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Paper short abstract

The paper theorizes war as an epistemic condition shaping anthropological knowledge. Drawing on wartime ethnography in Ukraine, it examines positionality, fragmentation, and epistemic restraint, arguing that uncertainty and incompleteness are constitutive of knowing under violence.

Paper long abstract

This paper theorizes war as an epistemic condition that reshapes how anthropological knowledge is produced, authorized, and constrained. Rather than treating war as an object of study, it asks how ongoing violence reorganizes the basic conditions of knowing, witnessing, and analytical distance in anthropology.

Drawing on wartime ethnographic engagement in Ukraine, the paper uses empirical experience primarily as a site for epistemological reflection. It examines how familiar anthropological distinctions, such as observer and participant, distance and involvement, or data and analysis, lose analytical stability under conditions of violence and polarization. In such contexts, knowledge cannot be separated from the researcher’s situated position within unequal regimes of risk, safety, and responsibility.

The paper argues that anthropology conducted in times of war produces knowledge that is necessarily partial, interrupted, and affectively charged. Fragmentation is treated not as methodological failure but as a structural feature of ethnography carried out under insecurity, moral pressure, and uncertainty. Practices such as silence, refusal, and non-publication are approached not as ethical exceptions, but as epistemic practices shaped by limits of representation and responsibility.

Building on debates about situated knowledge and the ethics of witnessing, the paper suggests that claims to neutrality in wartime anthropology risk reproducing epistemic harm by obscuring unequal exposure to violence. It cautions against replacing analytical work with moral or political alignment. The paper concludes by asking whether anthropology can remain analytically rigorous without seeking closure or coherence, and how epistemic restraint may function in wartime.