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- Convenors:
-
Maria Kastrinou
(Brunel University London)
Kristin Monroe (University of Kentucky)
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- Formats:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract
A roundtable on ethnography and violence—asking how anthropologists write, think, and work amid violence and war, and what forms our narratives take when the body, the field, and the social world are all under threat.
Long Abstract
This roundtable is a conversation about ethnography and violence. Incited by Don Donham’s “Staring at Suffering: Violence as Subject” (2006), we invite participants to share their thoughts on what it means to undertake ethnographic work in relation to violence that directly threatens the physical body. We approach this from the standpoints of representation, methodology, and narrative. Violence, Donham writes, is red: it overtakes and overwhelms, disorients and disrupts. It has the potential to unmake the social world, to create murk and uncertainty. Violence is, in this sense, a different kind of representational object. Yet if we take violence as our subject, do we risk losing our interlocutors—their stories, bodies and memories that persist amid the ruins?
We are living through a time of unrelenting violence: from indiscriminate genocide, smart killing drones, carpet bombing to intimate sectarian violence, sexual violence, starvation and massive displacement. Gruesome images, unbearable videos, and haunting voices travel far and away on social medial often posted by the people who committed them. They find ways into our inboxes, phones, social media feeds. The field, once imagined as a place to enter, now feels both too near and out of reach: mediated, violent as well as haunting, and often impenetrable to the anthropologist due to war.
What then becomes of ethnography? What can we still write when the act of looking feels unbearable? We find ourselves to be anthropologists in a time of extraordinary violence, what shape are our ethnographic narratives taking? What are we narrating and why? This roundtable invites a collective working through of these questions, to ask how anthropology might yet speak, ethically and attentively, in red times.
Accepted contributions
Session 1Contribution short abstract
After sustaining presence in violent situations during my fieldwork with vigilantes in urban Burkina Faso, I want to discuss three difficult claims: violence gets easier; violence creates its own time; and violence as a subject has epistemic value.
Contribution long abstract
What does it mean to sustain ethnographic presence when violence is exercised right in front of our eyes? What does my ability to be present say about me as a researcher and person? And what will people make of my stories? These are only some of the questions I keep asking myself after researching with and writing on vigilante groups in urban Burkina Faso, with whom I was able to participate in over 120 crime interventions involving corporal punishment, public shaming, and incarceration. Based on this research, I want to discuss three claims I keep struggling with. The first is that violence gets easier; the second is that violence creates its own time; and the third is that violence as a subject has epistemic value. With the first claim, I will challenge Donham's assumption that violence always "overtakes and overwhelms" by reflecting on my multiple affective responses to physical punishment. With the second claim, I will explore how the moment of a violent act breaks intersubjectivity, the possibility to attune with each other, and how this speaks to what we have so far learned about violence from its before and aftermaths. My third claim is that sustaining presence in violent situations can have epistemic value. I will ask myself: What have I learned by being there? Based on this discussion, I will address the question of when, how, and to what extent we can ethically speak and write about violence in red times.
Contribution short abstract
When violence is not an event but the condition of inhabiting space, what becomes of ethnographic writing? Drawing on fieldwork in Palestine, this contribution asks how to witness violence without losing interlocutors – holding together public witnessing and private humour, care, and ordinary life.
Contribution long abstract
What does it mean to do fieldwork where violence is not an event but the condition of inhabiting space, and where that condition colours perception, language, and narrative? Drawing on ethnographic research in the Hebron region of the West Bank, this contribution reflects on writing amid overlapping violences of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism. Approaching Yatta via Road 60 – through checkpoints, watchtowers, walled-off colonies, and the smell of burning rubbish that becomes a background odour of research – I ask what it means when the field is sensed as weaponised. In Susiya, At-Tuwani and Sarura, inside and at the edge of Firing Zone 918, Palestinian fellahin inhabit houses, caves and tents under chronic threat of demolition orders, settler attacks and military exercises: domestic life becomes a fragile yet insistent form of presence. However, alongside public accounts that must foreground violence, private moments are marked by irony, joking, and the effort to live “normally”. How can ethnographic writing hold together these registers without either aestheticising suffering or diluting violence into “everyday life”? When violence is ‘red’ and overwhelming, do we risk losing interlocutors to the very object we aim to describe? I propose to discuss narrative forms that can sustain a full account of social life – memory, care, humour, routine – while keeping the political demand to witness intact.
Contribution short abstract
What does it mean to engage with the suffering of others through scholarly work? How does the act of bearing the co-experience of trauma affect the victims and the researcher? To what extent can a scholar maintain a purely observational stance within the unsettling encounter of violence?
Contribution long abstract
Conducting qualitative research on experiences of loss in the context of war means being concerned with the meaning-making process. From a feminist perspective, the boundaries between “researcher” and “participants” become increasingly blurred (Willing).
Since 2015, I conducted interviews with Syrians and Iraqis about heritage loss. These interviews included testimonies from victims of pervasive violence, documenting extreme acts of torture, abduction, isolation, the loss of own relatives and home. Furthermore, some interviewees have expressed verbal racism against other sects or ethnicities, including my own. Additionally, my research includes analysing excerpts posted in social media, where I encountered horrifying records of sounds of suffering, torture, and sexual assault. During one particular meeting with a group of women in Aleppo, the trauma of war, specifically the loss of children and enforced separation, drove the group interview into an atmosphere of collective grief. One participant addressed me, “We wanted to help you with your PhD. Now you drown us all in tears.“
What does it mean to engage with the suffering of others through scholarly work? How does the act of bearing the co-experience of trauma affect the victims and the researcher, i.e. the observer? To what extent can a scholar maintain a purely observational stance within the unsettling encounter of violence? Based on the concept of “multidirectional Memory” (Rothberg), I argue that multidirectional positionality allows scholars to address injustice in an activist sense and scholarly work, while enriching the ethical question of the role of academia in the 21st century.
Contribution short abstract
This roundtable contribution asks how ethnographic narration can reckon with the embodied and social impacts of natural disaster and the slow violence of state abandonment. Showing how chronic malnutrition in cyclones' aftermath is not a "red" form of violence, it asks, what color is hunger?
Contribution long abstract
Four back-to-back cyclones in central Madagascar from January to March 2022 brutally remade the fabric of everyday life and the capacity for ethnographic knowledge. The storms were "mafy be," merciless and intense, as they stripped fruit trees limb from limb, cracked houses open, and forced tons of sandy soil downhill to flood young rice fields. "Mijaly ny vary," farmers said, even the rice suffers. In the storms’ aftermath, we suffered too. Up to 80% of young crops had broken. But we were inland from the hardest-hit coast, so no relief came, whether from a “lean” neoliberal state or from overstretched NGOs. In this landscape of abandonment, what little there had been to eat became even less. Hunger settled in. It distorted how we could act, how we could talk to each other. Thoughts became hazy. Experience dulled against the edge of aching need. Our bodies shrank. Our infections and injuries grew. We were so hungry.
This roundtable contribution asks how ethnographic narration can reckon with the embodied and social impacts of natural disaster amid the slow violence of forced, yet impossible, self-sufficiency. Redness in Malagasy color theory symbolizes the protection of the ancestors, the possibilities of political mobilization, the vibrant liveliness of blood -- all constrained in conditions where ancestors could not be propritiated for the lack of offerings, where there was no one to turn to in protest, and where energy faded into the torpor of chronic malnutrition. What color, then, is hunger? This paper seeks an answer.
Contribution short abstract
This contribution discusses the curatorial politics of atrocity media, exploring how the visual archives of political violence produced by perpetrators fractures the myth of a humanist viewing public, and gestures to the consumption of violence as a politically polyvalent practice.
Contribution long abstract
From Israeli soldiers dancing gleefully on TikTok as Palestinian homes are demolished in the background, to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement posting ASMR videos of deportation raids, there is no dearth of media these days that not only reveals violence but revels in it. What does one make of perpetrators who, rather than hiding in the shadows, smile and wave at the camera? As David Keenan observed of the Kosovo War in 1999, the visual archives of political violence produced by perpetrators themselves have a distinctive grammar that challenges liberal assumptions about the power of the image to expose, to shame, or to condemn. My roundtable contribution will discuss the curatorial politics of atrocity media and the challenge it poses for ethnographic engagements in a time of neo-fascist resurgence. Addressing the state-sanctioned aesthetics of the genocide in Gaza and the Trump regime’s mass deportation campaign, I will explore how atrocity media fractures the myth of a humanist viewing public and gestures to the consumption of violence as a politically polyvalent practice. If one of the conditions of ethnographic labour is sharing a world with others, performative violence by and for an audience reminds us of the constitutive impossibility of worlding premised upon structural dehumanization. It deprives anthropology of its favourite hermeneutics of counterintuition—with which the discipline has previously unmasked racial liberalism’s many hypocrisies—by manifesting a power so unbridled that it coarsens thought and vulgarizes critique. When cruelty becomes the message, what does ethnography have left to teach?