“They may not have been ducks.” The anthropologist put to the test of intersubjectivity

This article explores the social and cultural fallout of an accident that claimed the life of an eighteen-year-old boy from the Nahua indigenous village of La Esperanza in northeastern Mexico. The anthropologist, grieving the death of her godson, shares her sorrow with the members of the society she studies. Between affect and reason, she tries to counter the inconceivable by relating a dense ethnographic narrative of rituals, social mechanisms, and emotions: those of her interlocutors and her own. This metadata ultimately forms the foundation upon which the anthropological knowledge of the studied society is built.