Paper abstract:

A human rights lawyer reads testimonies of state violence and abuse with a certain focus. She looks for elements that meet legally defined criteria for violations of laws and international conventions. A psychologist looks for other elements. A journalist or an activist for other again. From the view of an anthropologist testimonies are stories about places that have been a part of the interlocutor's life that entail rich details about the environment and how this person experienced it. It can be a very thick description of a place not or no longer accessible to the researcher. This is the case for the Uyghur and Kazakh testimonies about incarcerations in the vast camp system of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region between 2017–2020 that I have collected over the last three years. The interviews with camp survivors, employees and relatives often lasted several hours a piece and were full of details about interactions and places, about morality and judgement and about meaning and lack thereof – within and without the camps. I am now analysing and reading them as thick descriptions in regard to what they tell us about life in XUAR in the years of 2017-2020 where access was extremely scarce and the lives of minority people in the region changed radically and painfully. This paper presents some of my important findings from the testimonies as well as methodological and epistemological reflections on the process and the development of a Remote Ethnography of XUAR – the latter being a project I have recently received funding for from the European Union.