Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork with families bereaved by the Sewol Ferry Disaster in South Korea, this paper reflects on the responsibilities of anthropologists researching grief and trauma, ethnographic co-presence and vulnerability, and the inability of fully knowing how to 'witness' the pain of the other.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists have rightfully been careful to reflect on what we do onto the field, and reflexive of the ways in which our ethnographic fieldwork and the ensuing practices of knowledge production may do onto the field, the lives therein, and the people thereof. But what of the things that ‘the field’ does onto us, and the potent emotional spillages that come back ‘home’ with us? Based on 15-months of fieldwork among families bereaved by the Sewol Ferry Disaster (2014) in South Korea, who have been campaigning for truth, accountability, and remembrance of their deceased children, this paper reflects on moments from fieldwork in which my co-embrication with the people I sought to ‘study’ was made strikingly evident, and the complicities and responsibilities that I have yet to fully respond to. What is the ethnographer to do with stories of shattering grief from the field? If they are to ‘bear witness’ to grief and trauma, is academic writing the most efficacious, reciprocal mode to do so? Rather than treat these moments as excesses or appendages to the fieldwork experience and the academic writing that emerged from it, I consider them as constitutive of the very co-presence and vulnerability that fieldwork demands and generates. In reflecting on moments and encounters that shaped my fieldwork, and shaped me as an anthropologist, this paper offers a sympathetic critique of accounts calling for ‘witnessing’, which necessarily presumes that anthropologists know what it means to, and how to bear witness.