ABSTRACT The Arabic phrase Allāhu a‘lam —“God knows best”—is used frequently in everyday Muslim speech and to conclude seemingly assertive statements or fatwas. At its heart lies the recognition that God is the All‐Knowing, whereas humans know next to nothing. Reflecting on this recognition, this essay discusses Sufi refusals of the ethnographic project and describes practices connected to the idea that only God truly knows. The latter range from the istikhāra prayer (turning to God for advice) to dhikr (remembrance of God). Finally, I ask what it might mean to let the Allāhu a‘lam inflect the ethnographic project. What if, instead of seeking to pile up more and more knowledge, we were to embrace the fundamental human condition of not knowing?
ABSTRACT This article argues that hunting is not a bounded event but a materially redistributed atmosphere that extends beyond the kill and across field, truck, clothing, and home. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork with wild boar hunters in Uruguay, I show how mud, odors, blood, and bodily residues carry the sensory, affective, and material force of tracking, waiting, and pursuit into domestic space. Rather than treating this continuity as merely phenomenological or symbolic, I explain how it is materially reproduced through adhesive, persistent, and indexical substances that bind bodies, vehicles, dogs, and households into the hunt's ongoing life. I develop the concept of atmospheric modulation to describe how these substances reorganize relations across spaces and times. In doing so, the article reframes hunting as a pervasive more‐than‐human practice and contributes to anthropological debates on materiality, residues, traces, and the social life of substances.
