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- Convenors:
-
Costanza Torre
(SOAS, University of London)
Henni Alava (Tampere University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel calls for darker anthropology in an increasingly dark world. We ask, what shapes our (dis)engagements with genocide, suffering, and inequality? What are the affective, ethical, and institutional conditions required for anthropologists to confront the moral weight of the worlds we study?
Long Abstract
We live in an increasingly dark world – one fractured by violence, inequality, and indifference. This panel asks whether the attention of anthropology as a discipline, and as a moral and epistemic community, is where it should be. Is anthropology turning away from its darkest materials–genocide, dispossession, and deepening systemic harm–and towards seemingly safer and more manageable topics? And if it is, what does this turning reveal?
Where the debate on the anthropology of suffering and the good directed attention to how anthropology constructs its object, we inquire instead into the conditions that shape anthropologists’ choice to pursue or avoid “dark” projects. Taking seriously the affective labour of our craft, we ask: how to sustain the work of “a darker anthropology” without breaking under its weight? Do our discipline’s institutions, funding streams, and collective habits of attention support bearing witness or engaging? How, when both despair and denial are rife, do we do our work in ways that neither look away from the world’s violences nor collapse beneath them?
This panel proposes “darker anthropology” not as an indulgence in despair, but a commitment to a discipline capable of confronting, rather than evading, the moral weight of the worlds it studies. We invite contributors to redefine anthropological commitment through reflections on question such as: Where does our attention lie? How do disparate practices in our field hold together? What are the communal and institutional conditions that allow pursuing difficult ethnographies with emotional sustainability and intellectual honesty?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper shows how institutional ethics and dissemination practices manage affect and prioritise public perception. I argue that these technocratic commitments produce ethical voids that obstruct the development of a darker anthropology capable of meaningful epistemic confrontation.
Paper long abstract
The recent rise of far-right parties across Europe has generated a proliferation of projects and research initiatives that seek to explain this trend. A dominant narrative emerging from these studies locates neoliberalism as the causal node: contemporary far-right movements are seen to feed on the social and emotional consequences of four decades of privatisation, welfare retrenchment and economic precarity. My own ethnography among far-right actors in London supports this view. Interlocutors spoke less in the language of policy than of dignity, masculinity, pride and belonging, mobilising cultural identity at a moment when material solidarities have collapsed. Yet the epistemic infrastructure through which this data is interpreted and disseminated remains deeply neoliberal. Research practices, analytic frameworks and dissemination strategies tend to discipline an Other into categorical imperatives designed to manage affect and render it publicly manageable in the 'problem vs solution' binary. Anti-fascist anthropology carries complex ethical and epistemic commitments, but the institutions hosting such work often prioritise public perception over systemic critique, reproducing the very logics they seek to challenge. This tension extends well beyond the far right and is familiar to scholars of other 'difficult subjects.' The paper traces a genealogy of these commitments within the university, showing how technocratic ethics and risk-averse institutional cultures generate ethical voids that make research on contested populations increasingly fraught.
Paper short abstract
When anthropologists study violence they are inevitably touched by it. This paper explores how being open to be affected by the violence, and injury, we study can open space to create other ways of doing anthropology that consider pain is something that can be collectively shared and acted upon.
Paper long abstract
During the last decade, several citizens have been mutilated during protests in France as a consequence of the use of less-lethal weapons. These citizens are often criminalized and, as a result, are not recognized as victims by society. This paper is based on 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among these citizens, during which I followed their struggles for truth and justice in court, their political organizing to make their cause visible, and their daily lives. During fieldwork, I observed that violence was not confined to individual bodies but was transmitted between them, affecting the close peers and family members of mutilated protesters, as well as the anthropologist researching on them. My interlocutors where utterly aware of the social origin of their pain and the injustice of this. This enabled them to "feel" the pain of other mutilated citizens in their own bodies. As a result, many advocated for a utopian project of police abolition, imagining a future in which no one would be injured by police again. They believed their own pain would cease when this sort of injury no longer existed. As my interlocutors, we are all injured by society in different ways. Anthropologists, if they are in contact with their own socially inflicted pain, could also be capable of feeling the pain of their interlocutors. A darker anthropology would research on violence and injury while considering the ethnographer as also being injured, creating a sentient anthropology, focused on dismantling the social causes of pain.
Paper short abstract
Framed as a descent into anthropology’s seventh circle (of hell), this paper reflects on the ethical and political dilemma of studying the international arms trade. It explores issues of researcher complicity, fraught connections, and 'espionage' within spaces of corporate violence and sycophancy.
Paper long abstract
The arms fair circuit is infernal. From the station exit to the exhibition hall’s main entrance, you move as a mass of suit-wearing consultants and executives, flanked by police. After an intensive security check, you arrive at a theatre of warmongering, filled with holograms, networking booths, and toy-like models of missiles, drones, and heavy-duty tanks. Here, prospective bloodshed is aestheticized and marketed as innovation.
This paper traces my personal descent into the world of military exhibits and conferences, foregrounding the ethical and emotional impact of inhabiting a field site structured by corporate violence, sycophancy, and disassociation. Conducting fieldwork in such spaces exposes the ethnographer not only to the spectacle of militarism, but to the ethical ambiguities of witnessing and documenting a world that thrives on destruction while speaking the language of security and progress.
Drawing on fieldnotes written over the past two years, I reflect on moments of discomfort, seduction, and doubt that arise in proximity to corporate and military power. These encounters raise questions about the limits of ethnographic empathy, the impossibility of informed consent in certain research settings, and the legitimacy of understanding a world that resists self-scrutiny. What forms of knowledge emerge when anthropology enters this infernal marketplace, and what moral debts accompany them?
Rather than seeking redemption through critique or distance, the paper argues for an anthropology that confronts its entanglement with darkness—acknowledging that our methods, affects, and ethics are shaped by the very systems and supply chains of violence we study.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research on organ donation and transplantation in Bulgaria, this paper examines how modern institutions (mis)manage death. It also reflects on the conditions that enable anthropologists to work in morally difficult domains in close proximity to death.
Paper long abstract
As large religious narratives lose their public authority, death is increasingly pushed to the margins of social life, while modern ethics emphasises individual autonomy and rational choice. These frameworks prove insufficient at the threshold where death must be collectively recognised and acted upon.
This paper examines organ donation and transplantation as a site where modern institutions confront the epistemological and moral limits of death, and the strength of the surrounding taboos. Drawing on ethnographic research in Bulgarian hospitals and interviews with medical professionals, it argues that apart from technical coordination healthcare systems should allow socially recognised ways of crossing the boundary between life and death.
Anthropology, with its capacity to analyse both institutional practices and symbolic orders while suspending moral judgement, offers a particularly powerful approach to understanding the “dark” zones in proximity to death where moral responsibility, cultural meaning, and institutional action intersect. This research was made possible also by a specific disciplinary trajectory, prior professional experience in psychological crisis management. It provided practical familiarity with situations structured by death and loss.
The paper raises a question about the absence of cultural forms of “death education.” Where societies lack shared ways of learning to confront death, both institutions and researchers encounter significant barriers when approaching situations structured by it. Without a shared narrative that situates death within the continuity of life, societies lose not only symbolic orientation toward the invisible but also a common horizon of the future.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Uganda, this co-authored reflection interrogates how funding regimes entangle knowledge and capital, asking what forms of engaged, affective anthropology are possible under institutions complicit in the harms.
Paper long abstract
This co-authored reflection draws on our experiences of conducting long-term fieldwork in Uganda and on the profound affective consequences that followed us back into academic life. We approach our experience of burnout as an analytic category, rather than as an individual failing, to discuss the structural tensions between anthropology’s moral and epistemological mandate, and the institutional demands under which knowledge is produced.
We pay particular attention to funding regimes which govern research agendas, to discuss entanglements of knowledge and capital. When the production of knowledge depends upon grants embedded in global economic structures that are themselves implicated in inequality and violence, what forms of inquiry become possible - and which are foreclosed? How can scholars ask for support to undertake intellectually and emotionally engaged research when the infrastructures of support participate in the very “darkness” we seek to analyse?
By taking our own experiences of exhaustion and fragmentation seriously, we aim to reopen questions about anthropological commitment. We argue that being emotionally affected by the field is indivisible from the creation of meaningful knowledge around it, and ask - what institutional arrangements - temporal, financial, collegial - would allow researchers to engage difficult materials without collapse? What would it mean to build academic structures that recognise affective labour as constitutive of knowledge rather than incidental to it? Crucially, what kind of knowledge production is possible under funding structures which are complicit in the production of the harm we study?