Louis’s Reviews > Wisdom from the Edge: Writing Ethnography in Turbulent Times > Status Update

Words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upon being, because they more closely convey the life of the whole and make our habitual evidences vibrate until they disjoin." In this way, writers— or painters, for that matter-use what Merleau-Ponty calls "the indirect voice" to evoke the "brute and wild being" of the world.

“I suggest we confront our obligations as scholars and admit that many of our long-standing methods and denotative conventions of representation are no longer in sync with the state of contemporary social, political, environmental, and economic dysfunction.”