Can a lizard ride on a housefly?: Navigating uncertainty and moral life in an Accra Zongo, Ghana

Abstract How can uncertainty become a resource for ethical life rather than a threat to it? Focusing on a Zongo community in Accra, Ghana—also known as a “traveler's camp” or “stranger's quarters”—this article examines how people use a creative form of communication called the practice of folding to sustain relationships shaped by conditions of uncertainty. I define this practice as a form of indirect communication that brings together opposing ideas, materialities, and geographies that are not typically associated with one another. Contributing to literature at the intersection of uncertainty, language, and morality, I argue that the practice of folding cultivates and sustains intersubjective uncertainty, inviting participants to keep doubt, questioning, and possibilities in active tension. It enables a particular form of ethical attunement I term an ethics of traveling‐with—an obligation to continually shift perspectives in order to understand other points of view, thereby delaying or even refusing resolution. These findings offer new insights into moral life in contexts of fragility, improvisation, and interdependence, challenging the common assumption that moral striving necessarily seeks resolution, judgment, or evaluation.