Will you teach me? From seriousness to sincerity with apprentice phenomenography

Abstract By pushing for adequate modes of conceptualisation, ontological turn theorists have made significant headway in the attempt to take seriously ontological worlds that are typically considered irreconcilable to those of the Western intellectual project. Rather than taking ontological alterity seriously, in this paper I ask instead what it would mean to take ontological alterity sincerely. Seriousness involves a commendable commitment to bracketing out all pre‐formulated metaphysical assumptions such that the conceptualising project of the anthropologist is unvarnished by the taint of standard Western habitual thought. Sincerity, on the other hand, means bracketing out nothing. The sincere anthropologist instead assumes that their habitual commitments to the world are amenable to alteration through submission to the teaching of their fieldwork companions. I describe this method as ‘apprentice phenomenography’, that is, the inscription of that which appears in concrete situations of learning.