Contribution short abstract:

Employing creative, semi-fictionalised, fragmented storytelling, this paper explores the moral ambiguities of representing lives shaped by violence. Drawing on fieldwork in Rio’s Vidigal favela, it examines how 'unwriting' ethnography can ethically narrate lives without reducing them to spectacle.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper explores the moral ambiguities and narrative challenges of ethnographically representing lives shaped by systemic inequalities and violent governance. Anchored in my fieldwork in Vidigal, a favela in Rio de Janeiro, the paper examines the life and choices of B, a former housemate who tragically took his own life after committing an act that irrevocably altered his existence and those around him. B’s story reveals the intersection of structural violence, precarious aspirations, and deeply personal struggles to achieve a better life (melhorar de vida) within constrained fields of possibility.

Through fragmented narratives and reflective storytelling, I interrogate how B’s life and death challenge conventional anthropological approaches to representation. Drawing on Veena Das’s notion of the ordinary, I explore how B’s decisions, including his final one, made sense within his moral framework and ordinary aspirations for stability and dignity. At the same time, the story unsettles dominant moral codes by foregrounding how systemic neglect and inequality render choices that are unthinkable to many as entirely conceivable to others.

By “unwriting” conventional ethnographic representations, this paper embraces the fragmented and nonlinear nature of human experience. It reflects on the ethics of representing lives where agency, precarity, and morality intertwine in complex ways. It asks how we, as ethnographers, can ethically narrate lives marked by suffering, resilience, and irrevocable loss without reducing them to spectacle or stereotype. Perhaps, this could be done through creative, generous, and semi-fictionalised storytelling.