Lines of Connection: Prophets, Ruins, and the Ethnographic Imagination

This lecture explores how anthropological inquiry might be reoriented through attention to the lines of connection that link prophetic figures, material ruins, and imaginative forms of social life.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in West and Central Africa, it examines contexts marked by historical rupture and the uneven presence of state institutions, where the past persists not as a stable archive but as fragment, trace, and ruin.

In such settings, speaker Ramon Sarro suggests that we are confronted with forms of what might be called remote imagination: modes of thought and anticipation that exceed established frameworks of knowledge while connecting disparate temporalities and domains of experience. Prophets appear here not as representatives of a religious category, but as singular figures whose voices traverse and reconfigure these domains, articulating possible futures through visions, narratives, and practices of anticipation. Rather than treating these dimensions as separate—religious, historical, or political—the lecture follows the connections through which they are continuously reworked. It argues that anthropology must move beyond the description of bounded social worlds towards an engagement with the imaginative processes that connect past and future, presence and absence, making ethnography itself a practice of tracing and, at times, participating in these lines of connection.

Ramon Sarró is an anthropologist who studied at University College London and has held positions at UCL, the London School of Economics, University of Lisbon, University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, and University of Oxford. His research spans West and Central Africa and African diasporas, focusing on religion, politics, material culture, and prophetic imagination. He is the author and editor of several influential works, including The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone (International African Institute 2009) and (The Invention of an African Alphabet: Writing, Art, and Kongo Culture in the DRC (Cambridge UP 2023). Professor Sarró has led major international research projects funded by EU and UK bodies, conducted extensive fieldwork in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and contributed to museum revitalisation and collaborative research initiatives across Africa and Europe.

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