Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the legal, relational, representational, and ethical dilemmas faced by anthropologists witnessing violence perpetrated by close informants. I advocate for a holistic approach to violence witnessing, which looks at physical, symbolic and structural violence together.

Paper Abstract:

Witnessing situations of violence is part of the work of many applied anthropologists, but what happens when those committing violence are one’s closest informants? Based on long-term ethnographic research with adolescents involved in Colombia’s criminal gangs, in this paper I reflect on the complexities of relating to, building ethnographic empathy with, and engaging in participant observation of individuals who are perpetrators of violence. I argue that this kind of research presents the ethnographer with several dilemmas. To begin with, witnessing violence imposes a legal obligation to report, which clashes with the ethnographic commitment to anonymity and confidentiality. Moreover, much violence is relational, meaning that the presence of the researcher as a witness may influence, or even generate, violent actioning. Additionally, a focus on violence as the object of the ethnographic inquiry implies serious risks of falling into ‘cowboy ethnography’ (Contreras 2013), or of producing a ‘pornography of violence’ (Bourgois 1995), thereby further stigmatizing, rather than emancipating, the study population. Last but not least, pursuing activist anthropologist becomes a challenge when one’s informants' agenda and values heavily clash with the researcher’s moral world. Does suspending moral judgment towards violence also imply suspending action to prevent it? To tackle these challenges, I propose a holistic approach to violence witnessing that looks at physical, symbolic, and structural violence together (as opposed to essentializing violent incidents and addressing them out of context). Within this approach, the ethnographer can still act to tackle structural causes of violence, while also helping to understand individuals’ violent behaviour.