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Paper short abstract

Drawing on research with mothers whose sons were forcibly disappeared in the Baixada Fluminense region in Brazil, this contribution discusses epistemological and ethical challenges involved in researching traces of violence that are implicated in the very conditions they index.

Paper long abstract

Traces of violence can be approached as imprints that index past events. Interrogating prevalent accounts of traces’ epistemic affordances, this intervention considers the challenges posed when traces themselves actualise violence and terror. To do so, we draw on research and activism with mothers whose sons were forcibly disappeared in the Baixada Fluminense region west of Rio de Janeiro. Since the late-20th century, the region has been a major hotspot of enforced disappearance, as territorial contestations systematically exploit and victimise poor and black populations. The mothers we accompany are systematically negated public accountability and suffer from long-term sequaelae. At the same time, the spaces they live in are shaped by intricate traces emerging from violence, obfuscation and intimidation. Engaging with these traces, we argue, poses challenges at epistemological and ethical levels. Not only are they inherently hard to read, they can also have profoundly immobilising, disorienting and terrorising effects, thus deepening conditions of silence and abandonment. Paradoxically, we argue, such traces sometimes acquire significance precisely in moments of silence and confusion among family members and neighbours with complex entanglements with different armed groups. Getting confused and getting lost make the inaudible and the invisible return through failures, distortions and diseases. At the same time, we consider art therapy sessions that forge collective ways of knowing otherwise, thus activating submerged capacities to remember and persist. Our contribution, then, fathoms careful ways of engaging traces amid entrenched conditions of terror, conditions intensified by the very traces that as anthropologist we seek to redeem.