Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the epistemological value to assess on an ethnographer’s dream and guilt unlocking local understandings about emotions. Based on ‘shared’ reflexivity, it suggests conversation about these field experiences with informants and interpretation of emotion by their cultural logic.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the epistemological and methodological value to assess on ethnographer's emotions in the field to further unlock particular local affective attitudes. It mainly deals with alternative ways of learning in the field by reflecting on a transgressive dream and the subsequent experience of guilt, which revealed important local insights into guilt and an every victim's ethos rooted in a cultural junction of psychoanalysis as a worldview and a common therapeutic practice. While conducting fieldwork in Buenos Aires among victims and indicted military officers that were involved in the trials for crimes against humanity that were committed during the last dictatorship that ruled from 1973 to 1983, many uncomfortable emotions attached to violence, suffering and accountability remained unaddressed during the interviews. To unlock particular affective attitudes towards the atrocities, I turned instead to alternative resources, like silence, humour and dreams, to gain local understandings about uncomfortable emotions. In so doing, empathy and reflexivity played significant roles in understanding the other. Other anthropologists have also been fascinated by how reflexivity on ethnographers' emotions plays a significant role in understanding the other during fieldwork (Lorimer 2010: 100; Luhrmann 2010: 213). They emphasize mostly the intersubjective character of emotions, which would validate and legitimize reflexive methodologies. To further unlock local meanings of emotions, I suggest discussions about these emotions in the field with the people we study. This means explicitly mirroring and discussing ethnographer's emotions with informants and trying to interpret these emotions by their cultural logic.