Paper short abstract:

This paper questions the taken for granted "externality" of ethnographic observation with a greater emphasis on participation. It is a phenomenological approach to "being distracted" that challenges the limits of ethnography to access "inner worlds".

Paper long abstract:

`People are arrested when they are distracted`, and `people are distracted when they enter the house or go to work` are the ethnographic data on which I would like to build a discussion that interrogates the limits of ethnography under circumstances of political violence. During my fieldwork in Luanda between 2006 and 2007 the circumstances in which I carried out my research dramatically changed from a context of `peace` to a context of `war`. Anthropologists have argued that one of the effects of violence upon knowledge is `abstraction` from the concrete reality of surroundings. The subject becomes encapsulated in representations that are imaginary and lose their grasp on things. The implications for ethnography are important since the defining characteristic of the discipline is participant observation. The ethnographer herself is in fact expected not fall `victim` to it precisely because of her dual positionality as both and insider and an outsider and because of her privileged knowledge of a meta-level of representation that transcends the level of the politics of identification that mediate violence. What does it mean then to become an `insider` of political violence, and how does one step out of it so as to oscillate between the two `sides`? These are the questions that I would like to engage with in this paper by recounting a particular episode of my fieldwork, that of how the impact of the legislative elections in Kinshasa onto face-to-face encounters at the Catholic Mission of Luanda.