Contingency, in its Latin root, is about touching, bordering on, reaching, befalling. In this, its first application as a concept driving new ethnographic practice, it avoids the quasi-scientific tendency to circumscribe a community or body of data. Consistently unsystematic, contingency theory welcomes stray facts, complexity, intuitions, and feelings. In this article the writer visits Madagascar contingently, encountering texts, people, and events.
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