaginaries in a world that is witnessing radical transformations. Horizography posits that it is unethical to assume that some people live in the ethnographic past and present devoid of futures or imaginaries about their futures.