Referring to a sketch in his notebook, the anthropologist Michael Taussig points to the magnetism of an event he recorded in a spur-of-the-moment sketch after witnessing an occurrence on the highway. Taussig saw a group of people lying down at the entrance to a freeway tunnel in Medellin in Colombia, just after midday. A woman in this group was seen sewing herself and a man intoa white nylon bag, the type used to hold potatoes, at the edge of a stream of passing cars. As his own taxi sped past, the assemblage of freeway tunnel entrance with two persons being sewn into a bag persisted in Taussig's imagination.

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Taussig's sketch, titled I Swear I Saw This, is the vivid afterimage. It haunts the anthropologist. He regards his unschooled, at-the-spur-of- the-moment sketch a 'talisman' - a piece of magical evidence that holds the unravelling to his instinctual but vital witnessing. Yet, this piece of evidence presents its own problems. Born out of curiosity, it forces both speculation and close reading. Placed within a prevailing research paradigm that distances knowledge/ logic from creativity/intuition, the emerging questions surrounding two figures disappearing into a nylon bag in a traffic slipstream are easily curtailed because of their happenstance. Coincidental encounters are often unwelcomed in intensely cross-referenced and carefully curated academic narratives. Engaging the resistance to compulsive subjects compelling a researcher affectively, Taussig's text patiently stitches what is out of place to reveal the seams of knowledge in academe. He points to where his persistent afterimage rubs against the limits of his (and our) discipline(s), and how academic training may limit how we think, tell, and write. What might be gained, and/or lost in knowledge production, when subjects of study are encountered through perspectives remote to one's disciplinary boundaries? What kinds of knowledge might be generated when remote points of view are left uncolonised by disciplinary norms? Taussig's sketch enacts a 'thinking•feeling', a response that reaches for analytical depth while at the same time preserving its capacity for intuition, in keeping with what is encountered. 'Affect is a way to account for experience in its in-forming. The sketch - an affective artefact - demands a commensurate yet-to-come narrative as its corollary and opens up a potential field of inquiry requiring analytical and projective perspicacity.