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Paper short abstract

Drawing on hospital ethnography at the boundary of death, this paper asks whether darker anthropology requires a distinctive stance, examining how power shapes available positions and how movement among them changes what can be known.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in a Bulgarian intensive care unit, this paper examines how power relations shape the positions available to the anthropologist and how movement among these positions changes what can be perceived and known. Research on organ donation, transplantation, and the determination of death provides the empirical setting for a reflexive analysis of positioning and movement.

Returning to the question of a darker anthropology, the paper asks whether fields with dark consequences require a distinctive epistemological stance. The hospital material suggests another emphasis: conscious positioning—recognising where one stands, understanding what becomes visible from there, and retaining the capacity to move again.

The paper begins with a vignette of entering an intensive care unit to observe a commission determining brain death. Small observations of territoriality, professional tension, responsibility, family communication, and material evidence become the starting point for examining the researcher’s own position. The analysis follows her movement through different moral and institutional positions during subsequent years of research.

The paper proposes positional mobility as a central capacity of anthropological inquiry while recognising that such mobility is never entirely under the anthropologist’s control. Positions are structured by power; movement between them may be permitted, resisted, or punished. Difficult fields may defend themselves against observation: access can be granted while inquiry is resisted, and presence tolerated while questions remain unwelcome. The question, then, is not only whether anthropologists can bear to enter dark fields, but whether those fields can bear the presence of anthropologists.