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Contribution short abstract

When violence is not an event but the condition of inhabiting space, what becomes of ethnographic writing? Drawing on fieldwork in Palestine, this contribution asks how to witness violence without losing interlocutors – holding together public witnessing and private humour, care, and ordinary life.

Contribution long abstract

What does it mean to do fieldwork where violence is not an event but the condition of inhabiting space, and where that condition colours perception, language, and narrative? Drawing on ethnographic research in the Hebron region of the West Bank, this contribution reflects on writing amid overlapping violences of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism. Approaching Yatta via Road 60 – through checkpoints, watchtowers, walled-off colonies, and the smell of burning rubbish that becomes a background odour of research – I ask what it means when the field is sensed as weaponised. In Susiya, At-Tuwani and Sarura, inside and at the edge of Firing Zone 918, Palestinian fellahin inhabit houses, caves and tents under chronic threat of demolition orders, settler attacks and military exercises: domestic life becomes a fragile yet insistent form of presence. However, alongside public accounts that must foreground violence, private moments are marked by irony, joking, and the effort to live “normally”. How can ethnographic writing hold together these registers without either aestheticising suffering or diluting violence into “everyday life”? When violence is ‘red’ and overwhelming, do we risk losing interlocutors to the very object we aim to describe? I propose to discuss narrative forms that can sustain a full account of social life – memory, care, humour, routine – while keeping the political demand to witness intact.