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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.