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.

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