Trembling moments: encountering the other (self) at the pier of Lampedusa

This chapter is a response to such a moment of intimate doubt in the form of a confession. In the realm of anthropological enquiry, it is not uncommon to encounter various kinds of revelations, reflexive accounts, self-critical reflections, and limitations which perhaps have not often been addressed as confessions as such, yet they have been revealed with some sense of uncertainty, disturbance, and guilt. Behaviour and speech, often observed as the source of an understanding of ethics, are only but a manifestation of details which the authors may simply not be able or ready to see at times. Experience, Toren argues, is evanescent, and one must learn how to capture it, again, in the awareness that it may simply vanish and leave us empty-handed.