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In relation to the idea of keeping Trickster – as master of chaos and disorder, boundary-crosser, and culture-giver – in our ethnographies, the second strategy that I would propose is to “keep it messy”, disordered, to let there be loose ends and dissonances.

— UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge by Diana Espirito Santo (Page 153)

I approached ufology, first, as a researcher interested in paradigms of evidence. But then I began to focus on those stories about experiences that made no sense to the experiencer. I could have brushed them off; or archive them to later sort out. They represented the conceptual void, or nothingness, of fieldwork. What did not fit the data. But I was drawn like a moth to a fire.

— UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge by Diana Espirito Santo (Page 149)

the fragmentation of knowledge and its incompletion; the inability, and sometimes, even irrelevance of conceptual knowledge on a society’s cosmology. Additionally, there is often an irrelevance of the concept of cosmology itself. Order gives way to fracture and ambiguity (analytically, at least), if there ever was order in the first place. It is thus not simply the ufological “absurd” in Chile, as I have described it, that “lacks” an idea of order or principle. Many complex shamanic or religious cosmoses are also patently “lacking” it, at least from the perspective of those who live them through and through.

— UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge by Diana Espirito Santo (Page 141)

Whether it is convincing or not, what I hoped to do was to dismantle the notion that our ethnographies have to say something that correlates in an immediate and binding way with theoretical and conceptual structures. This is not to suggest that we leave the ethnographic data to its own fate, but that, in thinking through it we can also allow it to simply be, perhaps even without a communication prerogative.

— UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge by Diana Espirito Santo (Page 131)

In the social sciences, these events have nowhere to go in analysis except into an interpretivist and symbolic frame which essentially isolates them from the recognition of reality-existence felt by those involved.

— UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge by Diana Espirito Santo (Page 122)

Which anthropologist or ethnographer has not had moments of utter perplexity in the field, where what is experienced or observed is not underwritten by any cultural code or meaning in the context under study, or perhaps even by their own logic (whichever it may be)?

— UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge by Diana Espirito Santo (Page 14)

by setting various bodies of knowledge, with their specific historical and conceptual repertoires, in conversation with each other, such that their respective insights can bounce off the other and provide us with a space to illuminate this ethnography creatively, self-reflexively

— UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge by Diana Espirito Santo (Page 5)