What is the redness of red? How can we describe what it is like to experience it? While literary writers have tried to give concrete answers to such questions, philosophers have tried to do their part by coining the concept of “qualia”. However, their concept has parted the waters and perhaps only created more questions. For me as an anthropologist, “qualia” is inspiring precisely because of the swarm of questions it generates. It opens you up to curiosity and listening and the wonder of human subjectivity, as when you sit in a group of people practising “guided shared reading” and try to tune in to someone else’s experience of what you have just read. Or it inspires you to encounter, for example, the force of a red door in a busy airport. Colour is “a splurging thing, an unmanageable thing, like a prancing horse or a run in a stocking”, Michael Taussig writes (2009:17), and I ask: aren’t such things what makes good ethnography?