The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World 9781032333816, 9781032367101, 9781003333418

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Contributors
Preface
1 Entanglements of Fieldwork: An Introduction
Ethnography and Violence
Fieldwork Under Duress
Violence and Non-Events
Emotional Fieldwork
Ends Without Redemption
Conclusion
References
2 Unspeakable: Silences and Silencing Around Fieldwork Amid Violence
Note
3 Drawing On Your Inner Anthropologist: Some Tools for Violent and Difficult Ethnographic Fields
Frames
To Sit Steadily in the Chair
Transference and Countertransference
Reverie and Free Association
Containing
Secure Base
Sublimination
Creative Writing
The Writing Poem
Writing as Painting
Notes
References
4 A Cautionary and Hopeful Tale About Experiencing, Thinking With, Writing Through, Reflecting On, and Teaching the …
Introduction
Fiji: Culture, Conflict, and Coups
Tales of Emotional Discombobulation From the Field
Encounter #1
Encounter #2
Encounter #3
Writing Feeling: Emotion and Ethnography
Emotions and Ethnography: a Pedagogical–pastoral Teaching Complex
Notes
References
5 The Fieldwork of Never Alone: Reframing Access as Relationships of Care
Introduction
Reframing Access and Exclusion as Relationships of Care
Paying Attention to Access and Exclusion in Settler Colonial Contexts
Access Reveals Power: the Role of Race and Gender
Never Alone: Relational Care, Jealousy, and Bed-Sharing
Che Celosaite! I’m So Jealous: Protection and Power Through Care-Taking
Protective Strategies: What They Signal
Conclusion
References
6 ‘You Are One of Us’, But I Wasn’t: Managing Expectations and Emotions When Studying Powerful Security Actors
Note
References
7 Conversations About Violence During Fieldwork in Colombia
Introduction
Background of the Project
Layers of Danger
Project-specific Risks
Paranoia and Determining Safety
Showing Trust
A Calm Paranoia
Conclusion
Note
References
8 Staying Sane and Safe in Israel/Palestine: A Foreign Researcher’s Reflections On Fieldwork Across Boundaries
A Difficult Time for Anthropology in Israel/Palestine?
Pragmatic Considerations: Getting in
Balancing the Line Between Research and Activism: On Night Patrol in a Besieged Village
Crossing Boundaries and Managing Signals
Mistaken as a Settler in the West Bank
Briefly Detained in Gaza
A Note On Ethics, Boycott, and Visibility
Conclusion: Researching Across Boundaries
Notes
References
9 Involved and Detached: Emotional Management in Fieldwork
Feelings as Knowledge Production?
Example 1. Fieldwork With Armed Groups in the Congo
Managing Emotions in Contexts of Insecurity
Example 2. Paranoia in Romania
Was I a Spy?
‘Don’t Visit Us Again. You Only Make Trouble.’
Conclusions: ‘Distance Learning’
References
10 On Catalina’s Silence and the Things About Her I Still Do Not Know How to Say
It Still Lingers. That Silence.
Selfie
No Sign of Jonny
Beauty, You Are Irresistible!
Baby, I Do Not See Anything Different
Notes
Reference
11 Side Effects: How Fieldwork and Ethnography Helped Me Reclaim My Life
Introduction
A Flash of the Past
Dealing With My Own Past
Notes
References
12 Violent Experiences, Violent Practices: Caring and Silence in Anthropology
Violent Experiences
Violent Emotions
Violent Practices
Care
Becoming a Trauma-Informed Discipline
References
13 Hospitality and Violence: Writing for Irresolution
How to Read These Letters
Note
References
14 Getting Closer to the Skin: Writing as Intensity, Writing as Feeling
Introduction
The Labor of Reciprocity
Being Put Together
Bringing Oneself to Write
Conclusion: Figuring Out Feeling
Acknowledgments
Note
References
15 Cherry Blossoms and Grilled Lamb: An Ethnographic Short Story
Acknowledgments
Note
References
16 Making Common Cause: Ethics as Politics, Anthropology as Praxis: An Afterword
Entanglements
Mixed Emotions
Taking Leave
Ethics as Politics
Making Common Cause
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World

This book focuses on the emotional hazards of conducting fieldwork about or within contexts of violence and provides a forum for field-​based researchers to tell their stories. Increasingly novice and seasoned ethnographers alike, whether by choice or chance, are working in situations where multidimensional forms of violence, conflict and war are facets of everyday life. The volume engages with the methodological and ethical issues involved and features a range of expressive writings that reveal personal consequences and dilemmas. The contributors use their emotions, their scars, outrage and sadness alongside their hopes and resilience to give voice to that which is often silenced, to make visible the entanglements of fieldwork and its lingering vulnerabilities. The book brings to the fore the lived experiences of researchers and their interlocutors alike with the hope of fostering communities of care. It will be valuable reading for anthropologists and those from other disciplines who are embarking on ethnographic fieldwork and conducting qualitative empirical research. Nerina Weiss is Senior Researcher at the Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research in Oslo, Norway. Erella Grassiani is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Linda Green is Professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, USA.

Routledge Studies in Fieldwork and Ethnographic Research

The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World Edited by Nerina Weiss, Erella Grassiani and Linda Green www.routle​dge.com/​Routle​dge-​Stud​ies-​in-​Fieldw​ork-​and-​Ethno​grap​hic-​ Resea​rch/​book-​ser​ies/​RSFER

The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World Edited by Nerina Weiss, Erella Grassiani and Linda Green

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Nerina Weiss, Erella Grassiani and Linda Green; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Nerina Weiss, Erella Grassiani and Linda Green to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032333816 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032367101 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003333418 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003333418 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of contributors Preface 1 Entanglements of fieldwork: an introduction

vii ix 1

NERINA WEISS

2 Unspeakable: silences and silencing around fieldwork amid violence

16

SA M I R A M A RTY

3 Drawing on your inner anthropologist: some tools for violent and difficult ethnographic fields

18

I VA N A M AČE K

4 A cautionary and hopeful tale about experiencing, thinking with, writing through, reflecting on, and teaching the emotional in ethnographic fieldwork

34

J A S TI N D E R K AUR

5 The fieldwork of never alone: reframing access as relationships of care

48

CA R I TU S I N G

6 ‘You are one of us’, but I wasn’t: managing expectations and emotions when studying powerful security actors

59

E R E L L A G R A S SIAN I

7 Conversations about violence during fieldwork in Colombia C O L L E E N A L EN A O ’B RIE N

63

vi Contents

8 Staying sane and safe in Israel/​Palestine: a foreign researcher’s reflections on fieldwork across boundaries

76

A N D R E A S H ACKL

9 Involved and detached: emotional management in fieldwork

93

A N N A H E D LUN D A N D STE VE N SA MP SO N

10 On Catalina’s silence and the things about her I still do not know how to say

114

S I M O N E TOJI

11 Side effects: how fieldwork and ethnography helped me reclaim my life

122

M O L LY H U RL E Y DE P RE T

12 Violent experiences, violent practices: caring and silence in anthropology

138

L E N A G RO SS

13 Hospitality and violence: writing for irresolution

150

AYA M U S M A R AN D AN N - ​C H RISTIN ZUN TZ

14 Getting closer to the skin: writing as intensity, writing as feeling

167

O M E R A I J A ZI

15 Cherry blossoms and grilled lamb: an ethnographic short story

178

E VA VA N RO E KE L CO RDIVIO L A

16 Making common cause: Ethics as politics, anthropology as praxis: an afterword

188

L I N DA G R E E N

Index

194

Contributors

Omer Aijazi is Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the University of Victoria, Canada. Erella Grassiani is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Linda Green is Professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, USA. Lena Gross is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Sami Studies, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway. Andreas Hackl is Lecturer in Anthropology of Development, University of Edinburgh, UK. Anna Hedlund is Researcher in the Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden. Molly Hurley Depret is an independent researcher in New York, USA. Jastinder Kaur is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London, UK. Ivana Maček is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden. Samira Marty is PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway. Aya Musmar is an assistant professor in Architecture and Feminism at the University of Petra in Amman, Jordan. Colleen Alena O’Brien is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Jena Center for Reconciliation Studies at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. Steven Sampson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden.

viii  List of contributors Simone Toji is a research fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-​Inequality in Latin America (Mecila), São Paulo, Brazil. Cari Tusing is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Anthropological Studies at the Universidad Austral de Chile. Eva van Roekel Cordiviola is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Nerina Weiss is Senior Researcher at the Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research in Oslo, Norway. Ann-​Christin Zuntz is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, UK.

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Preface

The idea for this book project was born after the seminar “The loose ends of fieldwork: emotional care of the self in the ethnography of violence”, held in 2013. The seminar brought together scholars from anthropology, psychology, political science and philosophy, who discussed methods and approaches to avoid or ameliorate emotional stress in the field; issues of representing and writing about violence and suffering; and how to sensitize scholars to, and prepare students for the potential emotional hazards encountered in the field and in analyzing data on violence and suffering. The presentations and discussions that followed made it quite clear that this topic was unfit for a conventional methodology handbook, which would provide the reader with a manual or blueprint. Rather, we wanted to create a book that would provide the reader with a multiplicity of approaches, perspectives and experiences. At that time, focusing on taking care of the self and exploring the emotional sides of fieldwork and its aftermath were new and utterly unexplored. Although we had seen several publications on the emotional turn and a larger focus on the fieldworker’s experiences during fieldwork, we still believe that our original aim to create a book that would sensitize and raise awareness was valid. Several years and continued discussions between the editors finally led to the volume at hand. We want to thank the participants of the seminar, some of whose contributions feature in this volume. We also want to thank the anonymous reviewers and our editor at Routledge, Katherine Ong. Oslo, Amsterdam, Tucson, May 2022 Erella Grassiani, Linda Green and Nerina Weiss

1 Entanglements of fieldwork An introduction Nerina Weiss

It all started with a dinner invitation. It was Ramadan, and I had come early. There was still time before we could break the fast. We were sitting in the living room, catching up, while the girls and their mother busied themselves with dinner preparations. I had offered to help, but had kindly and firmly been directed to the living room. So there I was, telling my host about my new position as a postdoc at a rehabilitation and research centre for torture victims in Denmark. It was my third or fourth research stay in this small, Kurdish-​dominated town in Eastern Turkey. Throughout my previous PhD research on expressions of violence in the area, my host had been an important interlocutor, offering explanations, context and gossip. I had known him for years, and we had shared countless cups of tea together. I also knew that he had been imprisoned and severely tortured several times. Everybody knew, and many respected him for his continued fight for the Kurdish cause. That was one of the reasons why he could work in the municipality without adhering to the –​otherwise rather strict –​dress code for municipality employees. He could drink and be merry in a town where the vast majority were practicing Islam, and alcohol was hard to come by. I counted him as one of my dearest friends in the field, but I had avoided interviewing my closest friends. It was so much easier to hear about suffering and pain from people less close to me, people I might not interact with on a daily basis. Now, when I told him that I had zoomed in on torture and how the torture experience was expressed and talked about in different contexts, he nodded appreciatively. He looked at me, seemingly making up his mind, and then told me “Now that you are working at this torture place, maybe it’s time to tell you my story.” What followed was an enactment of his torture experience, which I have described in detail elsewhere (Weiss 2014), and which also features in Maček’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 3). By the time the Muezzin called and my host had ended his story, I had forgotten the TV noise, had become unconscious of the busy dinner preparations of the women and nearly forgotten where I was. By the end of his performance of torture I was only able to see his naked, bloody and tormented body, DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-1

2  Nerina Weiss smell the filth and excrement and hear the banging of iron doors and military boots making contact with human bones. We had our dinner, and conversation during our meal was as relaxed and easygoing as always. However, the image of his tortured body stayed with me. Upon my return to my office, I was unable to analyse the patient files. Previously, I had been so careful to avoid any images, so as not to know which wounds, marks and scars the different torture methods left behind. I had consciously avoided knowing and imagining in order to be able to read the files and listen to the stories. I still did not know exactly what Turkish prisons looked like inside, still hadn’t studied the medical pictures of torture wounds. However, now, the image of my friend’s tortured body came to mind each time I started reading a patient file. Each time, I was back in his prison cell, smelling odours and hearing noises I had never experienced in real life. What had gone wrong? I thought I had learned how to deal with the stories of violence, loss and suffering. Thought that I had found a balance between empathy and (emotional) distance, and learned techniques to deal with difficult interviews. Until that night, I thought my tactics of taking care had worked. For over a year I had studied and analysed the patient files of torture survivors at the Danish Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (now Dignity –​Danish Institute against Torture). I had also already interviewed a number of torture survivors during that stay in the Kurdish town, had listened to their stories, documented their experiences and seen their broken bodies. All this, while apparently taking care of myself, through avoiding images, taking notes during interviews and file analyses in order not to have to remember too much of the detailed torture descriptions and by having clear boundaries between work and leisure time. But during that dinner everything changed. I had not been doing fieldwork, but visiting a good friend and his family. I had come to relax and be with friends, and he had simply caught me off guard. I had no notebook in which to record the memories –​I had to remember. He did not tell about his torture experience like my other interlocutors, in technical, horribly detailed albeit detached language. No, he performed it, moved through the room, enacted scene after scene, while he wanted me, his audience, to relax on the sofa. In the end he had drawn me into his world of pain, without me even realizing it.

Ethnography and violence I had learned the hard way that we never know what the fieldwork experience will be like. We do not know if or when the stories we hear, events we witness and emotions we experience might become troublesome, painful or overwhelming. We might not even know how we will react to such experiences, nor how or to what extent such experiences may impact our academic and personal lives. What we do know, however, is that our world is volatile and that during fieldwork, researchers often become entangled

Entanglements of fieldwork: an introduction  3 in violent situations, ranging from the spectacular, such as warfare, to the seemingly mundane, such as peacetime crimes and suffering. Since the end of World War II, anthropologists have increasingly addressed the topic of violence in its myriad forms more directly, as a plethora of ethnographies, edited collections and journal articles published in both the US and Europe attest. Besides a generation of scholars who have theorized on the dynamics of war and peace and understandings of violence as well as detailed analysis of specific conflicts or aspects thereof, some researchers have already engaged with the methodological and ethical issues of doing research on violence and conflict. Thus a new corpus of literature has emerged that focuses on methodological and ethical issues when doing research on violence or in conflict areas (Sluka 1995, 2007, Ansom 2010, Berreman 2007 [1996], Kovats-​Bernat 2002, Paluck 2009, Wood 2006, McLean and Leibing 2007). A number of publications have also examined the aftermath of fieldwork and its toll on fieldworkers themselves (Pollard 2009, Maček 2014), reflected on the roles of emotions in the field (Davies and Spencer 2010) and on the ethnographic ethic of immersing oneself in the context of violence (Weiss 2014). What is still missing, however, is a profound discussion of how we, as anthropologists, can become better prepared, and can prepare our students, for research in violent settings, how we can deal with the aftermath of such research in our private and academic lives, and how we may move forward. We need to have open conversations about the impact of violence and its aftermath not only on the lives of our interlocutors but also on the lives of our students and ourselves. Doing fieldwork remains the defining requirement for becoming an anthropologist in the twenty-​first century. Fieldwork remains a mandatory rite of passage and as such, to quote Rabinow (2016), is seldom the subject of public scrutiny. Ethnography is commonly understood as a “means for producing knowledge from an intense, intersubjective engagement” (Clifford 1983: 119). Fieldwork is perceived as an “intersubjective practice” (Crapanzano 2013 [1980], Rabinow 2016), and the intensity thereof mostly “achieved through long-​term involvement, intimate participation in a community and the deep immersion into people’s lives” (Keesing and Strathern 1987). Although later explorations of the meaning and content of ethnography vary in several ways, the definition of intense, intersubjective engagement is rarely questioned. But what does this intensity, intersubjectivity and immersion mean when we apply these basic requirements for fieldwork to the field of violence, social suffering and conflict? The authors of this volume tell of long-​lasting friendships and ongoing relationships of responsibility and care (Tusing, Chapter 5) relations of hospitality (Musmar and Zuntz, Chapter 13) and of shared emotions and fears (Green, Chapter 16; O’Brien, Chapter 7). They also tell of fieldwork encounters that were confrontational (Kaur, Chapter 4) or one-​time interviews marked by distrust and antipathy (Grassiani, Chapter 6). Some of the contributors write about their immersion, of sustained empathy and

4  Nerina Weiss solidarity with interlocutors who had become friends (Gross, Chapter 12, Marty, Chapter 2). Others have shown that this preference for ever more proximity, friendships and engagement may also have a downside (Hedlund and Sampson, Chapter 9; Weiss 2014). Grassiani and Kaur, for instance, criticize the common belief that anthropologists must gain the trust of interlocutors in the field and that relations of friendship and care are necessary to gain valid data. Both authors did fieldwork with people they did not necessarily like. For Kaur, fieldwork encounters were often confrontational, exclusionary and accusatory. Grassiani (Chapter 6) argues that: I am in no way advocating any sort of lying or disrespect towards the people that open the doors for us in order to do our research. But giving research participants insights into our motivations is often not needed in order to have a truthful and respectful relationship in the field. Grassiani did fieldwork among Israeli military personnel, whose political position she despised, and argues that she needed a certain form of distance. In particular, she did not want to share her own political position, which was opposite to that of her interlocutors. We know that the intense and repeated exposure to violence, social suffering and conflict in the field and through the processing of data may negatively affect the researcher (Gentry, Baggerly, and Baranowsky 2004), both personally and in her ability to analyse and reflect on the material gathered. The need for peer support and reflection has been acknowledged within other disciplines such as psychology (see Maček Chapter 3) and medicine (Shin 2021), as well as for NGOs and aid workers stationed in conflict settings (Green, Friedman, and Jong 2003). Most researchers working in academia, however, are still left alone to cope with the personal, ethical and emotional dilemmas that can emerge in the field and when processing data. In this current volume we aim at mitigating this by acknowledging the entanglement of personal and professional selves. Whereas it has long been an established fact within anthropology that our personal lives, our gender, skin colour, age and positionality impact how we do research (Powdermaker 1967), the reverse is equally true and important. As Kaur (Chapter 4) has argued, “we do not accept emotions as a valid subject of our reflexive practices in anthropology; we give priority instead to how our identities and statuses mark power differentials in our fieldwork relationships.” We therefore have to take seriously the value of fieldwork’s intersubjective and experiential dimension (Davies and Spencer 2010). Several researchers have shown how emotions may inform our understanding and become sources of insight and revelation (Green 1999, Taussig 1992). However, it seems as if our reactions to emotionally strenuous fieldwork experiences –​the pain, the shame, the guilt, the outrage, the numbness, the sadness or the paranoia –​are still left out of the academic canon. They are mostly shared outside, and lunch breaks and bars seem to be regarded as

Entanglements of fieldwork: an introduction  5 more appropriate environments for such sharing than conferences or academic papers. However, as Gross (Chapter 12) rightly argues, such emotions have to be explored in cultural, social and political contexts, rather than as something private, individual and potentially shameful. One purpose of this volume is therefore to take discussions about the researchers’ vulnerabilities from late-​hour confessions in bars and among friends into the academic spotlight. We thus want to break away from what I call “macho ethnography,” the boasting about strenuous fieldwork without acknowledging its emotional toll, i.e. “it was extremely hard, I nearly died, but see, I survived –​ and I survived intact and sane.” In doing so, this volume raises awareness about the emotional care of the self among researchers, which the social sciences have far too long neglected.

Fieldwork under duress The strenuous and negative emotions and experiences that may arise from fieldwork on and in violent settings are neither a private problem nor simply hampering academic rigor and analytical insights. Building on anthropological studies of emotion and intersubjectivity, which criticized the abandonment of emotion into zones of pathology, radical and racial otherness and into the feminine, the outlawed, the exotic, the mad, or the bad (Davies and Spencer 2010, Lutz and Abu-​Lughod 1990, Kleinman 2006), rather, we argue that our own experiences from the field – t​hose disturbing or painful –​are central to our academic endeavour, even intrinsic to it, and given the necessary acknowledgement, consciousness and preparation. The contributors to this volume therefore explore how we can focus on our reactions, be conscious of what they mean and how they can be productively employed in our academic and personal lives, beyond the ethnographic context in which these emotions occur. As such we go beyond Crapanzano’s (2013 [1980]) call for emotional reflexivity and Hage’s (2009) political emotion, both of which, although highly valid in this context, limit their exploration to the ethnographic studies at hand. What we do (and which is explicitly expressed in Green’s afterword to this volume) is to explore how our reactions in and to the field may have long-​lasting effects on how we define ourselves as anthropologists and human beings, and which choices we take in our future political and private lives. Therefore, instead of providing a book of confessions, or offering guidelines about how to navigate and control difficult field experiences, the chapters in this volume present different approaches to dealing with violence, to what anthropology is and what it should be. What unites the contributors to this volume is the genuine understanding that we need to listen –​listen to our informants as well as to ourselves. The messy stories (Hedlund and Sampson, Chapter 9) described in the chapters will hopefully enable us to appreciate the unpredictable nature of the research process and the wider contexts that shape research outcomes and knowledges produced

6  Nerina Weiss (Aijazi, Chapter 14) and to gain a more careful and nuanced understanding of what takes place when we are in fact at work (Maček, Chapter 3). We need to reflect more systematically on how we and our students might be better equipped to engage methodologically, analytically and personally with emotionally strenuous research topics. After all, the discussion about taking care of the self should be linked not only to the implications for the researcher’s own well-​being but also to the quality of their current as well as future work. The authors were asked to address the following three questions: 1. What is good (enough) data? And how do we collect it? Also, what is it with the idea of dangerous data being good data? 2.  Breaking with the “romantics of fieldwork” (and the different perspectives thereon), we question the ethnographic icon of immersion: When do we drown, when do we just dip our feet, and when do we dive with confidence? How far is it possible and desirable to immerse oneself in a traumatized society? How may we experience culture internally, but trauma externally? 3. What does it mean to write up fieldwork? What does distance mean? And should we actually be unscathed, literally pulling ourselves and our data together? What might we miss? Other than a request to engage with these questions in analytical and theo­ retical terms, the authors were asked to share their own experiences. As the reader will soon realize, the chapters in this volume are raw, and intentionally so. This rawness has little to do with lack of writing skills or unpolished style. On the contrary: authors were asked to put aside their academic habitus, and to cut down their stories to the essence. We wanted the authors’ emotions, scars, outrage and sadness, but even more so, their hope and resilience. We did not want yet another methodologically and academically-​ driven piece on fieldwork under fire (Nordstrom and Robben 1995), or another handbook of how to do fieldwork in violent settings (Robben and Sluka 2007, Bliesemann de Guevara and Bøås 2021). Instead of giving practical answers, we wanted to give the reader different tools –​in writing style, re-​interpretation of what fieldwork is or should be, and how to deal with the uncomfortable, messy and irresolvable feelings many of us experience before, during and after having been in the field. The insights from these different articles will help us to raise fundamental questions about our fieldwork experience and our discipline more generally. As such we hope that this book will be thought-​provoking, maybe shocking and most of all inspiring.

Violence and non-​events Within our discipline, work on conflict, violence and war tends to be privileged over other forms of suffering. Data on danger, violence and

Entanglements of fieldwork: an introduction  7 suffering seems to be regarded as “good data” (Gross, Chapter 12), and the researcher who has survived such particularly difficult and harsh fieldwork –​that is fieldwork in and on spectacular violence –​unscathed is ranked high in a “hierarchy of endurance.” I can still remember the respectful nod of one of the professors at my university upon my return from fieldwork: She had been sceptical in employing me. Me, the outsider from Austria, who had not been trained in the British social anthropology tradition, and thus was unworthy of being a PhD student at her institute. Her attitude towards me, however, changed completely after my return from fieldwork in Eastern Turkey. Having proven my “ability to endure” fieldwork in a remote, inaccessible conflict area with continuous police surveillance and military intervention, I seemed to have passed the test in her eyes. I had completed my rite of passage into the ranks of tough, and thus worthy, anthropologists. Violence may take many different forms, from war, genocide and torture to domestic violence, suicides, injustice, colonialism, occupation, inequality or racism. However, there commonly seems to be a bias towards the more spectacular forms of violence, the murder and torture, the genocide war and mass violence, obscuring other forms, which are more difficult to grasp, such as the consequences of a neo-​liberal economy, pollution or long-​term consequences of colonialism. Hurley Depret (Chapter 11) warns us that “A focus on so-​called ‘events’ causes one to overlook the banal non-​events of violence, the taken-​for-​granted, supposedly insignificant, invisible occurrences that were as important.” In this volume we want to bring together research that focuses on violence and social suffering and work in which the violence might not be readily visible, nor be the focus of the research. As I have argued elsewhere (Weiss 2014), methodologically, the difference between working in a setting of conflict, violence and mistrust and other emotionally strenuous fieldwork situations is not a fundamental one but rather a question of degree: During fieldwork in and on a conflict, mistakes might have more severe consequences, hegemonic discourses might be stronger, and the positioning and repositioning of the researcher might be more important. Access to certain groups of the community might be more restricted, one might be more exposed to negative emotions, fear, mistrust and suffering. However, when research is felt as “under duress” at what point the pressure becomes difficult to bear and when duress impairs ethnographic practice is impossible to say in advance. Several of the authors have conducted fieldwork under fire and have experienced being surrounded by tanks and weapons. Some have feared, witnessed, been threatened with or have experienced abductions, sexual assault and other forms of violence. Other authors may not have conducted fieldwork in the midst of war. Nonetheless, they have experienced deep and

8  Nerina Weiss fundamental feelings of discomfort and emotional stress in the field and upon their return. Rather than focusing solely on the spectacular, we have asked the contributors to also dwell on what Hurley Depret has called the banal non-​events, those events we might not even have noticed while in the field, but which had an immense impact on our interlocutors and ourselves. Non-​ events bring our attention to the abject (Povinelli 2011), and what life lived in nothing does to people. Non-​events or quasi-​events are refugees’ endless waiting in limbo, where nothing happens, but this nothingness still severely impacts the refugees’ physical and mental health (Weiss 2020, Kublitz 2015); the permeating inequality, which affects lives, health and social relations as a state of disillusion and decay, the impossibility of living with dignity due to the neo-​liberal capitalism of free market (Green, Chapter 16). The violence may be ubiquitous and in many cases without an obvious culprit (Gross, Chapter 12), and deposit itself in people’s bodies, feelings, friendships and dreams (Musmar and Zuntz, Chapter 12). The same is probably true for the anthropologist as well. Theorizing on the effect of such quasi-​events, Povinelli has coined the term “violence of enervation,” which she defines as “the weakening of the will rather than the killing of life” and “that hopes and despair are conjured through the endurance of the exhaustion of numerous small quasi-​events” (2011). As Aijazi (Chapter 14) demonstrates, such forms of violence “are rarely definitive ruptures of some coherent lifeworld, but part and parcel of the ongoing labour of making life viable.” For several of this volume’s authors, these non-​events provide the background (and at times foreground) to which experiences of violence are elaborated and experienced.

Emotional fieldwork At some point, the violence in which we live, and with which we work, becomes normalized. Danger and the threat thereof become part of daily life, which has to be dealt with. Hackl (Chapter 8), for example, tells of how he navigated life and fieldwork across the Palestinian/​Israeli borders by constantly hiding his intentions and emotions and modifying how he communicated information across different locations and social settings. “It is no surprise then, that this kind of research environment made me prioritize pragmatic thinking, which may have come at the expense of articulating my personal opinions and my emotions.” Without us knowing, violence and threat have merged into the way we move, the way we think and the way we interact. During a short fieldwork trip to Eastern Turkey in 2016, a time when air attacks occurred as much on Syrian as on Turkish soil, I had gotten surprisingly quickly used to the sounds of war that formed the background noise of my daily routine. The humming of the drones over our heads, the explosions far and at times not so far away –​one could always hope that it was a firework or a wedding celebration –​and the breaks during interviews, until the roaring of the bomber jets had ceased. I did not feel fear, nor stress.

Entanglements of fieldwork: an introduction  9 This was just how life was in Eastern Turkey. How much I had adjusted and how much the war had become part of my routine became clear during a walk with my partner and baby daughter shortly after my return to Norway. Upon hearing a loud sound, I asked (calmly, I believed) my partner to turn around and find another route to the woods. My entire being went into alarm mode. I had heard an explosion and now scanned the surroundings, trying to determine where the bomb had detonated. It took a few seconds to remember that I was at home, in Norway, and that the explosion had come from a nearby construction site, and that there was no danger at all in continuing our walk. Maček (Chapter 3) argues that: dangerous and difficult fields have a tendency to occupy our lives beyond our assignment. Because of our capacity to empathize with others, who are in need, as well as our ethical compulsion to assist them, many of us have trouble letting go of the field and living our private lives when we are not at work. Indeed, as will be seen in the brilliantly raw contributions to this volume, researchers struggle with emotions, memories and preoccupation for the people they left behind. Several of the authors recall their inability to let go. Maček recalls thinking constantly of the people in Sarajevo; Gross remembers talking obsessively, nearly screaming at people, while at the same time being unable to concentrate on academic work. We also shared that we were supposed to gain distance from the field and start the writing up phase. But: I had no distance, I did not want any distance. Who were we that we deserved distance? While we were distancing ourselves and trying to make a career out of the “data” we had collected, the life of our interlocutors went on without their loved ones, without food and housing safety, with extreme pollution, or whatever we had been researching. Emotions and feelings are central in this volume. It has been our aim to highlight those emotions, which seldom find their place in academic writing: the rage, the anger, the fear, the shame and the apathy. At times, such emotions are shared between the ethnographer and the people we work with, and as such give us a sense of meaning and common understanding. Green has previously written about the fear and distrust she experienced during her fieldwork on Mayan widows in Guatemala (1999). In a similar vein, O’Brien (Chapter 7) recalls the feeling of paranoia that had caught hold of her while working on a documentary film in Colombia. In Marty’s poem (Chapter 2) the fear is omnipresent. In all these three cases, these shared emotions become an important tool for knowledge and insight (Davies and Spencer 2010) and also become a form of shared humanity. They provide a

10  Nerina Weiss sense of meaning and a common understanding of the world and the current situation (Maček, Chapter 3). There is often shame linked to the ability to leave, and leave others behind. In an email exchange, Grassiani questions the idea that if the other suffers we have to suffer as well. I learned through my activism in Israel and Palestine that my feeling good, doing good things for myself does NOT in any way make the other feel worse. Our guilt is something we take with us from home or the university. It is not asked of us by the other who is suffering. That doesn’t mean we cannot or should not help the other, but I have encountered so many students who feel guilty for having fun on the beach while Palestinians they work with suffer oppression. (Personal communication 2021) Furthermore, these haptic parts of fieldwork which connect, also often make visible the distance that exists between the researcher and the “locals,” the people we work with. Although Green and O’Brien both shared emotions of fear, paranoia and distrust with their interlocutors, it was exactly that experience that distanced them from their friends, their host-​family and acquaintances. Their foreign passport protected them (to some extent) and gave them the security of being able to leave when things became too strenuous or too dangerous. As Musmar and Zuntz, as well as Kaur (Chapter 4), however, remind us, the discussion of shared experienced and distance –​often discussed as inherent to ethnographic fieldwork –​is a rather Northern “trope.” Not all have the privilege of distance, and not all have the privilege to leave. How could one leave, if one had done fieldwork in one’s own country, like Musmar did? And what use is a foreign passport, when one is considered by one’s looks to be one of the hated, local other, like Kaur experienced?

Ends without redemption More often than not, fieldwork does not end with redemption but with loose ends or traumatic memories. We return from our fieldwork, leaving behind encounters where we failed and where we failed others. We have been able to leave, whilst our interlocutors and friends continued to live in poverty, war or suffering. We have been unable to accommodate our interlocutor’s request for assistance (Musmar and Zuntz, Chapter 13) and will continue to disappoint any future hope for reciprocity with the people whose stories we build our careers on (Aijazi, Chapter 14). Many of us have our own memories of violence. However, our own emotions and our own traumas feel negligible compared to what we have witnessed during fieldwork, and which we know our interlocutors and friends still experience every day. It is easy to create a hierarchy of suffering, which the anthropologist most likely

Entanglements of fieldwork: an introduction  11 always loses. But not experiencing the entire abyss of violence, as Aijazi points out, does not deny the researcher the right to feel and react. After all, witnessing can have detrimental effects. In A Different Kind of War Story (1997), Nordstrom retells the story of a woman who had been tortured during the military dictatorship in Argentina. She scribbled down her experiences on sheets of paper which were smuggled out of prison by a friend. The woman’s priest got hold of the papers and planned to publish them as a diary. However, the priest could not cope with reading the horrors of torture and went mad. While writing had enabled the tortured woman to hold on to her sanity, reading her testimony led to the priest’s insanity. The story so clearly shows how writing may be both a way to keep and to lose one’s sanity. So, how might we stay sane and whole while going through our data and turning our experiences and emotions into text? How might we be able to write at all? Gross felt too angry, too outraged, Aijazi too numb and Maček spent her time occupying herself with computer games instead of reading her notes. Hurley Depret and Kaur left academia entirely for a while, finding other occupations, only later returning and finalizing their degrees. The inability to write, the inability to find a voice which gives justice to one’s interlocutors and relates their vulnerabilities and emotions, to claim positionality where it was due, but not to expose, is often experienced as a failure: a failure as an anthropologist, a failure as an academic and a failure as a fellow human being. Not surprisingly few anthropologists actually write about their emotions and the rough writing process. When Kaur resumed her PhD work, her ethnography was left out from her writing: in truth, I was hiding my ethnography from myself, refusing to give it life, because to do so would also give unwelcome life to long-​subdued emotions and remembrances of feeling overpowered, invisible, voiceless, and ultimately disembodied from the me that I knew: incarnated instead as an opponent, a refusenik, a coloniser, a foe. How then can we find a voice, a writing style with which we feel comfortable, and which conveys the researcher’s vulnerabilities and challenges, and also turns these into valuable data? For some, distance –​temporal, emotional and geographical –​was essential to being able to finally write. Hedlund and Sampson advocate emotional management during and after fieldwork. They argue that fieldwork is always that of an outsider and that we are always able to detach ourselves (be it during fieldwork at home or abroad). This outside status is a position of privilege, as it gives us a very different outlook on the risks and emotions involved in fieldwork. Gross, on the other hand, refuses to adhere to the standard procedure in ethnography: getting immersed during fieldwork and detaching oneself thereafter from the field, friends and the data.

12  Nerina Weiss Gross found their voice in the language of trauma, thus also accepting that the violence had impacted them albeit differently from their interlocutors. Like the priest in Nordstrom’s story, Gross also had to fight for their sanity. In similar terms, Aijazi (Chapter 14) advocates: writing incomplete stories can help dislodge (even if momentarily) the inherited notion that adding to literature is the only way to contribute. And provides openings to think more carefully about how to listen and grow humbler in the face of knowledge encounters. Writing stories that are incomplete, messy, elaborate, layered, speaks of the processual work that unfolds in the long duration of our research endeavours and in relationships with others as imbued with ethical concern and uncertainty. Toji, Marty and van Roekel Cordiviola finally present yet another approach to dealing with violence and the writing thereof. They have turned to ethnofiction and poetry, powerfully conveying the impact of violence and the written word as a form of testimony, and an imaginative tool for portraying “lived experiences of vexed emotions related to po­litical and structural violence” (van Roekel Cordiviola, Chapter 15). These authors demonstrate that several different genres are necessary to capture the plenitude of life and convey the multiple truths from the field. Fiction and the imaginative may provide one such “generous ground” upon which the anthropologists’ moral world can meet the interlocutor’s being humanly mindful about the stakes at play (Toji, Chapter 10). Gross (Chapter 16) has, along with Beckett (2019), defined ethnography as care work due to the place of empathy, intimacy and close relationships in fieldwork settings. Writing had for many of this volume’s authors become a continuation of their care work: care for their interlocutors and care for themselves. Through writing about and through the various emotions, care had become more than a de-​ politicized, individual project of self-​protection and sustenance to a form of care which allows us to remain in irresolution, and to “stay with trouble, not dissolving it” (Musmar and Zuntz, Chapter 13).

Conclusion When I came back to my office I could not work. I did not want to work, because I did not want to be confronted with my friend’s tortured body again and again. I talked to my superiors. The research director, a psy­ chologist, offered me crisis therapy and sent me home to my family on “lieu time.” My supervisor, fellow anthropologist Henrik Rønsbo, agreed that a holiday with my loved ones would do me good but asked me to answer a few questions about that dinner. What was on TV? Who had been in the room and how had my friend moved during his performance? Simultaneously he reminded me about the topic of my research. It was not torture I studied but

Entanglements of fieldwork: an introduction  13 expressions of torture. It was thus not my friend’s tortured body but his performance that I should focus on. It helped, and after a while I could again read files and listen to torture experience. I know that I had been extremely lucky that time. Not only could I rely heavily on insightful and useful advice from fellow researchers. I had also been working in an environment of researchers who had all worked on violence, suffering and torture. Unlike my previous (and maybe also current) workplace, my colleagues at that Danish institute also shared with me an understanding of why the work we did was necessary, important and also fascinating. Upon my return, and my being exhausted, there were none of the common questions which O’Brien (Chapter 7) reports, such as the questions why do we bother? Why can’t we find something else to engage with? Instead, I was met with the acknowledgement of the meaningfulness and importance of my work –​of sublimination (Maček, Chapter 3). All my energy, which otherwise would have gone on deflecting the questions of why, to defending my choice of research topic, explaining why I wanted to continue with it in spite of everything, could therefore be focused on questions of how. How could I become able and enabled to continue my work, to use my experiences productively and (in want of better, less esoteric words) to grow personally and academically. There was a common understanding that our work was strenuous and painful but also fascinating and important, and thus worth pursuing. These experiences led to a more thorough engagement with emotions and care during fieldwork.

References Ansom, An. 2010. The story behind the findings: ethical and emotional challenges of field research in conflict-​ prone environments. Program on States and Security. 1–​19 Beckett, Greg. 2019. Staying with the feeling: Trauma, humility, and care in ethnographic fieldwork. June 22, 2019. Anthrodendum. https://​anthr​oden​dum.org/​ 2019/​06/​22/​stay​ing-​with-​the-​feel​ing-​tra​uma-​humil​ity-​and-​care-​in-​ethno​grap​hic-​ fieldw​ork Berreman, Gerald D. 2007 [1996]. “Ethics versus ‘realism’ in anthropology.” In Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader, edited by Antonius C.G.M. Robben and Jeffrey A. Sluka, 298–​315. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bliesemann de Guevara, Berit, and Morten Bøås, eds. 2021. Doing Fieldwork in Areas of International Intervention. A Guide to Research in Violent and Closed Contexts. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Bornstein, Avram S. 2002. “Borders and the utility of violence –​State effects on the ‘superexploitation’ of West Bank Palestinians.” Critique of Anthropology 22 (2):201–​220. Clifford, James. 1983. “On ethnographic authority.” Representations 2:118–​146. Crapanzano, Vincent. 2013 [1980]. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

14  Nerina Weiss Davies, James, and Dimitrina Spencer. 2010. Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gentry, J. Eric, Jennifer Baggerly, and Anna Baranowsky. 2004. “Training as treatment.” International Journal of Emergency and Mental Health 6:147–​155. Green, Bonnie, Matthew J. Friedman, and Joop de Jong, eds. 2003. Trauma Interventions in War and Peace: Prevention, Practice and Policy. New York, NY: Kluwer. Green, Linda. 1999. Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Keesing, Roger M., and Andrew J. Strathern. 1987. Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Kleinman, Arthur. 2006. What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life amidst Uncertainty and Danger. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kovats-​Bernat, J. Christopher. 2002. “Negotiating dangerous fields: Pragmatic strategies for fieldwork amid violence and terror.” American Anthropologist 104 (1):208–​222. Kublitz, Anja. 2015. “The ongoing catastrophe: erosion of life in the Danish camps.” Journal of Refugee Studies 29:229–​249. Lutz, Catherine A., and Lila Abu-​ Lughod. 1990. Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maček, Ivana, ed. 2014. Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory and Representation. London: Routledge. McLean, Athena, and Annette Leibing. 2007. The Shadow Side of Fieldwork: Exploring the Blurred Borders between Ethnography and Life. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Nordstrom, Carolyn. 1997. A Different Kind of War Story. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nordstrom, Carolyn, and Antonius C. G. M. Robben. 1995. Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Paluck, Elizabeth Levy. 2009. “Methods and ethics with research teams and NGOs: Comparing experiences across the border of Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo.” In Surviving Research: Working in Violent and Difficult Situations, edited by C. Sriram, 38–​56. London: Routledge. Pollard, Amy. 2009. “Field of screams: Difficulty and ethnographic fieldwork.” Anthropology Matters Journal 11 (2):1–​17. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2011. “The governance of the prior.” Interventions: Inter­ national Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13 (1):13–​30. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1967. Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist. New York, NY: Norton & Company. Rabinow, Paul. 2016. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco: Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, with a New Preface by the Author. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Robben, C.G.M. Antonius, and Jeffrey A. Sluka. 2007. Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Shin, Beverly. 2021. “Peer Support for the Medical Community.” In Peer Support in Medicine, edited by Avery J.D. Cham. New York, NY: Springer. Sluka, Jeffery. 1995. “Reflections on managing danger in fieldwork: dangerous anthropology in Belfast.” In Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of

Entanglements of fieldwork: an introduction  15 Violence and Survival, edited by Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius C. G. M. Robben,. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 276–​294. Sluka, Jeffery. 2007. “Fieldwork ethics: introduction.” In Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader, edited by Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Jeffery Sluka. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Taussig, Michael T. 1992. The Nervous System. New York, NY: Routledge. Weiss, Nerina. 2014. “Research under duress: Resonance and distance in ethnographic fieldwork.” In Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory and Representation, edited by Ivana Maček, 127–​139. London: Routledge. Weiss, Nerina. 2020. “The violence of waiting: Understanding the experienced violence of the benevolent welfare state.” In Refugees and the Violence of Welfare Bureaucracies in Northern Europe, edited by Dalia Abdelhady, Nina Gren and Martin Joormann. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wood, Elisabeth Jean. 2006. “The ethical challenges of field research in conflict zones.” Qualitative Sociology 29:373–​386.

2 Unspeakable Silences and silencing around fieldwork amid violence Samira Marty

“This is the land of volcanoes. Suddenly they erupt,” said the taxi driver. “I have to close the doors and windows before I can answer any of your questions,” said the local friend. “It’s weird they let you enter our country,” said the youth party member, “normally we don’t like it when people like you come in.” “You are just another one of these white women asking for our stories, publishing it in English with all that fancy talk,” said the human rights defender. “You may try from another angle,” said a friend from far away. “Many ethnographers get injured doing fieldwork, using unfamiliar road rules and vehicles, undertaking potentially dangerous and unfamiliar tasks, overextending themselves in physical activities in order to keep up with participants, or being ignorant or dismissive of the risk of disease,” said the course book.1 “Your white skin must be very soft,” said the military police officer when driving past, “and sticking a certain carrot up your ass must feel very nice, don’t you guys think?” And his seven colleagues laughed, their AK47s shining in the midday heat. “Don’t be a hero,” said the supervisor. “She was strangled over there, you can’t walk any further down this road,” said the neighbor. “I miss you,” said the partner. “They want to let you know that they know exactly where you are living,” said the interlocutor, “and to be careful because you are a single white woman, all on your own. You should stop talking to me. Don’t call me again. And be very careful.” “It’s certainly a very important topic but please don’t come back here,” said the peasant. “Were you raped yet?” said a local colleague. “The situation has deteriorated vastly in the past months,” said a compatriot. “They are cutting our signal now,” said the radio moderator, “I repeat, a Presidential Decree has decided to cut our signal right now.” DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-2

Unspeakable  17 “There are no more buses running up north, may God be with us, and avoid another war,” said the fruit seller. “Let us come inside,” said the teenage girl, “my sister needs water and first aid. They started shooting into the crowds, hurry, please, let us in.” Error 404 page not found. “You have to stay in the backyard,” said the host. “Everyone can see that you’re not from here. They –​they could come to get you.” “This does not sound good at all,” said the doctor. “In the neighborhood they say you might be a spy from the CIA,” said the security guard. “It’s normal that protests are a bit rougher here, if you know what I mean. Just listen to the recommendations of local authorities and local media outlets,” said the embassy staff. No TV signal detected. “Please come back home now,” said the brother. “These are just minuscule protest groups, and the authorities applied their legitimate right to self-​defense,” said the First Lady. “Get down, we are passing the last checkpoint,” said the driver. “I cried for three days and nights straight and prayed to God that he may avoid another war,” said the person in the neighboring seat on the plane. “Welcome home,” said border control. “Out of business,” said the online newspaper. “We are afraid we can’t cover any of your expenses. There is no proof of whether you did research or were just on vacation,” said the insurance company. “They are watching everyone now. I’m not safe anywhere. Don’t forget to write my story,” said the interlocutor. “You are a nasty little liar,” said a reader. “It had been an ambitious project from the start,” said an anthropologist. “You should have tried for longer. It couldn’t have been that bad,” said another anthropologist. “It’s bizarre to look back and think this would be over with my departure,” said the diary.

Note 1 Madden, Raymond. Being Ethnographic: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Ethnography. Sage, 2017, pp. 91.

3 Drawing on your inner anthropologist Some tools for violent and difficult ethnographic fields Ivana Maček Consider this famous anecdote from a meeting of the British Psycho-​ Analytical Society held during the Second World War. It was a noisy evening with bombs dropping every few minutes and people ducking as each crash came. In the middle of the discussion someone I later came to know as D.W. [Donald Winnicott] stood up and said, “I should like to point out that there is an air raid going on,” and sat down. No notice was taken, and the meeting went on as before! (Little 1985:19) During my training as a psychodynamic therapist, this anecdote was used as an example of the attitude a therapist should aim for in sessions: sitting steadily in one’s analytical chair, open to, observing, and trying to articulate what is going on, no matter how emotionally heated or threatening the material the client puts forth might be. For me, the anecdote connected psychodynamic practice to my work as an anthropologist of war and mass political violence. This connection might have been intuitive from the start, but I have gradually explored it and formulated it more clearly during the ensuing years. It has been useful not only for my psychotherapeutic practice but also for my work with material and experiences from the wars that tore the former Yugoslavia apart in the early 1990s. If Donald Winnicott could preserve his calm during the London Blitz, then I could preserve my calm and be open to, observe, and try to formulate in words what had happened in former Yugoslavia. When work and writing were difficult or seemed impossible, I could remember to sit steadily in my anthropological chair. I faced violence in anthropological fieldwork first in the war zones of Croatia, then in Hercegovina and Sarajevo. I have described this experience and using it to better understand the processes of war and its consequences for people, society, and culture (Maček 2001, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2013). My interest in anthropological methods grew from the realisation that doing participant observation in dangerous fields demands much more careful and DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-3

Drawing on your inner anthropologist  19 nuanced understanding of “what takes place when we are in fact at work” (Geertz 1995:120).1 While anthropologists working in less demanding fields may conduct their study without much reflection on what they are doing, or how and why they are doing it, anthropologists in violent fields have often reported being overwhelmed and have seriously considered giving up their work (e.g. Maček 2014a, Weiss 2014, Swedenburg 1995). I decided to study psychodynamic psychotherapy because I myself was overwhelmed during my work with war in Sarajevo and later with comparative studies of genocide. Feeling helpless in the face of the existential abyss that wars often create, I discovered that psychotherapy and anthropology had quite a lot in common when it came to aims and methods.2 Both seek to understand how it is to be someone else, and both draw on the self-​awareness of the anthropologist or psychotherapist as a way of reaching this goal. Psychotherapy, unlike anthropology, has a century-​long history of theorising its methodology and established ways of educating new generations of theorists and practitioners. This chapter elucidates methodological concepts that describe fieldwork methods and techniques that anthropologists sometimes use spontaneously but are not always aware of, in part because they have not been theo­ retically described and properly defined in our discipline. These methods are especially useful for approaching whatever goes unsaid or is hidden in the field—​phenomena and experiences that are sometimes impossible to formulate in words (see Maček 2017a), yet are important parts of the social life we study. I describe the concepts from psychodynamic theory and practice that I have found most useful during my work with war and mass political violence (see also Maček 2014c). I hope that the reader finds this conceptualisation of anthropological method useful in the way Nerina Weiss, one of the editors of this volume, described it: “for me it has been an eye opener to learn that what I had experienced in the field actually had a name, a concept and a coping strategy” (Weiss 2013, personal communication).

Frames Frames is a concept that relates to the whole set-​up for therapeutic work. The outer frame pertains to the setting: it brackets off space and time in order to provide a safe environment for anything that needs to be brought forth from the client’s inner world, however difficult and dangerous it might feel to both the client and the therapist. I think of setting time and space frames for our fieldwork (as well as the writing-​up and presentation of our research) as a way to provide a safe setting for ourselves, where we can feel free to give ourselves over to the field (to paraphrase slightly Taussig 1992:10; see also Maček 2009:11). Knowing that there is a limit to this engagement is crucially important when working in violent fields.

20  Ivana Maček Dangerous and difficult fields have a tendency to occupy our lives beyond our assignment. Because of our capacity to empathise with others who are in need, as well as our ethical compulsion to assist them, many of us have trouble letting go of the field and living our private lives when we are not at work. This constant preoccupation easily leads to burnout, if not more serious collapse into mental paralysis and depression, which many anthropologists of war have experienced (e.g. Maček 2014b, Swedenburg 1995, Weiss 2014). I vividly recall that I could not stop thinking obsessively about the people in Sarajevo when I was safe in Sweden but at the same time could not focus on my academic work either, so I spent hours and hours playing Minesweeper (sic!) in a sort of spontaneous meditation that relieved me at least for the moment from the helplessness, powerlessness, and guilt that rampaged through my inner world (see Maček 2014b:143). From trauma psychologists I learned that if we are to work with existentially threatening issues (no matter whether war or peacetime violence) we need to take care of ourselves and provide for recuperation time, free from our emotionally draining task (see for instance Herman 2001, Pearlman 2014). Had somebody at that point told me about frames I needed to put around my engagement with war in Sarajevo, I might have not understood it; I might have thought it immoral or impossible. In retrospect, I know that at that point I, or someone else, should have forced me to take care of myself: to work for limited hours and to take advantage of the fact that I was not exposed to life-​threatening dangers in Sarajevo when I was in Uppsala between my fieldwork periods (Maček 2014b, 2018).3 Even though it would have felt wrong and difficult, I should have exercised regularly, dedicated time to a creative activity, taken up some sort of meditation or yoga, and looked for psychological support (if not regular therapy, then some sort of follow-​up debriefing). Much of this could have been provided by the workplace. Professional organisations, such as the Swedish Army’s international peacekeeping forces, offer debriefing and other assistance for the personnel working in war zones. Academic anthropology departments, however, seldom provide any support. The inner part of the frames is the mind-​set of the client and the t­ herapist and the intimate and secure relationship they aim to develop, which is known as “therapeutic alliance.” In anthropological terms, it is about the inter-​ subjectivity of our work: the understanding that we co-​create our knowledge about the phenomenon we are studying through constant, dynamic engagement with it, the field, and especially the people in it. The “key-​informant” or “war-​friend” who stands for and may even articulate the central insights we gain attests to the close relationships we often develop in the field. At the same time, we must be aware of our motives and the sometimes unconscious forces behind our engagement with these phenomena, which I take up later in the chapter. There is always a moment where we feel that we are losing the contact with the field or that the materials and understanding that we are getting

Drawing on your inner anthropologist  21 are not really that interesting, important, or even genuine. In psychodynamic terms, this is called the loss of the therapeutic alliance, a loss of meaningful relationship that needs to be re-​ established before the therapeutic process can continue. I suggest that we can use this sense of meaningful inter-​ subjectivity in our work, too. When we sense a loss of relevance, we need to re-​establish it before we carry on, no matter whether during the fieldwork or during the analysis and writing. Frames are a part of the contract, which both the client and the therapist commit to. The contract is useful whenever the therapeutic process comes to hard and problematic places, as must occur in every transformative process. Anthropologically, thinking in terms of a contract can be helpful when we explain our aims and methodology to our collocutors in the field: what we would like to do, the aims of our research, how we think we would like to do it, and what we need from our interlocutors. As part of the contract we should try to understand how our interlocutors see us, our research topic, and how they might be able to help us with it, as well as what they expect of us, and perhaps also what they would like us to do and why. In violent fields that might sometimes be the only ethical thing to do. In her work on social movements in Oaxaca, Lynn Stephen (2013) asked the people there what they needed her to do, and their collaboration resulted in a set of testimonies and an interactive web page (https://​faceo​foax​aca.uore​gon. edu/​).4 All these questions are useful to bring up continuously throughout the fieldwork, not only at the start. More concrete parts of the contract, the outer frames, are also useful to share with the interlocutors: how long are we going to be in the field, where we are going to stay and travel, how much money do we have, and how can we compensate our interlocutors for their time and engagement?

To sit steadily in the chair Working in war is dangerous and we are often in situations that are frightening, but we do not always acknowledge the threats they present; if we did, we would probably not be working in a war zone in the first place because, in contrast to people in the field, we have a choice.5 Amidst violence and war, we need to preserve our calm, while not shutting down our capacity to observe and reflect. The concept of “holding” in psychotherapy captures this capacity: holding means that we can endure the difficult materials we are facing without shutting them (or ourselves) off. Winnicott’s action, in acknowledging the air raid and then sitting back down as the meeting continued, is a telling example of this attitude. So, how do we keep our faculties intact in the face of bombings and other dangers, whether real or perceived? Apart from taking care of ourselves in the field physically, mentally and socially, we need to find our purpose for being there: why this is important to know, and why do I want to be the one to do this?

22  Ivana Maček When I worked in Sarajevo, the answer was not clear, but I felt very strongly that I could not do anything else. Even though it was neither refined nor insightful, this notion helped me through the roughest times both in the field and afterwards. When I was shot at by a sniper in Sarajevo, for example, the next day I felt a complete lack of will to continue with my fieldwork, a sort of instant depression. It felt like a proof that everything I was, worked for, and knew was not worth anything and could be destroyed in a second. Only after recalling my original motivation for being in Sarajevo did I summon the energy to continue my work, carry out an already planned interview, meet new people, and just be my curious and capable self. Curiosity was one of the central elements for being able to remain in the field, or “to sit steadily in my anthropological chair.” Whatever difficulties or threats I faced during my work in the field, it was always helpful to rely on the curiosity that brought me there in the first place. When we find this attitude of curiosity, it opens us up to a freer way of relating to the people and experiences we encounter in the field, which is a prerequisite for original ethnographic work. Being ourselves in the field is an essential part of our anthropological alliance with the field: if we want to relate to others and our experiences in the field in a meaningful way, we need to be authentic ourselves. When we meet people whom we dislike or encounter attitudes we regard as repulsive, such as the romanticisation of violence or the glorification of ethno-​national identity, holding onto our original curiosity helps us to be ourselves despite our distress in the moment. We cannot help the feelings we have, and sometimes we cannot conceal them, but we can transmute them into genuine questions about the experiences that formed their views. If we cannot find that place in ourselves, where we are genuinely interested in the other, and thus can act genuinely as ourselves, then working with that particular person or situation is probably not right for us. The way I related to nationalism in Sarajevo included both. Many people tried to define their own position towards their national identity and could sometimes make generalisations about the national “other,” and I met most of these attitudes with further questions and counter-​examples, without trying to prove something but rather trying to understand how my collocutors reached a certain conclusion, and more importantly, whether there were nuances and contradictions to certain attitudes, which almost invariably proved to be the case. Thus, I gained rich material and a nuanced understanding of how national identities were negotiated and the role that violence and fear of violence played in this process. In one interview, however, I was so scared by the aggressive nationalism of a man of different national background from mine that I became paralysed; fear trumped my interest and curiosity, so I posed the routine questions in a rote manner and wanted the interview to end. That encounter taught me the emotional power of national animosities. It was no longer impossible to imagine nationalistic rage and horror at the “other.”

Drawing on your inner anthropologist  23

Transference and countertransference Once during my fieldwork in Sarajevo a young man working for an NGO invited me and two other friends for dinner. He had managed to get hold of a chicken, some potatoes, and green salad, and he wanted to make a feast. This was the first time in almost two years that chickens had been available in Sarajevo; potatoes and salad were as hard to get, and all of it was very expensive. As we were walking towards his home, I started to say that he should not have gone to so much trouble for my sake. He turned to me half surprised and said that he was not thinking of me but of himself! I felt awkward and ashamed for assuming that he was treating me as a special guest, and for seeing him as a person in need who cannot, or should not, spend money on luxuries such as ordinary peacetime food. I relaxed, and we had a really nice time that evening. The unexpected and the awkward, even embarrassing, is always useful to look at. In considering this interaction, I bring readers’ attention to the ideas and presumptions that we had about each other but that were not in line with what we ourselves expected. In psychodynamic theory, the ideas that a client has about the therapist are called transference. They come from the client’s inner world and are not characteristic of the therapist, and the therapist can easily identify them as “strange.” In this event, there was an inequality between me and the young man: I had eaten many nice dinners with friends during the past two years and would be able to do so again as soon as I left Sarajevo. For him, this was a unique and longed-​for event. I did not expect him to treat me as his equal, as his friend; with friends you enjoy nice meals in good company. He saw me in the way he would have seen me before the war, and this discrepancy was telling. Life before the war was seen as good, as normal, and Sarajevans tried as far as possible to imitate it by any means available. “Imitation of life” was one of the main Sarajevan strategies for survival during the war (Maček 2007, 2009). Other examples of transference could be seen in the ways Sarajevans tried to understand why I was there. Some thought that it must be good money, or if not good money then good for my career. Others thought that I might be a spy, which considering US Army strategies for recruiting anthropologists was not as far-​fetched as it sounded to me at that time. Good money and career advancement clearly motivated other “outsiders” in the town, particularly UN soldiers and other personnel. All these incorrect guesses about me demonstrated very clearly the changes that the war brought into the town: strangers were motived by money and career, or had hidden po­litical purposes that were not in Sarajevans’ best interest. At the same time, they did not say much more, as they were quite well based in reality that I could also perceive. Had I been aware of transference and had I followed it methodologically, it could have been a source of much deeper understanding than I attained in Sarajevo. Thus, using transference, we can explore the

24  Ivana Maček surprising ideas that our collocutors express, rather than taking them at face value. Transference is a great tool for expanding the ethnographic investigation in meaningful ways, but it is not very useful if treated as a mere fact and the end of the story. This is even more true for countertransference, a concept used in psychodynamic theory for the reactions of the therapist towards the client and client’s material, particularly when these reactions are not typical for the therapist. In our case as anthropologists, our uncharacteristic reactions in the field can be treated as countertransference and lead us to ask whether this is only our own reaction, or whether it is related to something in the field. I like to think of this process as self-​reflection followed by asking more questions in the field, in a continuous reciprocal process between the anthropologist and the field (for an example and analysis based on this process, see Maček 2017b). Countertransference can give us central insights about our materials, especially those that are not easily put into words. In a project about Swedish professionals working in war zones, I conducted a series of interviews. At that time I was tired of working with political violence and really wanted to do something else. After some time I noticed that after these interviews, I usually felt good, empowered, like I could once again take on the task of engaging with difficult global fields. I had not had this feeling for a very long time and I knew that it did not come from me but from the people I talked with. This realisation made me look more carefully into what they were saying about their international service and eventually I made an analysis of why and how people on missions in war zones can be successful. By using countertransference as an ethnographic tool, I could with more clarity and certainty focus on what was central to the materials and not get side-​tracked by less important phenomena. Violence generally makes clarity difficult, and even more so since many experiences are traumatic or nearly traumatic and thereby difficult to recount in the shape of stories (see Maček 2017a). People we meet in violent fields will often not be able to tell us what they have experienced, but they will in different ways make us feel it. A telling example was Nerina Weiss’s experience in Turkish Kurdistan with a victim of political torture (2014). Smiling, and all the time checking that Nerina was sitting comfortably, the man graphically described his torture, not showing the slightest discomfort or discomposure. Nerina, on the other hand, felt the horror, and it took her long time afterwards to process the experience. In this situation, many anthropologists of mass political violence become overwhelmed and lose the capacity for description and analysis (see for example, Swedenborg’s (1995) excellent description of his state of mind after fieldwork amidst endemic violence). What the tortured man could not put into words, he communicated by projecting the feeling onto Nerina. Because of our empathic capacity, we can feel quite accurately what the other person is feeling. In psychodynamic terms, this is called projective

Drawing on your inner anthropologist  25 identification. We identify with the inner state of the person who projects it onto us.6 Neither in therapy nor in fieldwork is it enough to stop at the point where we feel or understand something, however. Both therapist and anthropologist need to see how our own reactions relate to the reactions of the people we are working with. This is a two-​way process of communication. Knowing about projective identification can deepen our ways of interacting with the field and ultimately broaden our understanding. The awareness of our own reactions as in transference, countertransference, and projective identification is part of analytic listening. It is an open-​ minded attitude, a position of non-​ judgmental observation that is simultaneously active and interactive, intersubjective and constantly relating to our interlocutors, the phenomenon we study, and the field in its entirety.

Reverie and free association “The mind is like a parachute—​it works best when it is open.” Dalai Lama I did not know about reverie when I did my fieldwork in Sarajevo. Of course, I knew about concepts such as stream of consciousness, free asso­ ciation, daydreaming, fantasy, and meditation, but I never thought of them as potentially useful in anthropological fieldwork. Had I known what I learned during my psychotherapeutic training, I would have surely used reverie. Ogden, a psychoanalyst who has explored Bion’s concept of reverie, likens it to Freud’s “simply listening” and defines it as “a state … in which [the analyst] gives himself over to ‘the current of [his] unconscious thoughts’ (1913, p. 134)” (Ogden 1996:885). Reverie is letting your mind float freely, not focusing on or aiming at anything. This state of mind generates openness to new and unexpected insights, which, as with all other psychodynamic tools, must then be put to use in therapy or fieldwork, bringing it back actively into the process of understanding the field. Reverie is the overlapping of the unconscious of the anthropologist and the unconscious or non-​explicit of the field.7 If we can relax and just see whatever comes to mind, note it mentally but not dwell on it, and let the mind wander wherever it takes us, original insights may arise, seemingly by themselves. Musing like this, the complexity and opacity of the field might display some brighter spots that we might want to explore further, without necessarily knowing how it will be useful to our research. The meaning will become clearer as we more actively return to explore these ideas or notions in the field. In the analytic and writing-​up process, too, reverie can make us see phenomena, connections, and meanings that did not emerge in our more rational and logical analysis of our materials.

26  Ivana Maček We all use reverie unknowingly. Indeed, since the early days of anthropology fieldworkers have intentionally wandered off from their field to write their diary under a tree, or to the closest town for a rest at a hotel, cinema, or bar.8 These spaces and activities facilitate not only notetaking and physical and social relaxation but probably also reverie, a crucial part of understanding the field. In dangerous fields, it often seems impossible, or potentially lethal, to relax and let your mind wander freely, but all of our minds wander if we do not have a specific task at hand. Sarajevans were very good at finding moments of enjoyment and relaxation, an old tradition in the region (Maček 2009:106). In any difficult and violent field, there must be moments and secure spaces that make reverie possible. It might seem like a luxury we cannot afford, but it can take us beyond what is readily apparent. Because of the precarity that meets us, we have a tendency to apply ourselves too intensely to the field and tasks at hand. With the help of reverie as methodological tool, we can take a mental step back, creating a free mental zone, which will open up new and more productive ways of being and working in strenuous circumstances and with emotionally demanding materials. Free association also makes use of the open state of mind, but here by freely associating around something particular: a social phenomenon, concept, event, or person. Reverie is sometimes used synonymously with free association, but for me it is useful to distinguish these two techniques. When we use free association with ethnographic material, it is more focused than reverie, which is disconnected from concrete phenomena. Freud has defined free association as “a state of quiet, unreflecting self-​observation” (Freud 1920:249). When instructing his patients how to go about it, he told them to “report to us whatever internal observations he is able to make” and not excluding “any of them, whether on the ground that it is too disagreeable or too indiscreet to say, or that it is too unimportant or irrelevant, or that it is nonsensical and need not be said” (94). This is the type of inner dialogue we need to establish in order to use free association on a topic in our field or materials, including all thoughts and sensations we might have, no matter how useless or embarrassing they might seem. When I worked in Sarajevo I ended up with a broad set of materials which were entangled in many meaningful ways, and writing them down in a linear and systematic way often seemed to be an impossible task. Apart from fieldwork diaries, I had over a hundred hours of interviews and over a thousand pages of transcripts. It was reassuring to have so much on paper and audio recording, but not everything could be included. Above all, most of the important experiences and understandings were in my mind. The holistic perspective that is foundational to anthropology directs us to gather a wide array of material and understand the complexities of the field in order to describe a phenomenon in its social and cultural context, not in isolation. Thus, we often end up with huge masses of materials that may turn out to be unrelated to our main topic of research. Reverie and free

Drawing on your inner anthropologist  27 association complement other, more systematic methods of analysis, illuminating connections that eluded us at the time. I use reverie and free association when I do not understand something that had happened in the field or find it especially resonant or exceptionally troubling. While writing, letting my mind float often opens up space for a good idea: what is really the main point I want to make, what to write in the opening paragraph, or a particularly apt example.

Containing After completing my fieldwork in Sarajevo, I had some really hard times writing up my material. What troubled me was not so much the complexity of the situation as its existential nature. The siege of Sarajevo was a matter of life and death to many, marked by extreme physical and emotional hardships, and it was socially and culturally shattering. After the Dayton Agreement in 1995, when the telephones started working again in Sarajevo, I talked to the mother of the family where I had stayed during the siege. She said that she had heard that I was not well, and I felt ashamed because I felt that she had so many more reasons to be unwell than I did and yet it was me who needed comfort. In a characteristic Sarajevan way she teased me for having a hard time writing: “It was easy to sit around in the cafes here, talking to people all day long. Now you have to do some work!” I laughed and when we hung up I felt much better. Not only had we shared the war experience, but she acknowledged that academic writing was hard work. Although I have written about this subject more extensively elsewhere (Maček 2018:246), here I want to emphasise how challenging it can be to process the records and memories of violence, to analyse such difficult and sensitive materials, and put them in words that are understandable to others. In psychotherapeutic terms this processing of the unspeakable is called “containing.” The fact that I felt better after this very brief exchange, in which we did not speak of any actual experiences we had during the war, is characteristic of the problems of communicating difficult experiences. Sometimes, when they cannot be translated into a meaningful symbolic form, they can only be re-​enacted (see Maček 2017a). Sometimes meaningful communication comes through pregnant silences. Here countertransference may be the only way of reaching these experiences and bringing them forth as useful research materials (see Kaplan 2014). Whenever we use our own experiences and countertransference of that which is hard to speak of, we need to check with the field whether this subjective experience is shared, by whom, and with what consequences. This exploration opens up more layers and nuances in our understanding of the phenomena. One of the hardest experiences I have had in Sarajevo was being shot at (see Maček 2009, 2018). I was shaken the next day, but several days later I told a young woman I was interviewing how it felt. She recognised what

28  Ivana Maček I was talking about and told me how it was for her. Her first reactions seemed even more paralysing than mine, but since then she had had this experience many times. As she had to continue living in Sarajevo, she had found ways to come out of this initial shock. After a bombing or shooting she would always do something nice for herself: take a bath, eat a chocolate bar, or visit friends. This intersubjective communication, as we compared our experiences and reactions, deepened my understanding of how people coped with everyday exposure to danger. Containing was part of this process. It started with my formulating the experience and sharing it with my collocutor. She then formulated her own experiences and shared her narrative with me. The important thing, in this case, turned out to be the ability to cope with adversity. In fact, how people devised ways to live with constant danger became one of the main themes of my ethnography.

Secure base Containing adverse experience can be extremely difficult, and while working in Sarajevo I felt that I had to have something very concrete to hold on to. In any field site, even more secure ones, it might feel a bit scary to get lost in the flow of fieldwork, losing sight of our original research question and its intellectual context. In violent and dangerous fields, this loss of contact with the original base of our study might easily become overwhelming. For example, I could not see the relevance of any anthropological theories to the ­situation in Sarajevo. All the prevailing theories of identity construction seemed strange and inapplicable in a place and time where national identity increasingly determined whether people survived or were killed (Maček 2009). In this exposed situation, I turned to the basics of anthropological fieldwork, a classical ethnography where all aspects of a society are systematically described: means of subsistence, social relations, political organisation, religion, ideology and worldviews. This was my touchstone, a secure base to which I could return whenever I felt lost and bewildered about what I was doing. It was not planned from the start, but it forced itself upon me as a valuable coping strategy in a perilous field. I also relied on this classical ethnographic structure while writing my dissertation. Anything else would have been impossible, and the chaos of half-​processed experiences, m ­ emories, and materials would have made the task of writing overwhelming.9 The very simplicity of this solution mirrors the cognitive difficulties that characterise violent fields, and having a secure base for such fieldwork might be necessary to carry out the research at all.

Sublimination It is essential that we are as clear and genuine as possible about our motives and forces behind the choice to do fieldwork in violent and dangerous fields

Drawing on your inner anthropologist  29 (see Maček 2014a:13, 18; Maček 2014b:144). When faced with the existential difficulties that are an inevitable part of this field (see also Dwork 2014, Maček 2018), I found it essential to know why I chose to engage with a violent context. Knowing that I could not have done anything else at that point in my life helped me to find strength to carry on. In Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (2001), I learned about sublimation, which she describes as one of the “saving graces” of a trauma therapist, and this made me realise that much of what I was doing in my professional work with war and genocide was actually a kind of sublimation. Sigmund Freud saw sublimation as highly civilised and positive, in that it captured the human capacity to turn socially and culturally unaccepted sexual drives into something constructive and productive. He saw both science and the arts as sublime results of this psychological defence mechanism against the inner forces that were taboo at that time and were unacceptable to express in ordinary social life (see Freud 2011).10 I think of sublimation in research on mass political violence as a way to be aware of our ulterior motives, as well as of the necessity to be highly creative in order to complete our research.11 I believe that using sublimation in this methodological sense can help develop this type of research beyond where it is today. When we decide to engage with violent and difficult fields, we are striving to turn our strong and often incomprehensible feelings into something meaningful to others also. If it is successful, this emotionally charged creative process is sublimation. Whenever the tensions in the field or analytical process seem too strong, sublimation usually opens new ways to tackle the problem at hand. This struggle to give a meaningful communicable form to something that lies beyond words, transforming the intangible and incommunicable into the tangible and communicable, is part-​and-​parcel of the ethnography of violent and difficult fields. Rather than despairing and perhaps doubting our ethnographic and academic competence, we can take the incomprehensible yet strong inner feelings as a starting point for sublimation. The creative part of the methodology of sublimation might sometimes be the only way to counteract the annihilating and silencing aspect of violence. With this in mind, I end this chapter with two pieces of creative writing, not about fieldwork but about the writing process.

Creative writing The writing poem A Story grows From the wordless feelings From the incongruent sentences For each person we meet

30  Ivana Maček Our Story grows And becomes clearer Simpler And true. Writing as painting I often think of the writing process as like making a painting. You sketch something on the white canvas and gradually cover it with paint and forms, and it disappears under them. Sometimes you do detailed studies, on paper or separate smaller canvases, before you start the painting on the large canvas. You paint different forms and figures; you choose certain colours. Your forms and colours have some relation to each other, they resonate with each other, and they make the observer move their gaze and feel in a certain way. While you are painting, you notice that some forms are not quite as you wanted them to be, so you try to form them a bit differently. Some are in the wrong place, so you change their position. Some colours are not as you want them or do not fit the painting as a whole, so you modify them. After some time, you leave the painting with the feeling that it is approaching completion—​but when you come back the next day you see that it is not. Perhaps it needs only slight improvements here or there, in this figure or that colour. But perhaps it simply does not work. You might need to set it aside and make a fresh start. When I run into difficulties with my text, especially when the task feels impossible and I find myself losing confidence in my academic and writing abilities, I think of the painter working hard and persistently on their painting from stroke to stroke, from day to day, stepping back and looking for the feeling that they want to capture, and then continuing to add paint, in a reiterative process of painting and feeling whether it works. I think of a painter sometimes painting over their canvas and starting from scratch, which gives me the creative energy to continue my quest to render something that matters to me understandable to my readers. Colours are my tone in the text; style, my choice of words. They create a feeling that can range from dryly academic to passionate, even muddled. Figures and forms are the content I write about, from fieldwork to theories. Composition is the logic and flow of my text. Canvas is the blank screen on my computer. I am ready to paint!

Notes 1 I have described the need for theorising anthropological method in Maček (2014b). Other anthropologists have made similar calls, including Whitehead and Finnström (2013:18), Robben (2010:21), and Behar (1996:44). 2 I remember reading Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1954 [1899]) and suddenly realising that I enjoyed it because it read like an ethnography of the inner worlds of his patients.

Drawing on your inner anthropologist  31 3 For more about how a researcher can take care, see Pearlman (2014). 4 Testimony is sometimes the best way for the survivors and witnesses of genocide to feel that their experiences can be shared and useful, not only shattering. See, for example, the Shoah Foundation’s project (https://​sfi.usc.edu/​). 5 For more about intricate and sometimes opaque reasons why we choose a certain research topic, see Maček (2014b, 2018). 6 This is how infants can communicate with caretakers before they develop symbolic communication such as language. 7 This is a paraphrase of Ogden’s discussion of reverie in psychoanalysis (1996:887). 8 I have discussed the value of making distance from the field or going into and out of it repeatedly, for our capacity to analyse what otherwise can become an overwhelming immersion (Maček 2018). 9 In psychodynamic theory the concept of “secure base” comes from child development theory where it stands for the security young toddlers seek in their caretakers when they start to explore the world beyond the caretakers’ secure presence: typically, a toddler runs back to their caretaker whenever the world they encounter becomes a bit too scary. See Bowlby (1988). 10 Others have since demonstrated that the fact that some emotions or acts are socially and culturally forbidden often results in higher levels of creativity (e.g. Kim, Zeppenfeld and Cohen 2013). 11 My discussion of motives that drew me to violent and difficult fields can be found in Maček (2014b).

References Behar, Ruth. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Bowlby, John. 1988. A Secure Base: Parent-​Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Tavistock professional book. London: Routledge. Dwork, Deborah. 2014. “To Work with the History of the Holocaust.” In Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation, edited by Ivana Maček, 25–​33. London: Routledge. Freud, Anna. 2011 [1936]. The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. London: Karnac Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1920. “A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis.”Horace Liveright Publisher: New York. pp. 248–​261. Freud, Sigmund. 1954 [1899]. The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Allen & Unwin. Geertz, Clifford. 1995. After the Fact; Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Herman, Judith Lewis. 2001 [1992]. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Pandora. Kaplan, Suzanne. 2014. “Personal and Research-​ Related Links to Trauma.” In Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation, edited by Ivana Maček, 159–​170. London: Routledge. Kim, Emily, Zeppenfeld, Veronika and Cohen, Dov. 2013. “Sublimation, Culture, and Creativity.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 105(4):639–​666. Little, Margaret I. 1985. “Winnicott Working in Areas Where Psychotic Anxieties Predominate: A Personal Record.” Free Associations 1(3):9–​42.

32  Ivana Maček Maček, Ivana. 2001. “Predicament of War.” In Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, edited by Bettina E. Schmidt and Ingo W. Schröder, 182–​219. London: Routledge. Maček, Ivana. 2005. “Sarajevan Soldier Story.” In No Peace, No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts, edited by Paul Richards, 57–​ 76. Athens: Ohio University Press, and Oxford: James Currey. Maček, Ivana. 2007. “ ‘Imitation of Life’: Negotiating Normality in Sarajevo under Siege.” In The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Moralities, and Moral Claims in a Post-​War Society, edited by Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings, 39–​58. Farnham: Ashgate. Maček, Ivana. 2009. Sarajevo under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Maček, Ivana. 2013. “Compliance and Resistance to the Logic of Ethnic Conflict During the Siege of Sarajevo (invited voice).” In War, Community, and Social Change: Collective Experiences in the Former Yugoslavia, edited by Dario Spini, Guy Elcheroth, and Dinka Čorkalo Biruški, 99–​103. New York, Heidelberg, Dortrecht, London: Springer (Peace Psychology Book Series). Maček, Ivana. 2014a. “Introduction.” In Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation, edited by Ivana Maček, 1–​24. London: Routledge. Maček, Ivana. 2014b. “Making Involuntary Choices, Imagining Genocide and Recovering Trust.” In Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation, edited by Ivana Maček, 140–​158. London: Routledge. Maček, Ivana, ed. 2014c. Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation. London: Routledge. Maček, Ivana. 2017a. “Communicating the Unthinkable: A Psychodynamic Perspective.” In Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation, edited by Fazil Moradi, Ralph Buchenhorst, and Maria Six-​ Hohenbalken, 107–​121. London: Routledge. Maček, Ivana. 2017b. “‘It Starts to Burn a Little’: Intergenerational Transmission of Experiences of War within a Bosnian Family in Sweden.” Oral History Forum d’histoire orale 37, Special Issue on Generations and Memory: Continuity and Change: 1–​18. Maček, Ivana. 2018. “Experience, Empathy, and Flexibility: On Participant Observation in Deadly Fields.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of Death, edited by Antonius C. G. M. Robben, 237–​248. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Ogden, Thomas H. 1996. “Reconsidering Three Aspects of Psychoanalytic Technique.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 77:883–​899. Pearlman, Laurie A. 2014. “Vicarious Traumatization in Mass Violence Researchers: Origins and Antidotes.” In Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation, edited by Ivana Maček, 171–​185. London: Routledge. Robben, Antonius C. G. M. 2010. “Ethnographic Imagination at a Distance: An Introduction to the Anthropological Study of the Iraq War.” In Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropologists Can Teach Us about the War, edited by Antonius C. G. M. Robben, 1–​23. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stephen, Lynn. 2013. We are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Swedenburg, Ted. 1995. “With Genet in the Palestinian Field.” In Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, edited by Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius C. G. M. Robben, 25–​40. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Drawing on your inner anthropologist  33 Taussig, Michael. 1992. The Nervous System. New York, NY: Routledge. Weiss, Nerina. 2014. “Research under Duress: Resonance and Distance in Ethnographic Fieldwork.” In Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation, edited by Ivana Maček, 127–​139. London: Routledge. Whitehead, Neil L., and Finnström, Sverker. 2013. Introduction to Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing, edited by Neil L. Whitehead and Sverker Finnström, 1–​25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

4 A cautionary and hopeful tale about experiencing, thinking with, writing through, reflecting on, and teaching the emotional in ethnographic fieldwork Jastinder Kaur

Introduction I write this while reflecting on my current research on the relationship between people, politicians, and parliaments in Fiji. I have been hearing some variation of the envious comment ‘Fieldwork in Fiji? Gosh, that’s got to be difficult!’ since my early days as a researcher of ethnic relations and socio-​political ruptures in the South Pacific archipelago. In this chapter, anticipating my return to the country, I reflect on some of the experiences and implications of my earlier fieldwork in Fiji, both as a response to the notion that our fieldsites are ‘exotic’ places, and as a provocation to consider how we prepare students for the realities of fieldwork through pedagogical training and pastoral care. My purpose is threefold: (1) to convey the complexity of research undertaken about, and in the midst of, political instability and the passionate political emotions entangled in these –​in this case, in relation to ethnic coups in Fiji–​particularly from the perspective of an outsider mistaken for an insider; (2) to challenge the corrosive effects of silencing researcher emotions in the name of professionalism and academic rigour, such that the residues of research and their psychological impact are unhelpfully labelled as ‘personal’ experiences, when in fact the emotional labour and toll of fieldwork may well be productive of, rather than a distraction from, analytical insight and rigour; and (3) to advocate for pre-​ fieldwork training and dialogue to take seriously the emotional effects of immersive fieldwork and their possible affordances. I believe that the provocation set by the editors of, and contributors to, this volume can connect us in imagining anthropological futures that acknowledge the dense imbrication of our professional and personal selves. As anthropologists, we take seriously the inner worlds of our interlocutors –​ the structures, meanings, experiences, and emotions that shape their being in the world. While suppressing the same in ourselves, in the name of professional objectivity and integrity (see, e.g., Spencer, Walby, Hunt 2012). DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-4

A cautionary and hopeful tale  35 Why are we as academics suspicious of our own emotions and those of our colleagues? Rightly, over the past few decades we have sought to be more reflexive about our positionality and power relative to our interlocutors, ostensibly to lay bare the falsehood of analytical objectivity and better reveal and hold ourselves accountable for our complicity in unequal power structures and relations vis-​à-​vis those with whom we study. But what about how the field and our encounters therein make the fieldworker feel? I am arguing here for the humanisation of the fieldworker. But for a very specific purpose: in order that we take seriously our emotional worlds not as a residue of research that endures as personal memory distinct from our professional life and work, but as integral to the latter. By way of illustrating this, I provide an ethnographic history of a selection of my fieldwork experiences and emotions in Fiji between 2002 and 2004, as well as immediately after I returned from the field, and when years later I resumed writing up my thesis. I begin by providing some broad brushstroke context about Fiji, specifi­ cally the historical, political, economic, social, and cultural contours of conflict over identity, rights, power, and belonging between the country’s Indigenous Fijians and Indo-​Fijians.1 I then say something about my earlier research on Fiji’s ethnic coups and the kinds of ethnographic puzzles that animated my inquiry, before offering and discussing some selected encounters during my fieldwork that elicited emotions which tied me to, and anchored me in, Fiji’s ethnic conflict landscape. For example, I am both British and Indian, and I therefore hold multiple resonances and ruptures for people in a country marked by a historical and tense relationship with the British as colonisers and Indians as a vulagi (foreigner) settler community. I then describe how, a decade after my fieldwork, when I resumed trying to make sense of my data and write up my thesis, I felt compelled –​despite broad collegiate disapproval –​to revisit the residues of my fieldwork emotions and bring them out for inspection, reflection, and analysis. I end with some thoughts on the value and need for a pedagogical–​pastoral approach to preparing the next generation of fieldworkers that confirms that emotions matter. What prompted this essay? In 2014, I presented an auto-​ethnographic vignette at a postgraduate conference to cover for my lack of a clearly developed theoretical framework for my research on ethnic conflict and coups in Fiji. This appeared to be well-​received and gave me pause for thought about the separation of ethnography and theory, as if one is merely story-​telling and the other more robustly analytical and intellectual. I recall at the time feeling intensely nauseous with a migraine, and for long moments as I spoke at the conference to a room full of peers and senior colleagues the scene that swam into view was not the one I was in but the one from which my ethnographic vignette was drawn. Feedback that day emboldened me to reflect on whether and how my fieldwork emotions might contribute meaningfully to my articulation of an anthropology of coups (for more on the latter see Kaur 2017, Kaur 2021a, and Kaur 2021b). Might fieldwork

36  Jastinder Kaur emotions have useful affordances even as we may cut ourselves on them personally? And if so, ought we to give ourselves permission to sit with and acknowledge the emotions that arise in and through our relations with those we study, and expect that our disciplines make space for analysis and emotions to converge and discourse with each other co-​productively? For me, the answer to each of these is yes. Doing so, I believe, can help shape a fuller notion of what anthropology is and what it entails –​and ultimately bring our humanness to the project of studying with other humans.

Fiji: culture, conflict, and coups Places that live in the collective Western imagination as paradisiacal –​once-​ in-​a-​lifetime honeymoon and holiday destinations replete with the whitest sands and the bluest seas –​are incommensurable with imaginaries of violence, conflict, and exclusion. Yet Fiji is an exemplar of both. The South Pacific archipelago of little more than 900,000 people consistently appears in lists of top ‘exotic’ holiday destinations and has even reached out through our television screens in the form of the programme ‘Survivor’ in which individuals compete to survive as castaways. But Fiji has also experienced coups –​in 1987, 2000, and 2006 –​in its fifty-​year history as an independent state. The coups articulate and embody a struggle over the distribution of resources –​including identity, political power, and land –​between the country’s Indigenous Fijians and post-​indentured settler Indians (hereafter: Indo-​ Fijians). The conflict originates in British colonial rule and its pluralist system of governance, in which the two communities were represented by nominated leaders from their own groups and then elected via communal rolls2 –​a system that endured to varying degrees until 2013. Coups in Fiji often express a competitive struggle between the notions of Fijian ‘paramountcy’ versus Indo-​Fijian calls for equality of opportunity. They occur, for the most part, though not exclusively, in the wake of general elections in which Indigenous Fijians lose power to Indo-​Fijians. In 1987, for example, the Alliance Party led by the popular and widely revered figure of the paramount Indigenous Fijian chief Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara –​ hailed as the father of independent Fiji by all citizens, irrespective of ethnic ­affiliation –​was ousted after seventeen years of continuous power.3 In its place, the people of Fiji elected a coalition led by the Fiji Labour Party (FLP), a newly formed political party comprising trade union leaders drawn from both the Indigenous Fijian and Indo-​Fijian communities, and whose support base was the growing multi-​ ethnic urban working population. According to the ethnopolitical framework established during colonialism, and which maintained Indigenous Fijians and Indo-​Fijians as distinct identity and interest groups, the Alliance Party was an Indigenous Fijian political party and the FLP an Indo-​Fijian party (notwithstanding that they fielded candidates from both ethnic groups; and indeed, the latter was led by an Indigenous Fijian).

A cautionary and hopeful tale  37 Indigenous Fijian chiefly leadership draws its mana (translated here rather simplistically as legitimacy, effectiveness, power) from pre-​colonial Indigenous cosmology, and it was strengthened by the British coloniser’s paternalistic regard for Indigenous Fijian culture and life to continue untrammelled by the exigencies of modern life. Yet, the imperative of economic modernisation was unavoidable in Fiji as elsewhere, and responsibility for this was laid on the shoulders of indentured Indians. They were brought to Fiji from 1879 onwards on five-​year contracts (known as girmit), which could be extended by an additional five years, after which the British would bear the costs of their repatriation to India. Sixty per cent of Indians opted to make Fiji their home, however, following the end of their indenture contracts. Free of the indenture lines, described throughout the literature as narak (hell), they settled on the outskirts of Fijian villages from whose collective community units (mataqali) they leased land to continue farming sugarcane –​this being the work they had been set to as indentured labourers, and which until recent decades was the backbone of Fiji’s economy. The economic dominance of Indo-​Fijians contrasts with the exclusion of Indigenous Fijians for the most part from the labour force during colonial rule, and by extension from the economic life and wealth of the colony. Economic inequalities were sharpened over the years by policies relating to land and their leasing: Indo-​Fijian farmers were granted ninety-​nine-​year leases, thus taking Indigenous Fijian-​owned land out of circulation from potential use by its owners; and rents were distributed to the mataqali landowners using a pyramid system that concentrated wealth at the top beginning with chiefs and trickling downwards. In addition to their relative economic wealth, compared with Indigenous Fijians, Indo-​Fijians were spurred on by nationalist demands in India in the early twentieth century to challenge European political dominance in Fiji. But with Indo-​Fijians beginning to outnumber Indigenous Fijians from the 1940s onwards, the prospect of acquiescing to their calls for parity in po­litical representation garnered robust opposition from both the British and the Indigenous community, cohering in fearful notions that Fiji’s original settlers would be overcome by the creation of a little India in the Pacific (see for example, Coulter 1942). Fijian–​Indian relations, mediated skilfully by the British, thus gained the force and power of a seemingly intractable conflict, oscillating between despair and hope (Jolly 2005). Thus constructed, the dense equivalence between ethnic affiliation and political emotion has been a sustaining feature and function of Fijian-​Indian conflict discourse, reverberating for one and a half centuries with the potency of an intrinsic and unassailable truth. Both the electoral system and the constitution in Fiji have until recently retained ethnicity as a cornerstone of the country’s post-​colonial political system, and the moral legitimacy of Indigenous Fijian political dominance within that. This is often explained as a fair trade-​off for Indo-​Fijians’ economic dominance, which has extended from sugarcane farming to include

38  Jastinder Kaur big businesses. Therefore, when in 1987 and in 1999 Indo-​Fijian political parties were elected to govern –​first via a groundswell of urban multi-​ethnic working-​class support, and then because of Indigenous political fragmentation –​the coups that overthrew them were regarded by Indigenous Fijians as unfortunate but necessary acts of moral restitution: Fiji for Fijians, as the phrase goes. So, coups in Fiji embody a narrative struggle and contestation over ethnic and civic logics of belonging, which in turn marks the coups themselves as discursively ethnic. Inter-​coup periods in Fiji are no less discursively marked by ethnicity, as the ethnographic vignettes I share in the next section illustrate. I will not go into the details here of the 1987 and 2000 coups, which became the focal point of my research on Fiji, except to say that they yielded three ethnographic puzzles, which I explore in my thesis and in articles currently in preparation. These puzzles had to do with the temporality of coups, specifically how the ‘critical events’ of coups to use Das’ (1995) formulation (1) were both a new mode of history and thus reorienting in their effects, while also anchored to and structured by history and specific ethnic memorialisation of the past; and (2) reverberated into the future long after the return to electoral democracy, thus writing themselves into national life as a kind of ‘poisonous knowledge’, to draw again on Das and specifically her work on violence, suffering, and memory (2007). Meanwhile, a third ethnographic puzzle that presented itself in relation to Fiji’s coups, and which I sought to amplify in my thesis (the reasons for which are grounded in my fieldwork emotions, as I will discuss later in this article), was the phenomenon of Indigenous Fijians extending care and compassion to, and trying to sustain their friendships with, Indo-​Fijians interpersonally. In this section I have provided an incredibly compacted and broad brushstroke overview of the conflict landscape in Fiji that I sought to study and learn about and the kinds of ethnographic puzzles that my research threw up in my study of coup events. Hopefully, this enables the reader to better grasp the context in which particular kinds of emotions arose in the course of my fieldwork that ended up marking both my research and me personally. The encounters I have chosen to alight on in the next section are not intended to speak for the full breadth of emotions that I sat with during fieldwork and thereafter. Rather, I have extracted them from my memory in order to say something about what it means to conduct research in a country imperilled by a culture of ethnic coups as a British, Indian, tertiary-​educated woman. Presenting this as ethnographic history, I hope to draw the reader into feelings of fear, entrapment, confusion, aloneness, bewilderment –​and sometimes the sheer chutzpah of our responses to these!

Tales of emotional discombobulation from the field Within a week of my arrival in Suva, the capital city of Fiji, in mid-​ September 2002, one of the English-​language daily newspapers published an

A cautionary and hopeful tale  39 editorial predicting the ‘real possibility’ of a ‘race war’ between the country’s Indigenous Fijians and Indo-​Fijians. The form and content of such a race war were left to the imagination. No small feat in a country that had come to characterise itself (mimicking prominent media and academic analyses) as having a culture of coups, following the overthrow of elected governments in 1987 and 2000. The prospect of race war presented a picture of imminent danger and mayhem to me, a novice fieldworker freshly arrived in Fiji. Newly arrived, and with an introduction letter to only one person in Fiji from a fellow anthropologist back home, the prospect of violence was obviously concerning. I had, after all, taken great care to not commence my fieldwork in 2000 following the coup that year precisely because of the unrest and upheaval associated with that event, and more pointedly because the bodies targeted during that and earlier coup events looked much like my own. I thus read the newspaper editorial as a warning of an imminent attack on my body, which indisputably marks me out as Indian. Two encounters soon afterwards deepened my unease about being in a country mired in a history of ethnic tension; and one that occurred later reinforced the wide discursive net thrown around inter-​ ethnic dialogue about democracy and politics in the country. I recount them here in the first person and in the present tense, both as a mechanism to create intimacy with the reader through dramatisation, and in an effort to convey the kinds of sensations and feelings that can arise during fieldwork and take up space in our minds and bodies as we try to gather data. Encounter #1 I am sitting at a café table in one of Suva’s modern food and shopping courts, the three English-​language daily newspapers arrayed in front of me, and I am leafing through them in turn and comparing editorials and ­articles. A latte rests just in reach of my right hand, as I shiver under the air-​conditioning. An Indigenous Fijian man who looks to be in his twenties or thirties is sat at a table across and a little to one side of mine. Nursing his own coffee, he asks if I’ve ‘been away or something?’ gesturing to all the newspapers. I explain that I am not from Fiji, that I am a researcher studying ethnic relations, and that I want to be able to see what kinds of topics are dominating political and public discourse. His tone serious, imperious even, to my ears; he looks me straight in the eyes and says: ‘We don’t have those here’. A blond, blue-​eyed photographer, also from the United Kingdom, and staying at the same hostel as me, returns from browsing a store and having caught the man’s statement but not the conversation preceding it asks innocently ‘You don’t have what here?’ ‘Fijian–​Indian relations’, the man replies, his gaze seeming to bore through me, before he raises his face and beams at my acquaintance. I feel like I am being taught a harsh lesson about staying on my side of the road, about what might happen if I venture to cross it and thereby infiltrate boundaries where I am not welcome,

40  Jastinder Kaur and which will not tolerate any notion of miscegenation. I sit there feeling marked, downcast, slightly scared even. I also wonder whether situating myself in Suva, the capital city of Fiji, was a false move on my part if –​as my interlocutor insists –​there are no inter-​ethnic relations to be found here. My uneasiness therefore has two registers –​personal and professional; and emotional and analytic. Encounter #2 I venture one lunchtime from the offices of the civil society organisation where I work to go and collect my laptop, which has been sent to me from back home in the United Kingdom. Riding in a taxi with a colleague, an Indigenous Fijian man in his forties, I assume the errand will be brief and that we will have time to eat lunch somewhere before returning to the office. The room we enter has become in my memory a dilapidated outpost of bureaucratese done in peeling magnolia paint. It is empty except for my colleague and me. The bureaucrat behind the glass-​panelled counter takes my passport in response to my smiling explanation that I am here to collect my laptop. In the way of most bureaucrats, he examines each page of my passport with almost forensic concentration. But then he goes off-​script, going beyond the usual ritual questioning that we are used to from those who wield petty power. HIM: How long have you been away? ME: I’ve never been away; this is my first time here. HIM: When did you leave? ME: I left the United Kingdom on… there, it says on the immigration stamp

when I arrived. HIM: Why did you leave? ME: Leave where? HIM: [stony-​ faced silence

as if I am being flippant] When did your parents leave? ME: My parents have never been to Fiji. I’ve never been to Fiji. I’m not from here. Each unsatisfactory answer from me prompts an excavation aimed at establishing my prior relationship to Fiji. It feels like an interrogation and is confusing on so many levels. I have a British passport and am a British citizen. The details therein attest to the fact that I was born there. In my head, I am screaming ‘I’m not one of them’. But I am also trying to make sense of the inside-​outsider role that the bureaucrat seems intent on fixing me as in his mind: that is, as an Indo-​Fijian, and somehow even worse as an Indo-​Fijian who had the temerity to leave Fiji and is now returning to it. Trying to occupy the parallel universe he is creating in the space of our encounter, I cannot tell whether he is madder at me and/​or my parents for

A cautionary and hopeful tale  41 having left, or that I have had the gall to return. I stand there dumbfounded, unable to make this person see and acknowledge me as a genuine outsider and I feel hemmed into a role I barely grasp in these early days of fieldwork. Namely, that of the insider-​outsider Indo-​Fijian who is being blamed for having left their home in times of violent uncertainty about the liveability of their lives. Then, without another word, the man disappears, my passport in hand, and returns with my package, and with that I am dismissed. Encounter #3 I am sitting in the office of the General Secretary of an Indigenous Fijian-​ only trade union, facing him across his large desk. This is an interview, but in the way of most anthropological interviews it is largely unstructured. I prefer to have conversations with my interlocutors where they can story what matters to them most within the ambit of some general framing questions (or even entirely ignoring the topic I approach them to discuss). In this instance, I want to find out more about the significance of ethnic trade unions, whether and how they interact and collaborate in the struggle for all Fiji workers’ rights, and what this might say about inter-​ethnic relations and conflict. My interlocutor talks about what he says is the sedition and terrorism that underlay the creation of the FLP at a trade union meeting in the mid-1980s; his opposition to it, his absolute belief that all was good and right in Fiji until the 1987 election, when the FLP won. Race did not matter until then. All was harmonious. Our conversation turns to democracy, and he says that of course I believe Westminster democracy should be a global model –​though I do not think that I have said or implied this –​because I’m British. He trots out the phrase I have read so many times: democracy is a foreign flower in Fiji. We then talk of Prime Ministers and the possibility of a non-​Indigenous one in Fiji’s future, and he says ‘you lot’ have not allowed Sonia Gandhi to become Prime Minister. ‘You don’t know me’ I want to retort; ‘you don’t know what I believe’. Of course, I say neither of these things, not merely because my interlocutor has spoken with such finality and authority about who he presumes me to be. Rather, my anthropological endeavour and curiosity lies precisely in trying to understand my interlocutors’ inner worlds, beliefs, and meanings. Each of these three ethnographic vignettes, from the many I might have selected to share in this essay, contributed to a cumulative emotional landscape that was disorienting, painful, and puzzling. As an anthropologist there is an almost mythical belief that one must gain the trust of interlocutors in the field. To fail to do so implies that one remains forever on the outside of their world, their lives, their meanings, their logic –​them. I cannot say with any degree of confidence that I did gain the trust of the people I lived, worked, walked, ate, and travelled among during my time in Suva. I did, however, gain a level of insiderness, conferred on me because of my p ­ hysical appearance, through which I gained some understanding of the visceral

42  Jastinder Kaur political emotions that reinforce ethnic difference and the boundedness ­separating Indigenous Fijians and Indo-​Fijians. Whether it was the warning, as I interpreted it, that miscegenation would not be tolerated; or the unwelcomeness of my presumed return, once the dust of various ethnic coups against Indo-​Fijians had settled; or the assumption of my being anti-​Indigenous by virtue of being British and Indian –​the register of my fieldwork encounters was often confrontational, exclusionary, and accusatory. They felt like skirmishes, and left me feeling bruised and alone. Convinced that I was a terrible ethnographer, I sat alone with my feelings first during fieldwork and then during the long decade that followed when I had to abandon my research and my PhD for family reasons.

Writing feeling: emotion and ethnography Almost a decade after I returned from fieldwork in Fiji, I formally resumed my PhD. I prepared for it by writing some 70,000 words about ethnic identity, relations, and conflict; and about culture, coups, and constitutions. Not a single sentence in that document was troubled by the ethnographic data I had collected. I told myself that I did not know how to write ethnography and that this was quite understandable given my lengthy disengagement from academia and from anthropology. The ethnography would come with time, with reading, with guidance, I reassured myself. In truth, I was hiding my ethnography from myself, refusing to give it life, because to do so would also give unwelcome life to long-​subdued emotions and remembrances of feeling overpowered, invisible, voiceless, and ultimately disembodied from the me that I knew; incarnated instead as an opponent, a refusenik, a c­ oloniser, and a foe. I was hesitant to find out the kind of emotional havoc that would ensue when my ethnography was transmitted from notes and memory, through my fingertips, to the bright and blank Word document on my computer. Where was I to put my feelings, my sentiments, and my prejudices in all of this? How to know whether I was withdrawing myself sufficiently from the description and analysis to say something erudite and academically meaningful? ‘The description of your arrival in Fiji is nice, but what is its purpose?’ I recall being challenged by a reader of one of my thesis drafts. I had to admit that the ethnographic vignette they were referring to had a distinct quality of bad travel-​writing about it; but as to its purpose, I felt that I was framing the story of ethnic relations in Fiji in September 2002, mid-​way between two coups, in as authentic and immersive a way as possible. Here was an entry point for my readers, comprising my supervisors and viva committee members, to grasp the following: that Fiji’s ongoing ethnic history had forced me into being a participant-​observer in a very specific set of ways and that the experiences and observations this entailed could be reflected on to say something anthropologically and analytically relevant about Fiji. I could not, to put it bluntly, disentangle myself from my ethnography; each flowed

A cautionary and hopeful tale  43 into the other. I recall, while writing my thesis, any number of occasions on which I felt that this could not be wrong and that anthropology can make space for this kind of reflexivity and put it to work as part of the process of knowledge production. It is interesting to reflect now –​in a moment of historical ethnographic honesty –​on how my eventual anthropology of coups was as much a strategy for managing my fieldwork emotions as it was about people, p ­ olitics, history, society, culture, and coups in Fiji. I did not for a moment wish to depict Fiji as something other than what I learned it was, and I spent a lot of time checking what I wrote about Indo-​Fijian and Indigenous Fijian informants for unconscious bias. Ultimately, however, I returned to my ­original impulse: to hang my thesis on the comment of the Fijian man at the café, who stated that there are no Fijian–​Indian relations. Even though what I observed, experienced, felt, and was told (in Suva, at least) corroborated his statement so precisely, I mined my data for its counterpoint. And I was not disappointed. Here and there were tales of the unexpected, that is, of inter-​ethnic conviviality, support, and friendship, amid ethnic coups and violence. Positive inter-​ ethnic relations have been tantalisingly referred to in older anthropological texts but have not been granted the same bandwidth as has analysis of conflict in Fiji (see for example, Mayer 1973[1961], Bossen 2000, Trnka 2008) except for one text. Perhaps the most comprehensive study of inter-​ethnic relations in Fiji was by Mamak (1978), who wrote of de-​pluralising tendencies arising from Fiji’s rural–​urban drift from the 1960s onwards, with different ethnic groups finding themselves incorporated into and sharing an urban framework of lived experience along with all the municipal concerns that go with it. Riffing off Mamak, I used ethnography to mitigate my fear, anger, disillusionment, and confusion about Fijian–​Indian relations, by highlighting examples of their positive and mutually sympathetic relations. I represented this using a composite ethnography of informant narratives, memories, and actions –​ both in a bid to confer anonymity when necessary (as one must ethically be mindful of doing in conflict situations) but also to convince myself to give up my negative fieldwork emotions through compelling storytelling that evinces more positive ones. But questions remain: Can knowledge about the other, gained and filtered through one’s own emotional lens, claim to be robust and rigorous? What are we to do with the surfeit of feeling that grows during research and accompanies us through our professional and personal lives thereafter? For many decades now anthropologists have been preoccupied with rendering the discipline respectable. This has led us to teeter on various precipices: claiming scientism and objectivity; reflexively engaging with our status, power, and privilege vis-​à-​vis our informants; looking for relevance in non-​anthropological theories and formulations (Foucault comes to mind most forcefully in this regard); embracing resistance not only as an object

44  Jastinder Kaur of study that reflects the lived social world of so many for so long but as an anchor for our sense of morality (and through which we can claim to be on the side of the marginalised, dispossessed, invisible, and silenced). In all of this we can discern a desperate attempt to atone for the Euro-​American colonial roots of our discipline. We pick at the ethics of what we do, how we do it, and to whom. But in all of this we do not deem ourselves – e​ ither as a group or as individual practitioners within it –​as likewise worthy of ethical engagement, support, compassion even. This is evidenced in the fact that mention of one’s emotional turmoil as a result of fieldwork –​when the reality of difference strikes deepest and most viscerally in ways that pre-​ fieldwork reading and thinking cannot –​arouses a kind of shuffling embarrassment by our colleagues on our behalf. Rigour, professionalism, a stiff-​upper-​lip –​together they form a chauvinist bulwark against the unwanted nonsense of emotions and feelings, resulting in a discipline that treats researcher emotions as something to be endured, alone and in silence. It is not difficult to discern in this the conflation of emotions with hysteria, located in a gendered discourse of emotions that we have done little to correct. As such then, we occupy –​and are implicated in –​a culture (called anthropology) that regards emotion as the dereliction, and even perhaps the downfall, of robust, rigorous and respectable research. I would like to make the case here that our emotions, specifically those invoked in our relations with our research interlocutors (and especially in the field) through processes of alienation and othering (among others) can have serious analytical value. By this I mean that we are always already turning our feelings over in our minds as we approach our data, work through it, wonder what it means, and put it together. For, if I feel embarrassed, fearful, oppressed, threatened, depressed, then can I say in all frankness that these feelings do not seep into my organisation, thinking, analysis, and writing; and that they do not texture the ethnographic construction and analysis that follows? Researcher emotions have always been implicated in anthropological processes of knowledge-​making, and even their products. But we have not always been explicit in acknowledging or making space for this. What we are missing is the formal integration of fieldwork emotion into anthropological training and discourse.

Emotions and ethnography: a pedagogical–​pastoral teaching complex In the course of this essay I have sought to disentangle my own understanding of the relationship of emotions to ethnography, drawing on my research in post-​colonial, multi-​ethnic Fiji, with its culture of ethnic coups. I summarise below what I think I have learned and how this might be productive in opening conversations that extrapolate from our personal testimonies and can be utilised to redraw the boundaries of anthropology more generally.

A cautionary and hopeful tale  45 It occurs to me that since emotions occur in the context of relationships –​ whether deep and meaningful or transitory and passing, whether in contexts of friendship and empathy or conflict and misunderstanding –​and since relationships contour our encounters with those whose lives we strive to learn about; and since neither these relationships are static and timeless nor the feelings that flow through them final (to paraphrase the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke),4 then emotions course through our research. They ebb, flow, transform, and are active agents in the dialectical and creative process that is anthropological research. As such, emotions are vital energies that work upon us in various ways, by various others, in various time-​ spaces. They fuel our encounters, our thinking, our analysis, our writing, our knowledge, our understanding, and our sense of self. But we do not accept emotions as a valid subject of our reflexive practices in anthropology and we give priority instead to how our identities and statuses mark power differentials in our fieldwork relationships. I am not for one moment suggesting the latter is not true. What has interested me in this essay, however, is the power exerted by the people we study, the kinds of relationships this can entail, and the impact that accrues when those who have power over us impute to us particular moral, ideological and political positionalities –​and evoke corresponding emotions in us as a result –​which affect our processes and practices of knowledge production (in my case about coups) as well as our psychological sense of self. As I embark on the publishing journey that is part of the academic apprenticeship, and reflect on the words I have written recalling places and faces, conversations and confrontations, rumours and silences, fear, anger, resentment, disbelief, hope, empathy, disturbance, I am grateful to the editors of this special issue for the space and encouragement to grapple with the emotions evoked in the course of my research, what I have done with them and how I have been changed by them; and to reflect on the emotion/​ ethnography nexus as a potentially productive way of thinking about what it is we do, and who we think we are, as anthropologists. If we are to open ourselves to our own, and each other’s, disorientation and suffering as we go about doing anthropology, then it follows that the researcher as pained subject can bring meaningful embodied knowledge to bear on our analysis and representation that deepens it in ways that participant-​observation by another anthropologist would not. The accrual of being heard and having one’s experiences –​which in their starkest depths can even reach a kind of existential screaming into the void –​acknowledged, authorised, legitimated as robust data; and being supported to think through the pain anthropologically and articulate it in anthropologically interesting ways is manifestly beneficial to both upcoming generations of anthropologists (see, for example, Thummapol, Park, Jackson, Barton 2019) and to the enterprise of anthropology as a whole. For it is not enough to recover lost ground from our colleagues in the political sciences, who are captivated by the allure of ethnography and are rebranding it in ways that

46  Jastinder Kaur we decry. We have to reflect on what it is about ethnography, and the way we inhabit it, and it inhabits us, that makes it such a unique anthropological proposition. My intention in this article has been to suggest that our emotional, intellectual and physical embeddedness in our field sites, and the research endeavours they are a part of can productively strengthen both anthropology and anthropologists. The suffering that anthropological research can bring to the mind and body of the researcher must be acknowledged as integral, rather than external, to the entire process of generating, piecing together, producing, and extemporising anthropological knowledge (see also Lobetti 2011). This requires active unsilencing of the episodes we shamefully hide for fear of failing the professionalism test, as well as active listening by colleagues. I am not suggesting departmental therapy sessions or suchlike, but rather that we collectively and collegiately draw on our critical capacities to rethink the limits of what we implicitly define and accept as being robustly and rigorously anthropological.

Notes 1 Naming has a tense and contested history in Fiji, echoing the competitive struggle between ethnic and civic conceptions of nationhood in multi-​ethnic societies. Indigenous Fijians have variously been referred to as Fijians, ethnic Fijians, and iTaukei, by themselves and others, while naming Indians has been inflected by discourses of Fijian existentialism as well as self-identity. 2 For more about the concept of pluralism, see Furnivall (1948), Smith (1965), Barth (1969), Rabushka and Schepsle (1972). For an extended discussion about pluralism in relation to Fiji, see Mamak (1978). 3 The Alliance Party did lose the 1977 general election, but factionalism prevented the winning party from taking the reins of government and a further election was called. Had the National Federation Party managed to form a government, however, it is broadly believed that the fact that it originated in and represented the Indo-​Fijian community would have triggered Fiji’s culture of coups a decade earlier. 4 “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final” (Rilke 2014).

References Barth, F. (1969) Ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organisation of culture difference. Waveland Press. Bossen, C. (2000) Festival mania, tourism and nation-​building in Fiji: the case of the Hibiscus Festival, 1956–​1970. The Contemporary Pacific 22(1): 123–​154. Das, V. (1995) Critical events: an anthropological perspective on contemporary India. Oxford University Press. Das, V. (2007). Life and words: violence and the descent into the ordinary. University of California Press.

A cautionary and hopeful tale  47 Furnivall, J.S. (1948) Colonial policy and practice: a comparative study of Burma and Netherlands India. New York University Press. Jolly, M. (2005) Epilogue: multicultural relations in Fiji –​between despair and hope. Oceania 75(4): 418–​430. Kaur, J. (2017) Towards an anthropology of coups in Fiji. Unpublished PhD thesis. Kaur, J. (2021a) Towards an anthropology of coups. Allegra Lab. Accessed 21st September 2022. https://​allegr​alab​orat​ory.net/​towa​rds-​an-​anthr​opol​ogy-​of-​coups. Kaur, J., White, D. and Cook, I.M. (July 2021b) ResonanceCast 2: incitement and coups (podcast). Allegra Lab. Last accessed 21st September 2022. https://​allegr​ alab​orat​ory.net/​resona​ncec​ast-​2-​inc​item​ent-​and-​coups. Lobetti, T. (2011) Fieldwork and pain: issues in field research methodologies involving extreme field circumstances. Fieldwork in Religion 5(2): 144–​161. Mamak, A. (1978) Colour, culture & conflict: a study of pluralism in Fiji. Pergamon Press Australia. Mayer, A. (1973 [1961]) Peasants in the Pacific. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rabushka, A., Shepsle, K. (1972). Politics in plural societies: a theory of democratic instability. Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company. Rilke, M.R. (2004) Rilke’s book of hours: love poems to God (Translators: Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy). Riverhead Press. Smith, M.G. (1965) The plural society in the British West Indies. University of California Press. Spencer, D., Walby, K. and Hunt, A. (2012) Emotions matter: a relational approach to emotions. University of Toronto Press. Thummapol, O., Park, T., Jackson, M. and Barton, S. (2019) Methodological challenges faced in doing research with vulnerable women: reflections from fieldwork experiences. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 18: 1–​11. Trnka, S. (2008) State of suffering: political violence and community survival in Fiji. Cornell University Press.

5 The fieldwork of never alone Reframing access as relationships of care Cari Tusing

Introduction When I returned from my ethnographic fieldwork in Paraguay, I felt disoriented and unsure of my findings. In order to re-​engage with anthropological writings, I returned to researchers whose work I admired. I selected an ethnographer with extensive fieldwork experience in a nearby region, whose theoretical work I drew upon leading up to my field research. The ethnographer’s book arrived through interlibrary loan, and I set aside a quiet afternoon to read his excellent prose. In his fieldwork accounts, I felt a fond familiarity with his experience. In a key passage, he arrived at an elder’s home and shared a few rounds of mate, a caffeinated tea passed back and forth between those present. The morning conversation led to some of his research insights. Feeling affirmed, I reminisced about my fieldwork mornings, listening to community stories and sharing mate in rural Paraguay. Then, the ethnographer explained in his book, he picked up his bicycle and pedaled down the road, joining men on a walk to hunt. My ­familiarity with his ethnographic description ended there, and my face flooded with warmth and shame. The delight with which he explained his fieldwork and the way he moved his body, unclaimed, through his research space, lay in stark opposition to my fieldwork experience as a solo female researcher. When I was in the field, I never moved about so freely alone. Instead, I was accompanied at all times by host family members or my field assistant. As one host family member told me, “I tell everyone you don’t have money so you won’t be kidnapped.” When they were not available to accompany me, I unhappily stayed put, not because I was unable to go alone, but because it placed undue worry on my hosting families. They felt responsible for my wellbeing; moreover, they were held responsible for my wellbeing by their communities. I could have set out alone, but I was discouraged from doing so throughout my fieldwork. Not only was I vulnerable as a potential target because of my class and nationality, as a woman alone I ran other risks. I chose to respect my host families’ anxieties about my solo travel and never DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-5

The fieldwork of never alone  49 go alone. This was a decision that shaped my fieldwork significantly, and I am still unsure if it was the right one.

Reframing access and exclusion as relationships of care Putting this uncertainty into print might open my work up to the easy critique that my fieldwork and subsequent ethnography represent an overly limited experience, as I was always dependent on others. To be clear, in my fellow ethnographer’s introduction he acknowledged how his positionality affected his research: as a male ethnographer, he had far less access to direct interviews with women, and thus his work might present different conclusions than someone else. Nevertheless, he said his work was thorough as he relied on iterative conversations. Neatly resolved, it was not an issue in the rest of his ethnography. But the difference between his fieldwork experience and mine was not just based on different kinds of access and exclusions. It was based on different kinds of responsibilities to others, some of which tied me to families and to places as a woman in Paraguay, with all the social assumptions and obligations this entailed. In short, I was also placed into gendered relationships of responsibility to keep me safe in the field, relationships different from those that a male researcher might have required. Ethnography, based on fieldwork, is often framed as an exercise navigating gates and gaining access (Dunlap and Johnson 1998; Feldman et al. 2003; Müftüoglu et al. 2018; Waldrop and Egden 2018; Straube 2020). In this light, the ethnographer’s body is used as a research instrument to enter new spaces during fieldwork: as conscientious participants, we aim to sense, observe, and document as much as possible, gaining experiences, knowledge, and reflections as we move ever forward, ever deeper. With this embodied approach, ethnographers, like the people they study, are at physical risk in situations of violence and harassment during fieldwork (Nordstrom and Robben 1995; Lee 1994; Hanson and Richards 2019; Clancy et al. 2014). The demands of successful access imply, ironically, a singular kind of ethnography—​usually to the detriment and danger of the researcher, as Hanson and Richards (2019) make explicit. They argue that some particular “ethnographic fixations” of fieldwork—​namely solitude, danger, and demands of intimacy—​make ethnographers vulnerable to violence and harassment as they gain access on their own. What is often left out, both in preparations and writing-​up, are the other claims on and limitations of the body that escape the neat narrative of “gaining access.” By reading his ethnography, I was able to identify with my fellow ethnographer’s account, but also see how my positionality conditioned a different relationship to my field sites. In this chapter, I seek to address the decisions I made, and limitations I faced, that shaped my fieldwork. Early in my fieldwork, I approached my field sites based on the framing of risk-​taking

50  Cari Tusing in the context of access and exclusion. While “studying up” (Nader 1972), my gender and race conditioned access to rancher elites who shared their assessments of indigenous Guarani and campesinos. When read as white and wealthy, I gained access as these ranchers assumed I had similar views and felt comfortable opening up about their racist opinions. However, wherever I went, I was seen in relation to the people I was with. If I was alone, then I was out of place. I had tried unsuccessfully to gain access to ranchers on my own, unable to see why my networking failed. Only when I paired with my local research assistant, a young lawyer who explained my project to the ranchers he had known his whole life, did I stop being excluded. In reviewing my fieldwork, I began to see that access and exclusion was a function of my relationships. Furthermore, in reviewing my field notes, I found that my host families claimed me whenever I was read as alone. This is because when I was alone I was not only out of place; I was vulnerable. From this experience I suggest an approach to fieldwork not simply as a problem of access and exclusion, but as multiple, ongoing relationships of responsibility and care. This approach still pays attention to access and exclusion, not as constitutive of fieldwork, but rather as revealing of the dynamics of danger, risk, and care at play in our selected research sites. That is to say, how people take care of each other says volumes about power and violence within their circles. Through this focus, we as ethnographers might also be able to identify vulnerabilities in the field and problems within in our discipline. This, I hope, is useful in order to navigate fieldwork in multiple contexts.

Paying attention to access and exclusion in settler colonial contexts Re-​reading my field notes, I identified the recurring themes of access, exclusion, and relationships. My fieldwork in Paraguay examined the aftermath of land titling in indigenous Guarani and campesino communities in Paraguay, including the perspectives of local elites. The themes of access and exclusion are central to a settler colonial property regime. I found that land titling privatizes land holdings in the hands of some, while denying the claims of others, recreating racial hierarchies that favor wealthy elites of European descent that exclude poor, rural, and indigenous populations from land ownership. However, some opportunities to title some land are made possible by leveraging indigenous and campesino claims to land. The outcomes of land titling not only create a new settler landscape of partitioned spaces and properties—​the implementation of a property regime through land ­titling also demands a change in relationship to land for everyone who carries out their livelihoods on it. Concomitant with settler colonial projects of land privatization is the history of anthropology as a discipline. As mercantilism and colonialism

The fieldwork of never alone  51 “opened” new lands for conquest, so were they violently “opened” to anthropologists. The unprecedented access of this salvage–​savage anthropology was ensured through settler colonialism: as anthropologists navigated access to document disappearing cultures, they often failed to recognize the concurrent, ongoing genocide and theft of indigenous land (Scheper-​Hughes 2001; Simpson 2007). The inscription of settler colonial processes, and patriarchal white supremacy in particular, is part and parcel of an imagined white masculine explorer who leaves the armchair to go to the field (Hanson and Richards 2019). And yet, the imagined solitary, white, male ethnographer who gains access through determination and grit is unlike any practicing anthropologist in the field, including those who might fit parts of this description. Berry et al. (2017) highlight that anthropology has begun to interrogate the fieldwork myth of a “masculinist rite of passage or an exercise of one’s endurance” (538). Fieldwork is increasingly understood to be different from the gendered myth that sustained determination is the means to gain access. Yet they argue that while scholarship considers gendered dimensions of fieldwork, analysis of race is often overlooked. Therefore, in the following section, I highlight how my interlocutors’ expectations for someone of my race and gender simultaneously enabled access and restricted my research.

Access reveals power: the role of race and gender Gender and race played different roles in framing my access and exclusion to fieldwork. When I was read as an in-​group elite or white person, I was able to “study up” (Nader 1972), visiting ranchers whose land titles covered most of the region, but only with my male research assistant. They often shared their unfiltered assessment of race relations in Paraguay. How my gender was read in the field, on the other hand, meant that I was excluded from places as a woman alone. At times, my interviews with elite ranchers yielded bluntly racist views. My whiteness meant that they sometimes tried to use our common European ancestry to place me with them at the top of their racialized hierarchy. In one instance, when I introduced myself as an anthropologist to a wealthy Paraguayan rancher, he quickly responded, “Oh of course, you study humans,” and followed with: “And so do you look at their head shape?” He turned his head in profile and traced his hand along his forehead to the back of his neck. “Everyone in my family has this head shape, longer in the front and rounded in the back. Look at my son; he has the same shape,” he gestured. As I listened, trying to figure out how to respond, he pointed out the portraits on the wall of his mother, father, grandparents, and great-​ grandparent. “Ah,” I managed. The rancher continued, “You look like you’re German, so you have a European head shape like us,” including me in his racial group. “In Paraguay, the Mennonites and Indians interbred too

52  Cari Tusing much inside their respective groups, and that’s why they are not attractive people.” Not attractive people? I weighed my response: Did I need to ensure further access to this interlocutor? What kind of relationship was I affirming if I responded neutrally? “Well,” I said, finally finding my voice. “That’s very interesting. My understanding is that phrenology was part of anthropology over 100 years ago, and that people have shown that it doesn’t work that way, that it isn’t possible to measure intelligence by head shape and race.” “However,” I continued, “I am interested in hearing what you think about the different people living in Paraguay and their relationships to land. I want to talk to all of the groups and then understand how they relate to each other.” The decision to push back about his claims to anthropological knowledge was a risk, as I could offend. “Oh!” he said, “You’ll take all of the information together and stitch it together like ñanduti,” a traditional Paraguayan lace named after the Guarani word for “spider webs.” “Exactly!” I said, able to express genuine enthusiasm at the comparison. At the same time he included me in his racial group; however, the rancher was quick to remind me that I was at risk and vulnerable when visiting his ranch as a woman. “If you go with me,” he explained, “they won’t do anything to you. But a white woman alone with ranch hands and campesinos…” He trailed off. “When I was in the army there was this joke about women who entered the soldiers’ barracks. We’d do to the woman that thing that they didn’t want us to do, that they still wanted us to do,” he said, jocularly intimating rape. “My father told me he’d whip me if I ever did that. You’ll be safe on the ranch with me,” he winked. In addition, in the field I quickly learned that I was assumed to be in a relationship with any man that I traveled with, as an unattached female seemed to be outside of peoples’ frames of reference. Once while waiting for a bus with a German tourist forty years my elder, I made small talk with a police officer. The police officer asked me if the man was my husband. “No,” I answered incredulous, “he’s my father’s age.” After rehashing the interaction with a Paraguayan mentor, she warned me that the policeman had likely assumed I was an escort. The experience opened my eyes to how women were read in relation to men, as the policeman assumed sexual relations between the older man and myself. I came to realize that women were often attributed sexually to the men they were with. When we were alone, we might then be seen as sexually available. Therefore, my race and gender as a white female researcher played significant roles in shaping my fieldwork. My whiteness facilitated access to elite ranchers, while my gender exposed me to rape jokes and prying inquiries about my sexual availability. These experiences taught me that women in Paraguay were defined in relation to men, and that my access to information would therefore be shaped by issues of safety. I changed how I conducted fieldwork in response to these race-​and gender-​shaped experiences. In the very beginning, I had refused to work

The fieldwork of never alone  53 with a field assistant, buying into the ethnographic convention that solitary research yields more valuable insights. After the rancher’s rape jokes, I hired my male field assistant to connect and accompany me to visit Paraguayan and Brazilian ranchers. (The access and exclusion demarcated by private properties necessitated an assistant as well—​it is physically impossible to hold open a cattle gate and drive through it at the same time!) Therefore, my fieldwork, both in rural communities, and at elites’ ranches, necessitated working in a team. From these examples, I suggest when the idealized fieldwork is practiced by lone-​wolf ethnographers, not only can it select for a singular kind of ethnography, it places the weight of access and exclusion on the ethnographer. Specifically, using the ethnographic fixations of danger, solitude, and risk to measure scholarship also means certain gendered and racialized traits will be privileged. Mallon (2012) contends that “[d]‌ecolonization, therefore, involves the questioning of the racial and evolutionary bases of colonial power, and how these have tended to underlie the construction of ­knowledge” (2). The ethnographic conventions of the lone, white male researcher are built upon settler colonial assumptions of white male access, ease of movement, and a steadily unfolding production of knowledge, scaling gate after gate. Failure to gain access echoes neoliberal narratives that assign individuals the responsibilities of systematic discrimination. That is to say, when anthropologists do not fit in an imaginary white-​male-​explorer framework, fieldwork that seeks access is risky. Perhaps everyone who has gone through fieldwork knows that it is difficult, fractured, and thus necessarily iterative. What access and exclusion can show instead are the dynamics of power and discrimination at play within our field sites. The rancher’s ease in expressing his racist views, and the policeman’s assumption about my sexual relationship with the older tourist, disclosed their everyday beliefs about race and gender. Yet the ways that my research was conditioned by my race and gender revealed not only the dynamics of power and discrimination at play in my field sites but also the racist and misogynist assumptions embedded within ethnography more broadly, which place solitary ethnographers at risk.

Never alone: relational care, jealousy, and bed-​sharing However, as I emphasized in the introduction, I was never alone because I was always looked after by my host families or accompanied by a field assistant. As Hanson and Richards (2019) observe, the relationships of care, trust, and dependency that ethnographers build in the field are often rewritten as a narrative of access and exclusion, “contributing to a disembodied presentation of research” (3). In other words, following the conventional narrative of access and exclusion excludes an examination of the relations of care and safety we must forge in the field, overlooking the relational, embodied fieldwork we carry out. In what follows, I contest this

54  Cari Tusing simplification of access, exclusion, and disembodiment by presenting the relational care I experienced that became foundational to my research in Paraguay. Whenever I went to a community or ranch, I was looked after. My hosts made sure I had a place to stay, they fed me, they walked me around to the neighbors, they took me to their church or their religious ceremonies, and they incorporated me into the family. In rural homes, which often had precarious structures and few rooms, someone in the family always gave up their bed for me to sleep in. In the beginning I protested that I would be more comfortable in my hammock, but my host families absolutely insisted. I came to understand that giving up their bed was a way to ensure I was safe and cared for, even within the privacy of their home. One of my Paraguayan mentors warned me, briefly, before I went into the field without her: “No matter what anyone says, you don’t share your bed with anyone. Don’t accept to share a bed with an indigenous man, or with another Paraguayan, no matter how long you’ve known him.” This preoccupation with beds and bed-​sharing came into sharp relief when I was in the field, and men began asking where I slept. In the following two sections, I illustrate how I became hyper aware of the work of relationship-​making and care-​taking through a curious insistence about jealousy and where I was sleeping. Che celosaite! I’m so jealous: protection and power through care-​taking One campesina woman who treated me dearly asked me to stay at her house. I had interviewed her and her family about their use of communal grazing grounds. “You always come here and you stay with Susana,” she observed, almost teasing. It was true; I met Susana at the beginning of my fieldwork and stayed at her house whenever I visited their community. I smiled back to her and said a phrase I’d heard often in Paraguayan Guarani, laughing: “Susana icelosaite!” or “Susana is very jealous!” In my field notes, jealousy and concern about where I was sleeping came up multiple times, beginning with my mentor’s warning. However, in the beginning I did not understand that someone claiming “jealousy” in Spanish or Guarani was using the concept differently, in the sense of looking out for and protecting someone. The relationship between bed-​sharing and jealousy seems to make easy sense: beds, lovers, and jealousy are entwined. But when I parroted the phrase I’d heard about Susana, I was not talking about romance. That is to say, jealousy in these contexts had more to do with defining relationships of responsibility, access, and protection, rather than sexual jealousy. Two instances from my fieldwork help to illustrate this concept of jealousy-​as-​protection. My first example shows how “jealousy” is linked to care-​taking. I was talking with a Guarani political leader representing his community at a development program fair. The community boasted a school of agroecology

The fieldwork of never alone  55 to train indigenous students in agricultural practices that were quickly being lost to wage work and land dispossession. The reduction of indigenous land claims to small, bounded, and fixed communities meant that land was opened up to timber extraction and industrial mono-​cropping. Communities often become forested islands in a sea of soy fields or cattle ranches. The Guarani leader explained that the school was one way that the community was able to use traditional seeds, grow saplings and maintain the forest. “We are jealous about our jungle [Ore celoso ore ka’aguyre],” he concluded in Guarani. In the face of mass deforestation, where 7% of the Atlantic Forest remains (Terborgh 1992), the leader’s phrase defined a clear stance. They were looking out for their jungle. As with other lowland South American indigenous groups, the Guarani hold that all flora, fauna, and landscape features have a spirit responsible for their care. If the forest is decimated, those who carried out the destruction may get sick from the responsible spirit. In contrast, the Guarani leader and his community looked after the forest, taking responsibility for their relationships and fostering regrowth. Focusing our attention on care and responsibility, we can see that the forest is to be protected and looked after, and to do otherwise is dangerous. Therefore, they must be “jealous” about their forests. The second instance of jealousy takes place at Susana’s house, celebrating a saint’s day. Extended family and friends came together to eat a rice dish with meat from a young cow they slaughtered for the occasion. Paraguayan polka, sung in Guarani, animated the afternoon. One of the men mentioned to my campesino host father that he thought I was very pretty. In front of the whole crowd, including his wife, my host father called over to me, “Did you hear, Cari? He said that he thinks you’re very pretty. I’m so jealous! [Rehendupa Cari? Ha’e he’i neporãeterei. Che celosoite!]” Everyone laughed, and we continued our meal. During the two years that I spent time at their home and subsequent visits, my host father never said, insinuated or do anything that I felt was inappropriate. In this example, my campesino host father’s declaration was not one of sexual jealousy for me. As a putative member of the family, he claimed jealousy about a possible romantic match in the community as a way to extend his protection over me. In other words, by announcing to everyone that he was “jealous,” he declared that he was looking out for me, not that he wanted a relationship with me. By claiming jealousy, my host father indicated that I was not a woman alone; rather, that I was claimed. This gendered claiming protected me, denying access to me by others and making a place for me within the family. Thus my relationships excluded access to my body through the extension of care. In the following section, I examine how women regulated access to my body by claiming it through bed-​sharing, thus taking me into their networks of care.

56  Cari Tusing

Protective strategies: what they signal In contrast to the disembodied narrative of access, my fieldwork experience was shaped by my almost obligatory reliance on relationships. As I have alluded to previously, I found that solo female travelers in Paraguay are seen as out of place and sexually available, and women are seen in relation to their companions, be it as family or as romantic partners. Therefore, I was usually defined in relation to who I was with and where I was. When I explained that I had professional rather than affective ties with my NGO partners, host families, or field assistants, I was often met with quizzical, sometimes uncomfortable silence. As I learned, being an unattached woman meant that your body was presumed available to men. The privileges of nationality, class, and race that might have afforded me access did not afford me the safety to travel alone. Here I present two instances where women claimed I was sharing their bed in order to communicate that my body was not available, that someone else was watching out for me, and that I was not a woman alone. When a contracted tractorist came to plow a field at my campesino home for an international development project, he asked repeatedly who I belonged with or to, if I had a man, and if I slept alone. My host “mother,” a woman my own age, said firmly, “I’m her mother and she sleeps with me [Che isy ha ha’e oke chendive].” “Exactly [Upeichaite],” I echoed. She sent her preteen sons with me anywhere I went the week that they were plowing, something which I did not protest. In another case, I met a rancher through friends in Asunción at a small get-​together. He was an agricultural engineer. His family owned an expansive ranch, and I had already documented how his family evicted an indigenous community that claimed land from the ranch property. I was planning to get into his good graces to hear a version of the eviction from an elite, when he, clearly drunk, asked if I was single and if I would go on a date with him. My friend quickly cut in and said that I wasn’t interested in dating anyone because I was focused on my work. Slurring, he asked if I slept alone. Unknowingly echoing my campesina mother, my friend said: “No, she is sleeping in my bed.” Later she told me to make sure I was never alone with him, saying curtly, “He’s bad news.” I tried to interview him again later, asking her to call him and suggest we three go to coffee to chat about his family’s ranch. He agreed if I went alone. Even through it was “just coffee,” I was familiar with how my requests for access to information could result in a push and pull over access to my body. I declined. Through these examples of care, I hope to show the gendered dynamics of access and exclusion at play in my fieldwork and the ways in which I relied on relationships of care. When women said I slept in their bed, they conditioned access to my body. Their claiming it even in my sleep shows the

The fieldwork of never alone  57 extensive responsibility they took on for me. When I was “alone,” I was really never alone—​I was claimed by the women and families I knew. Much would be lost if I followed a lone-​wolf narrative to rewrite these relationships as a disembodied narrative of gaining access. By understanding my fieldwork as a set of relationships and responsibilities inscribed by care, I was able to set aside the shame I felt when reflecting on how my body was unable to move freely through my fieldwork space.

Conclusion I have argued that the myth of the lone, white male anthropologist places ethnographers at risk in the field. I opened the chapter by discussing how my access to, or exclusion from, research spaces was conditioned by my interlocutors’ reactions to my race and gender. These dynamics of access and exclusion underscore how fieldwork is necessarily incomplete, constricted, and fenced in by each researcher’s positionality and field site. Yet in paying attention to those limitations, I was able to map out some of the ways my relationships in the field attended to those power dynamics through care. If we conflate access with knowledge, my stymied attempts to gain research access should signal that I failed to document the processes of marginalization and dispossession taking place. On the contrary, through those same experiences I learned volumes about racism, sexism, and the relations of care that seek to protect women, which enabled my research in rural Paraguay. Over time, I found it useful and safer to embark upon fieldwork through multiple, ongoing relationships of responsibility and care, as illustrated through examples of “jealousy-​as-​ protection” and bed-​sharing. When we pay attention to how people protect each other, we may lay bare the practices of power that shape access and exclusion in our field sites. At the same time, we may reframe the disembodied production of knowledge by writing about how our bodies are perceived and cared for in the field.

References Berry, Maya J., Claudia Chávez Argüelles, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada (2017) Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field. Cultural Anthropology 32(4): 537–​565. Clancy, Kathryn B. H., Robin G. Nelson, Julienne N. Rutherford, and Katie Hinde (2014) Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault. PLOS ONE 9(7): e102172. Dunlap, Eloise, and Bruce D. Johnson (1998) Gaining Access to Hidden Populations: Strategies for Gaining Cooperation of Drug Sellers/​ Dealers and Their Families in Ethnographic Research. Drugs & Society (New York, N.Y.) 14(1–​2): 127–​149.

58  Cari Tusing Feldman, Martha S., Jeannine Bell, Michele Tracy Berger, et al. (2003) Gaining Access: A Practical and Theoretical Guide for Qualitative Researchers. AltaMira Press. Hanson, Rebecca, and Patricia Richards (2019) Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research. University of California Press. Lee, Raymond M. (1994) Dangerous Fieldwork, vol.34. Qualitative Research Methods. Sage Publications. https://​us.sage​pub.com/​en-​us/​nam/​danger​ous-​fieldw​ ork/​book3​981, accessed September 3, 2019. Mallon, Florencia E., ed. (2012) Decolonizing Native Histories: Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas. Duke University Press. Müftüoglu, Ingrid Birce, Ståle Knudsen, Ragnhild Freng Dale, et al. (2018) Rethinking Access: Key Methodological Challenges in Studying Energy Companies. Energy Research & Social Science 45: 250–​257. Nader, Laura (1972) Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up. In Reinventing Anthropology. Dell H. Hymes, ed. Pp. 284–​311. Pantheon Books. Nordstrom, Carolyn, and Antonius C. G. M. Robben (1995) Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival. University of California Press. Scheper-​ Hughes, Nancy (2001) Ishi’s Brain, Ishi’s Ashes. Anthropology Today 17(1): 12–​18. Simpson, Audra (2007) On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship. Junctures. The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9: 67–​80. Straube, Christian (2020) Speak, Friend, and Enter? Fieldwork Access and Anthropological Knowledge Production on the Copperbelt. Journal of Southern African Studies 46(3): 399–​415. Terborgh, John (1992) Maintenance of Diversity in Tropical Forests. Biotropica 24(2): 283. Waldrop, Anne, and Sissel Egden (2018) Getting Behind the Walls and Fences: Methodological Considerations of Gaining Access to Middle-​ Class Women in Urban India. Forum for Development Studies 45(2): 239–​260.

6 ‘You are one of us’, but I wasn’t Managing expectations and emotions when studying powerful security actors Erella Grassiani

Relief. That is what I would feel every time I walked out of an air-​conditioned office of one of the security CEO’s I interviewed or away from the security fair grounds I did observations at. I literally would let out a sigh of relief when walking outside and feeling the scorching hot sun on my skin again. I would be free again, to go about my own business. But what was I relieved about? And why were these interviews and observations so uncomfortable? Why did I suffer so much during this research? In this short piece, I will explain what I came to understand as reasons for my discomfort leading up to and during an interview or observation and the relief afterwards. I will trace my emotions in the field during my research project on the Israeli security industry through my positionality and the subject matter at hand. The bottom line is that who we are, what we believe, what we study and what we feel are all interconnected. Studying people of power is still not very typical for anthropologists, but it has been done for many years. Laura Nader already called upon her peers to study up and with this to gain more understanding in power relations in the United States in the 1970s (Nader 1972). Her idea was for anthropologists to do ethnographies of corporations and other actors within the capitalist system. As Gusterson (1997) writes, there were few takers and I believe this is still true today as it has been in the decades past, with some exceptions of course (e.g. Abbink and Salverda 2012). And there is reason for this, besides anthropology’s continued focus on the ‘far away’ and the exotic, studying the elites brings a host of difficulties with it especially concerning access to the field. Here I want to add another layer to such difficulties of studying the powerful, namely the emotional costs it can have. This is especially true when studying the military or the security elites of our world (Gusterson 1997). I studied the Israeli security industry and its global reach. I wanted to understand how Israeli security as a commodity is marketed, how it sold and what messages are conveyed when doing so. Most of my fieldwork was in Israel; I would interview security actors from the industry. But I also visited such Israeli professionals in Nairobi, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro. These interviewees were mostly senior employees or CEOs of security companies they founded themselves after enjoying an early retirement from their military DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-6

60  Erella Grassiani career or their career in one of Israel’s secret agencies. They were mostly white, Ashkenazi1 men in their forties or fifties and they obviously had better things to do than talk to me. I was ‘welcomed’ more than once by a grumpy ‘so what do you want from me’. But they talked to me, often because one of their other friends had sent them to me and they felt obliged. Good for me. I would go to their offices in ugly buildings in industrial zones in the centre of Israel by bus mostly, with students, pupils and lower-​class wage workers. I would want it to be over before it began. Finding my way to their office with a knot in my stomach. Sitting down and trying to make clear what I was interested in, without giving away too much about myself and my political opinions. These opinions are tricky in Israel. But when asked, I did emphasize that my family was from a kibbutz in the centre of the country. This personal heritage is perceived as great social capital in the world of Israeli security. People from the kibbutz (especially my grandparents’ generation) are seen as the heroes of the nation, as the founding fathers of the ‘real Israeli’ with his feet in the earth and a gun in his hand (women were crucial, but not THAT crucial in early Zionism). I would go to do observations at security fairs. I would walk around the stalls of a range of companies, selling weapons, cybertechnologies, uniforms and helmets, and their security consultancy services. Most attendees at the fairs were men. The women were usually only there for the sales, not for the detailed explanation about how the weapons and defence technologies worked. Men with (combat) experience were brought in to do that. Men explaining the use of weapons, the need for technologies, emphasizing threats like terrorism; it all fell so far outside of my comfort zone. I wanted to see what was happening, what they were selling, how they were selling it, but it depressed me at the same time and left me utterly uncomfortable and out of place. During an interview I nod, or half nod, or try not to nod when hearing the things I don’t want to hear but need to hear. They are important to hear; it is my work to hear them, but it makes me sick sometimes to hear it. All this talk about weapons and sales and convincing people they need weapons and security, and only Israel knows how it is done and there is a need for all these security technologies. ‘You know. Right?’ ‘You know’ ‘at yoda’at’. ‘You are one of us’, they seem to tell me. But I don’t feel like I’m one of them. It is only their assumption that I’m one of them. These assumptions have to do with who I am: a white, Jewish, Hebrew-​ speaking Israeli woman who is, on top of that, from a kibbutz. As such, I am perceived as a member of the Israeli elite. The same elite that is in charge of the security industry in Israel. An elite with a large amount of securitizing capital (Diphoorn and Grassiani 2016) to secure their privileged place in society. These men assume I have no doubts about the superiority of Israel in global security development. They are sure I support Israel’s efforts in the Occupied Territories to, as they believe, ‘counter terrorism’ and defend Israel’s borders.

‘You are one of us’, but I wasn’t  61 These assumptions are also closely related to the Israeli political mainstream. Real criticism about Israel’s government and its occupation ­politics, its human rights violations and its racist policies are heard only from minority voices in the Israeli public landscape. The vast majority of Israelis, even those who in 2020–​21 relentlessly protested against then Prime Minister Netanyahu, support the broad lines of Israeli policies of self-​defence and its security discourse. This discourse legitimizes every kind of imaginable injustice in the name of national security. Between feeling uncomfortable during the interviews and the assumptions my interviewees had of me I sometimes realized I also experienced feelings of betraying them. They thought they were talking to someone who was sympathetic to what they were saying, but in reality I was very critical of the industry and their role in it. Was I betraying them? What would that mean for my professional role as a researcher? Or for the ethical dilemmas that come with it? While I felt a sting of disloyalty, I knew I wasn’t really betraying anyone. Elsewhere I have written about the methodological aspects of doing research with people you don’t agree with and/​or don’t like (Grassiani 2019). In that chapter I come to the conclusion that in order to do such research one (or at least I do) needs to keep some kind of distance that is atypical for anthropological studies. Importantly, in terms of responsibility for the people we study, there is a big difference between doing research among oppressed people and, for example, CEOs of security companies who earn millions. I am in no way advocating any sort of lying or disrespect towards the people who open doors for us in order to do our research. But giving research participants insights into our motivations is often not needed in order to have a truthful and respectful relationship in the field. I guess I did the opposite of what Robben (1996) has warned us about: being seduced when studying perpetrators of violence; beginning to like them because they are friendly and amiable. The men I interviewed perhaps expected me to be seduced, but my political position was already too grounded to let that happen. I knew what I wanted from them, what information interested me, but I wouldn’t get closer than that (see Grassiani 2019). But still, the emotion of relief every time I finished an interview or after walking out of a security exhibition in Tel Aviv’s big convention centre was intense. I can still see myself coming back home to Tel Aviv after finishing an interview or an observation. The freedom I would feel of having done the work and now being able to ‘be myself’ again; to be able to talk to my friends about politics and my critical opinions concerning Israel, and about going to protests against the occupation. Was it a relief from the ‘role’ I played? Or was it just a relief of being away from a context that was so far from my comfort zone? I believe it was a combination of these; I felt, on some level, that I ‘faked’ it, that I was indeed performing while interviewing. That people thought I was someone else, with different opinions and ideas from those I actually had. This is related to the fact that indeed this context

62  Erella Grassiani of businessmen dealing in weaponry was very far from the places in society I find comfortable. I have often felt like a bad researcher. And definitely a bad anthropologist. What anthropologist doesn’t like to go out interviewing? Who doesn’t like to come back from the field and go through all their notes? I didn’t. I left my interview transcriptions and my field notes on a corner of my desk and in a not easy to find folder on my laptop for many months. Questions about my fieldwork after I came back I usually answered with: ‘it was OK, I’m glad I’m back though’. I guess that doing fieldwork always makes you leave your comfort zone. Makes you go to places, meet people who you would not socialize with in daily life. But fieldwork can also leave you utterly uncomfortable, and anxious. Not because of the difficult situation your research informants are in, but because of who your informants are and what they stand for. In my case these feelings were amplified by assumptions about and expectations from me that I could not fulfill. My fieldwork was then heavily influenced not only by who I was, but also how I was seen, misguided assumptions about my positionality, my moral and political standpoints and the research questions I wanted to answer. I realize I put myself in complicated position, and I will probably do it again.

Note 1 Ashkenazi refers to Jews of European descent (and who are white). In Israel they have historically had a dominant position, both in politics and the military.

References Abbink, Jon, and Tijo Salverda, eds. 2012. The anthropology of elites: Power, culture, and the complexities of distinction. Springer. Diphoorn, Tessa, and Erella Grassiani. 2016. Securitizing capital: A processual-​ relational approach to pluralized security. Theoretical Criminology 20, no. 4: 430–​445. Grassiani, Erella. 2019. Critical engagement when studying those you oppose. Secrecy and Methods in Security Research, pp. 248–​260. Gusterson, Hugh. 1997. Studying up revisited. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 20, no. 1: 114–​119. Nader, Laura. 1972. Up the anthropologist: perspectives gained from studying up. Hymes, Del H. (ed.) Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon. pp. 284–​311. Robben, Antonius CGM. 1996. Ethnographic seduction, transference, and resistance in dialogues about terror and violence in Argentina. Ethos 24, no. 1: 71–​106.

7 Conversations about violence during fieldwork in Colombia Colleen Alena O’Brien

Introduction “You can’t both be scared and do a dangerous thing,” a friend told me. “You have to choose one or the other.” I thought about the war journalists I had spoken with, who had undertaken projects far more dangerous than mine, but who had never acknowledged or even mentioned the risks. For over a year, I had been working on a documentary film project about the reintegration process of ex-​guerrilla fighters of the FARC-​EP into Colombian society, and I had started feeling paranoid; so, I decided to discuss my feelings with a friend from the United States. The project I had been working on took various emotional tolls, because of the subject matter (violence during the conflict) and the realities of violence in Colombia—​including po­litical clashes between the government, guerrilla organizations, paramilitary groups, and drug cartels, combined with day-​to-​day violence. This essay relates my experiences during 24 months of fieldwork and ethnographic filmmaking in Colombia, from the streets of Bogotá to remote rural areas. I focus on the conversations I had during my work to illustrate both the interpersonal relations a researcher develops while conducting fieldwork in a dangerous environment and to share the thought processes involved in trying to stay safe. Many researchers have discussed the emotional and physical effects that fieldwork can have on researchers, in particular students (e.g. Pollard 2009). When field sites are dangerous, these negative feelings can be compounded. Emotional support from friends was essential to my emotional wellbeing. When I reached out to friends, family, and colleagues back home in the United States, however, I often received harsh feedback from them, saying that I should not be undertaking a risky project in the first place. At the same time, other friends did not seem to understand the stakes whatsoever, which felt equally frustrating. In the end, I felt that outside of Colombia, it was difficult to relate to anyone about the stresses of my work. Conducting research in violent contexts can take emotional tolls and can also be hard to explain to friends and colleagues back “home” who do not do anything similar. Some researchers have advocated for alternating between immersion DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-7

64  Colleen Alena O’Brien in the field and distancing oneself from it (Maček 2018). This essay touches upon these themes while also stressing the importance of being able to talk openly about the risks and their effects. I should first of all say, however, that my overall experience in Colombia was far from negative, and in a way I almost feel guilty for writing about the violence rather than the positive aspects of the country. Tate (2007) observes that Colombians resent this “relentless focus on violence and ongoing assessment of their national character.” One clear example I noticed was that not a single Colombian I knew was willing to watch Narcos, a popular American TV show about drug cartels in Colombia, with Pablo Escobar as the main character. Violence was always in the background, but there were so many wonderful things about the country, which is why I was willing to continue working there despite the risks. For me, there was an extra emotional ambivalence toward being positive about the place and having negative emotions about it. The juxtaposition between kindness and fear was apparent even in casual conversations, such as when a friendly street vendor once told me after I had purchased some pairs of colorful socks from him: “But be careful. Someone might pretend to be your friend and then kill you. But God will help you. Blessings.”

Background of the project In August 2016, I began producing a documentary with filmmaker Noah DeBonis about the Colombian peace process. We both happened to be in Colombia for different reasons (I was conducting linguistic field research with the Kamsá, an Indigenous community in southern Colombia, for my PhD dissertation; he wanted to learn Spanish), but neither of us could ignore what was happening around us. The Colombian government had finally come to an agreement with the FARC, and the guerrillas would have to demobilize and reintegrate into Colombian society. Although we found every aspect of the process fascinating, our primary question was: What will happen to these 13,000 guerrillas when the war ends and they return to “normal” life? To begin answering this question, we contacted the ACR (Agencia de Colombia para la Reintegración, “Colombian Agency for Reintegration”), a government agency that had been helping ex-​combatants from all armed groups reintegrate since the early 2000s.1 The ACR was working closely with ex-​combatants who had either deserted an armed group or been captured by the military. The ACR handled cases with individuals such as these, in addition to working with entire groups that demobilized collectively as part of a peace agreement. The ACR provided therapy sessions, job training, aid to finish high school, and modest financial support, as well as supporting programs that fostered reconciliation with the greater Colombian society, especially through community service.

Conversations about violence during fieldwork in Colombia  65 With the help of the ACR, we were able to meet several demobilized ex-​ combatants in Bogotá who had deserted the FARC years before the peace process had begun. We followed them in their daily lives and conducted extensive interviews in order to learn more about the challenges they were facing. After a long process of conversations with various people who were still in the FARC (mostly via WhatsApp), I also obtained permission from a FARC commander to visit a demobilization camp in order to conduct interviews with the new wave of demobilizing guerrillas. We first visited their camp in February 2017, shortly after they had gathered there. The camp was monitored jointly by the FARC, the UN, and the Colombian government. The first time we visited the camp, the FARC had not yet given up their weapons. We visited three more times over the following two years. This project took place mainly in the cities of Bogotá and Valledupar, and in one FARC camp about a one-​hour drive from Valledupar. I was also conducting linguistic research during the same time in Putumayo, southern Colombia. We were a core group of four people making the film: Noah DeBonis, the director; Laura Ángel, the co-​director; Rajiv Smith-​Mahabir, the cinematographer; and me. We were often carrying around expensive film equipment, and we were always conspicuous. Occasionally we hired police or private security to accompany us, but generally we worked unaccompanied, partially because of the nature of the project and partially because we wanted to build trust with our participants. When we visited the FARC camp, we always went unescorted, notifying the FARC before a trip, but not telling the ACR. And because of the sensitive nature of the project, we often filmed participants in my home in Bogotá. None of us had experience in this type of filmmaking (nor in war journalism or anything like it) and we had to learn as we went along. Furthermore, the situation in Colombia was always changing, and no one could gauge what was truly safe. I would receive vastly different advice regarding safety from different people. It is important to note that the Colombian conflict was still ongoing, in that there were (and continue to be) active armed groups waging war on the military, civilians, and each other. At the same time, none of our participants were engaged in warfare or violence any longer (they could all be considered “ex-​combatants”). Thus, the subject of my research was not violence that was currently happening. However, these ex-​combatants were at high risk for being victims of violence. Since the start of the peace process in 2016, at least 271 ex-​combatants (Reuters 2021, Gaviria 2019) and hundreds of social activists (Indepaz 2019), primarily those supporting the peace process, have been murdered. Thus, these ex-​combatants were living in constant fear of being targeted. The irony of being killed after demobilizing was not lost on them, either. One FARC commander explained to me: We’ve been here for a number of years fighting against the State, and it would be paradoxical if then we did not fall in the middle of the

66  Colleen Alena O’Brien military confrontation, but instead later, once we are disarmed, we are assassinated by paramilitaries.

Layers of danger “That feeling in your chest, that fear, that panic, I’ve felt it my whole life. I thought it was normal,” Fernando told me. “And it’s physical.” “I’ve never felt like this before,” I said. “Never in my life.” “You see it in the faces of the people in Bogotá. When you walk around, you see the anxiety there. Everyone is so incredibly anxious, all the time,” Fernando continued. I had visited Fernando, a bogotano friend, to discuss how I had started feeling more afraid lately. I expected him to tell me I was overreacting, but instead he confirmed my fears. The way he characterized the physical manifestation of fear rang true; it was visceral, and it was located exactly in my chest. And you grow up with it, you feel it your whole life, from when you’re a kid. And if you’ve never lived anywhere else, you think it’s normal. When I lived in New York for six months, the feeling went away. Then as soon as I came back to Bogotá, it came back. The fear in my chest. I hadn’t noticed it was gone until it came back. This description was representative of what I heard from many bogotanos during my time in Colombia. It seemed to stem from a complicated mixture of factors, including the high crime rates in ordinary life, the traumatic memory of the terrorism of the 1980s and 1990s, and the sporadic terrorism they still faced, along with other reasons more difficult to pinpoint. Like many foreigners in Colombia, I did not immediately perceive this heightened state of fear. Even after the first time I was robbed (thrown to the ground, a knife held to my neck, and hands covering my mouth so I couldn’t scream), I remained optimistic. I knew intellectually that it was dangerous, and I knew that I should be careful and take precautions, but it was not until several months after conducting research about the actors in the Colombian conflict, particularly current and former members of the FARC, that I began to experience similar feelings to my Colombian friends. I was losing that privilege of being a foreigner: the ability to go to this new place and without knowing the context, remain oblivious to the dangers. This particular project carried several layers of real and perceived danger, some of which apply to any project in Colombia or countries experi­encing violent conflict or high levels of crime. As I describe in greater detail below, it was not always possible to ascertain the level of danger in many situations. These layers all intersect in various ways, in terms of our identities, our entanglements with the participants, the political situation in the country, and ordinary crime. Tate (2007) writes: “What makes Colombia’s case

Conversations about violence during fieldwork in Colombia  67 illuminating is not that it is the site of the worst violence but rather that multiple forms of violence exist in the context of a relatively wealthy, established democracy.” The most obvious danger when conducting research in Colombia is day-​ to-​day crime. The risk of being a target of crime varies greatly between neighborhoods and this difference can be felt immediately when entering the more dangerous neighborhoods, with the first sign being that there are no police anywhere. Back in the United States, I had come to associate neighborhoods with lots of police with greater danger. But in Bogotá the police are too afraid to go into the most dangerous neighborhoods. Crime was a constant topic among my Colombian friends. It was impossible to go to a party without hearing stories of violence, and sometimes this would turn into a perverse competition of who could tell the worst story. I was fortunate to have friends across all strata of Colombian society, and they were all similarly preoccupied with crime. In Colombia there is a concept called dar papaya “give papaya,” which means to put yourself in a situation where someone will take advantage of you, usually in the form of robbery. When discussing the relative risks of activities, Colombians will often give me, or each other, the advice not to give papaya, as a sort of assurance that you’ll be okay as long as you don’t give papaya. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard not to dar papaya,” my friend Andrea told me. When you leave the house, your family tells you, “Don’t give papaya, keep your money in different parts of your body, walk in the shade so they don’t see you, give them everything if they rob you.” Que pánico! Every time someone walks through the door, they are expecting the worst and at the same time if something does happen to you it’s your fault for not preventing it, for giving papaya. Nearly every decision we made carried extra weight because of safety considerations: whether we walked on one street versus another; whether we took a taxi or the bus; which route we asked the taxi driver to take once we were in the taxi. When I was in a cafe, I watched everyone who entered; when I was in a taxi, I paid attention to the driver’s phone conversations; when I walked down the street, I watched the interactions between people who were ostensibly strangers, looking for secret communication that could be part of a coordinated robbery. The need to be constantly aware, the need to not give papaya, was exhausting.

Project-​specific risks Not only is Colombia a dangerous place to conduct research; my project itself was dangerous, both because of the nature of the project (a politically sensitive topic, with participants who were high-​risk) and because of our own

68  Colleen Alena O’Brien identities as gringos and filmmakers. Entering a slum in southern Bogotá as a Colombian is already dangerous, but entering a slum as a gringo with a lot of expensive camera equipment, brings the danger to a higher level. We took what precautions we could, ranging from taking turns standing behind the person filming to keep watch while trying to be as nonchalant as possible (and probably never succeeding) to hiring police or private security to accompany us. On one shoot in Las Cruces, an especially dangerous neighborhood in Bogotá, we brought four police officers with us, and in a last-​ minute stroke of paranoia we also hired a private security guard as backup in case the police abandoned us. About an hour into the shoot, I noticed that two of the police were missing. “Make sure you watch the police,” a friend had warned me. “Sometimes they get scared and run away.” I went up to the remaining two police and asked where the others had gone. “Maybe they got robbed!” one of them joked, and they both laughed and laughed. I laughed along with them, and waited for a real answer, which I didn’t receive until later; they had gotten distracted chatting with a mango vendor. “Just think of the things he’s seen, being on this street corner, in this neighborhood!” the policeman related to me. Even with police accompaniment, we still needed to be careful about where we went and how long we stayed, and I would frequently check in with the police to gauge what they thought of the risks. When filming outside, we tried to do all of our interviews as fast as possible, in order to move on to the next place, hoping that this would prevent would-​be bandits from having time to plan an attack. One might think that one of the major risks in such a project would come from working with combatants, whether former or current. But I can honestly say that I never felt afraid working with ex-​combatants. Even visiting a still-​fully-​armed FARC camp was not frightening for me at all. The only fear related to our participants I felt came from the idea that we could also become targets of their enemies. I never feared the FARC commander (who is currently on trial for several kidnappings he organized during the conflict) nor other former guerrillas, even those who had killed people. I was only afraid of the people who wanted them dead. This was one way in which I differed from my Colombian friends, many of whom warned me of the dangers of going to a FARC camp, inviting ex-​combatants to my home, or attending FARC events in Bogotá. Although our identities as foreigners put us at greater risk for day-​to-​day crime such as robbery, they perhaps protected us from other sorts of violence. Of all of the social activists and journalists who have been assassinated in Colombia, none were foreigners, with the exception of three Ecuadorian journalists kidnapped and killed by FARC dissidents in 2018 (Giraudat 2018). A journalist friend of mine told me that as foreigners we enjoyed a certain immunity from political violence. The armed groups (at that time, at least) did not want to risk the repercussions of killing a foreign national. At least as far as targeted political assassination went, we mostly believed we were safe.

Conversations about violence during fieldwork in Colombia  69

Paranoia and determining safety The fact that the subject matter of my research was violence itself (both past and possibly future) and that we were talking about violence all day, every day, made it difficult not to be affected emotionally. A professor of mine had warned me that this project might cause me to feel sad or depressed, but in the end, I instead felt paranoid. I would sometimes spend ten or twelve hours a day with some of the participants, all of whom were extremely fearful, who were afraid people would kill them, who wore sunglasses and bulletproof vests every time they left the house, who wouldn’t go to a public university in case they were recognized, who understood the mechanisms of organized violence in and out because they used to participate in it. The fear was contagious. Taussig, who has written extensively about violence in Colombia, says: “Paranoia as social theory. Paranoia as social practice” (1995). Throughout my research projects in Colombia, I prided myself on being aware of what was happening in the country and I read the news constantly. I had (and still have) several Colombian friends who were equally obsessed, and whenever anything new happened in the country we would immediately get in contact with each other. Because of this constant reading, I was often aware of even more obscure news events in the country, such as a paramilitary group taking over a new region or an ex-​combatant in a particular camp being assassinated. This constant research certainly took an emotional toll as well. Before making any decisions during my fieldwork, I would consult various people to ascertain the level of danger and to try to take action to make activities safer. My strategy for determining safety involved both extensive internet research, perhaps to the point of obsession, and soliciting advice from a variety of sources, including military, academics, NGO employees, ex-​combatants, and journalists, as well as ordinary people familiar with the relevant locations. Ultimately, I also relied much on what other people told me was safe, often talking to up to ten people about the logistics of a location or situation before making a decision. In the end, however, no matter how much research I did or how many people I asked, the ultimate decision I made was arbitrary. I was never in an actual war zone. The actual security level of each situation was fuzzy, and it required guessing and consulting other people, which at the same time made nothing ever seem totally safe. Thus, I felt like I was constantly going back and forth between two extremes: fearing that I was carelessly doing dangerous things that I should not be doing and thinking that I was being overly cautious, overreacting to situations that were totally safe. At some level, every time we finished a shoot or a series of interviews without incident, we felt relieved, and on another level, when nothing bad happened, I felt like maybe all of the concerns I had had in the first place were misguided. For example, once, when we went to a small town known for having a large paramilitary presence to conduct interviews

70  Colleen Alena O’Brien with the community about a nearby FARC camp. We all felt that it was a dangerous location, but we thought getting these interviews was somehow “worth it.” The first few people we approached to interview refused to talk with us, saying it wasn’t safe, and after about an hour of searching, driving around the little town in our very conspicuous pickup truck full of camera equipment, a man agreed to an interview as long as we went into a back alley with him and promised to take no more than ten minutes. Two of us waited in the car with the driver, and two of us interviewed the man. When it was over, we drove out of the town, up a mountain on the only road that led out of the town to the main road. Nothing happened to us. Had we been overly paranoid? Maybe there was little or no risk to begin with. It was always hard to make decisions as “one fumbles with contradictory advice and rumors” (Taussig 1995). The uncertainty of the “reality” of the safety was also evident when asking people for advice. In February 2018, the ELN, the country’s largest Marxist group, declared a three-​day “travel ban” during which they would be executing a military offensive. They warned Colombia that they would be bombing roads, for example, and said people should avoid traveling. I had a trip planned to go to a region where the ELN was active, and it was scheduled for the day following the end of the travel ban. My im­mediate reaction was to cancel the trip. I asked different Colombian friends for advice, and the responses I received ranged from “Absolutely, cancel it,” to “Tranquila, it’ll be fine.” One friend joked that the ELN couldn’t possibly attack anyone after the travel ban: “They said they’d only kill people during those three days. If they did it the day after, then people would really get mad!” In the end, I did cancel the trip, and some friends told me I made the right decision, while others told me I was being paranoid. Sometimes the stress of worrying about the danger made us rather crazy, becoming suspicious of other people or coming up with wild ideas for achieving security. Once, before a trip to Valledupar to interview the ex-​ combatants in the nearby FARC camp, we were beginning to get more and more scared. The AGC, currently Colombia’s largest paramilitary group, had just made an announcement that they would be starting a military initiative against leftists, ex-​combatants, journalists, and students, saying: “Our fingers will not tremble on the rifle to defend the interests of hard-​working and honest people.” The AGC distributed the announcement in the form of pamphlets in Valledupar, of all places in the country they could have chosen. Given that we were filmmakers (we didn’t expect the AGC to know the difference between journalists and filmmakers) working with ex-​combatants, we felt that this threat was especially applicable to us. One night over beers, Noah and I brainstormed about security measures we could take, culmi­ nating in one particularly insane idea: What if we hire a paramilitary guy (or former paramilitary guy) as a driver to bring us to the FARC camp? He could be armed, or not, but the important thing would be his reputation,

Conversations about violence during fieldwork in Colombia  71 that everyone knows he’s a para, and then the other paramilitaries wouldn’t attack us. An acquaintance of ours knew just the guy; he even had his own vehicle. We would pay him the same amount we usually paid our driver in Valledupar. Luckily, when daylight struck, we came to our senses and did not go through with this plan. I would like to say it was because we realized that it was absurd, but the real reason was that we were afraid the FARC would be upset with us if we brought a para to their camp. The nonchalance of other foreigners could sometimes be equally frustrating. One time we were trying to decide whether to do a shoot in a small Indigenous village in the Amazon where there were still active FARC dissidents (FARC guerrillas who refused to demobilize as agreed upon in the peace process). From my obsessive news-​reading, I remembered that, some months before, a small group of tourists had been kidnapped by the FARC dissidents in that area and were later released. I tracked them down, and Noah and I met with one of them in Bogotá. We went to a cafe in the historical center of the city. Noah and I sat down with “the hostage,” as we jokingly referred to him between ourselves. “Turn off your phones and put them under a cushion,” the hostage told us, very seriously. We obeyed. He told us his kidnapping story, which, all in all, did not impress us as all that eventful or dramatic. In the end, we asked him what he thought of the danger level, expecting him to warn us not to go. “You guys have bad energy, man,” he responded. “If you have bad energy, then something bad is going to happen to you. You have to be positive.” The conversation left me incredibly frustrated. I also envied his indifference to the violence in the country and wished I could be the same way and blindly go to dangerous places, relying on my positive energy to keep me safe.

Showing trust Trust is important in any research project. In my project in Colombia, I felt that the trust between me and the ex-​combatant participants was crucial. This can be emotional trust as well as physical. One ex-​combatant and I would meet and talk for many hours about the conflict, lamenting that the peace process was falling apart. I would tell ex-​combatants details about my personal life, which I felt they appreciated. They would usually remember and later ask me questions about my (unrelated) research with Indigenous people in Putumayo, or about the various friends who had visited me in Colombia, or even how my father was getting along back in Mississippi. I would send them photos of Putumayo while I was doing research there, and they would talk about how beautiful it was, one even reminiscing about the time she spent there as a guerrilla. I would also go with them to meet their friends and family, sometimes finding myself walking alone with a participant on a dark street at night, or in an unfamiliar neighborhood with him and his friends.

72  Colleen Alena O’Brien Once several FARC members from the camp near Valledupar were visiting Bogotá for a political event and we wanted to interview them, in particular one commander and his partner, Diana, who was also a FARC member. “You can interview us, but we want to do it somewhere safe,” Diana told me. After considering having them meet us in an anonymous hostel (we even visited one to scope out the lighting in the rooms), we decided to invite them to my apartment. If they trusted us enough to meet us in Bogotá, we should also trust them enough to bring them into my home. Plus, we could think of nowhere safer. When they arrived, the doorman for our building called me. “Señorita Alena, someone … is here to see you,” he said awkwardly, then pronounced the commander’s pseudonym. I could tell he knew something was strange. I ran downstairs to meet them. The commander and Diana were accompanied by six bodyguards, muscular men all wearing pink button-​up shirts and carrying little purses. Each bodyguard greeted me by kissing me on the cheek, as the doorman watched us from behind his desk. Diana was carrying a Che Guevara purse. The commander and Diana decided that two bodyguards would wait outside the building, two in the garage, and two would come to my apartment. Afterwards, we walked with them to a restaurant about six blocks away. The bodyguards spread out around us, keeping watch as we walked up La Séptima, the main avenue of the city center. “Do you think people notice that something weird is going on?” I asked our ­cameraman. He turned to me: “Six dudes, jacked as shit, wearing button-​up shirts, armed, walking on La Séptima? No, of course not,” he answered. In the end, they seemed appreciative that we had trusted them. I began to worry, however, that my neighbors and doorman had seen me hosting these people who were very obviously members of the FARC and that that could have its own consequences. After about a week of paranoia, I—​like many before me—​ fled Colombia for Miami.

A calm paranoia Michael Taussig muses about the paradox of taxi drivers in Colombia being your link to the universe and also a threat to your safety. He writes: Stranger intimacy. A wondrous thing … Rumor has it that more than half of the taxi drivers are spies for the army. Rumor also has it that taxis are where you stand an excellent chance of being mugged or ­kidnapped, so people resort to radio-​taxis, using secret codes in col­ laboration with the dispatcher over the telephone. But what’s to stop the dispatcher from organizing a kidnapping, or some group intercepting the calls? I must put a stop to these runaway thoughts kidnapping my soul. But is not the cab a microcosm of life here? (2003:8).

Conversations about violence during fieldwork in Colombia  73 One late morning in Bogotá, I had a meeting scheduled with an Indigenous woman named Fanny to discuss my research plans. She was from the Amazon but lived in Bogotá. I was running late to the meeting, so I had to take a taxi rather than walking the twenty-​five blocks or so, as I would normally do. I hadn’t yet replaced my phone from when I had been robbed a few weeks previously, so I couldn’t call a taxi. My landlady was nowhere to be seen, so I couldn’t use her phone, either. So I went downstairs and hailed a taxi on the street, something that every Colombian friend had warned me never to do (often, ironically, while doing it themselves). I got into the first taxi that stopped. When I noticed that the driver was young, I immediately felt uncomfortable. My friends had given me lessons on how to discern a good taxi driver from a bad one, and one of the rules was that young drivers are more likely to kidnap you than older ones, due to the impetuousness of youth. He wasn’t friendly or talkative at all, which was also disconcerting. Most Colombian taxi drivers wanted to chat with me for the entire ride, engaging in forty-​five-​minute-​long conversations about all kinds of topics, ranging from love to food to terrorism. He broke the silence a few times to tell me I was beautiful, but made no further conversation, which made me feel much, much worse. Then we went onto the Avenida Circunvalar. This is an avenue that goes through park areas and bypasses much of the city traffic but also has a reputation for being the site of kidnappings and robberies. As we were descending from the Circunvalar into the National Park, I noticed that there were very few cars, despite it being daytime. Then I heard my taxi driver ask, “Dónde están ustedes?” (“Where are y’all?”) to someone he was talking to on his phone. I started panicking. I grabbed hold of my jacket, and positioned myself in the middle of the backseat so that I could try to jump out from either side of the vehicle, depending on what side the attackers would approach from. I stared at my taxi driver in the rearview mirror, not taking my eyes off him. He looked back at me. I quickly formulated a strategy. “I’m sorry, señor, I’m super nervous, very anxious these days,” I began. “A few days ago, I was robbed in El Centro … so now I don’t have a phone, or a bank card, or much money, nothing … and I’m nervous all the time.” He looked back at me. “Tranquila, tranquila, señorita,” he said. “We’ll make sure we find her house. Don’t worry.” I was confused for a moment, then it hit me that he thought I was worried about finding Fanny’s house, not that I was scared of him. He assured me that he would make sure he found the exact address before letting me out of the taxi and that he’d wait outside until they let me in. “But you should never walk alone in La Macarena, day or night,” he scolded me. “It’s dangerous there. There’s a large slum, very close by… .” and he gave me the same speech I’d heard from almost every taxi driver who had brought

74  Colleen Alena O’Brien me home in the past month. I felt comfortable again, and let go of my jacket. His last piece of advice was that I should trust no one in Colombia. My fear had apparently affected him, and he was very conscientious about dropping me off. Even when he saw that Fanny had opened the door for me, he waited until I gave him a motion that I was okay. He waved to me, and then took off. Later, when I told this story to Colombian friends, they were on the fence about whether he was going to rob me and my trick worked, or if I had just been paranoid. Either way, it was my fear of strangers that ended up (whether founded or not) building trust with one—​a Colombian paradox. Another Colombian paradox that I can’t say I’ve managed to grasp personally is dealing with everything calmly. It’s not that people aren’t afraid—​they are, all the time, suspicious of every stranger. But they handle their paranoia calmly. There was a paradox in the fear that everyone felt and the calmness with which they dealt with it day-​to-​day.

Conclusion When students ask me for advice about doing research in Colombia, I am conflicted about how to respond. Although it feels irresponsible to recommend doing research in a dangerous place, I never regret for a moment having decided to work in Colombia. Making a documentary film about ex-​combatants was an incredible experience and I loved being involved in their lives, even if an aspect of their lives was fear. Over the course of my project, I learned important things about conducting research in a context of violence. For me, the most important help in dealing with the fear was emotional support, especially from Colombians. No friends or family in the United States could provide the emotional support I needed. My engagement with the participants themselves was also crucial, and I like to think that it wasn’t one-​sided, that I was able to provide emotional support to them, as well. Another important thing was coming to terms with the fact that the project was dangerous, and trying not to think about it, or at least not obsess over it. Rather, I needed to accept that there were risks, although everything was probably fine. Taking precautionary measures is of course necessary, but it still isn’t enough to make something completely safe, and I needed to somehow accept that. Sometimes it is okay to leave when you need to, and go to Miami. Maybe you can both be scared and do a dangerous thing.

Note 1 The ACR has since transformed into a new agency called the ARN (Agencia para Reincorporación y Normalización “Agency for Reincorporation and Normalization”) (ARN 2019).

Conversations about violence during fieldwork in Colombia  75

References ARN (2019) ‘ARN in cifras’, Website of the Agencia para la reincorporación y la normalización.     www.rein​corp​orac​ion.gov.co/​es/​agen​cia/​Pagi​nas/​ARN-​en-​cif​ ras.aspx Gaviria, Ricardo Monsalve (2019) ‘Han asesinado, en tres años, más de 180 exFarc’, El Colombiano. Dec 17, 2019. www.elcol​ombi​ano.com/​colom​bia/​es-​una-​racha-​ de-​ase​sina​tos-​siste​mati​cos-​denun​cia-​farc-​KH1​2156​972 Giraudat, Jules (2018) ‘“This border is out of control”: journalists’ murders shock Ecuador’, The Guardian. Oct 24, 2018. www.theg​uard​ian.com/​world/​2018/​oct/​ 24/​ecua​dor-​jou​rnal​ist-​saf​ety-​colom​bia-​mat​aje-​murd​ers Indepaz (2019) ‘Informe líderes y defensores de DDHH asesinados al 26 de Julio de 2019’, Report by Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo y la Paz (Indepaz). July 26, 2019. www.inde​paz.org.co/​info​rme-​lide​res-​y-​def​enso​res-​de-​ddhh-​ase​sina​ dos-​al-​26-​de-​julio-​de-​2019/​ Maek, Ivana (2018) ‘Experience, Empathy, and Flexibility: On Participant Observation in Deadly Fields’, in: A Companion to the Anthropology of Death. Ed: Antonius C. G. M. Robben. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. pp. 237–​248. Pollard, Amy (2009) ‘Field of screams: difficulty and ethnographic fieldwork’, Anthropology Matters. 11, 1–​24. Reuters (2021) ‘Killings of Colombia ex-​rebels could reach 1,600 by end of 2024 –​ court,’ Reuters. April 28, 2021. www.reut​ers.com/​world/​ameri​cas/​killi​ngs-​colom​ bia-​ex-​reb​els-​could-​reach-​1600-​by-​end-​2024-​court-​2021-​04-​28/​ Tate, Winifred (2007) Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia. University of California Press. Taussig, Michael (1995) The Nervous System. Routledge. Taussig, Michael (2003) Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza. The New Press.

8 Staying sane and safe in Israel/​ Palestine A foreign researcher’s reflections on fieldwork across boundaries Andreas Hackl Moving between Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies comes with significant challenges and risks for foreign researchers, due to a polarized political climate, mobility restrictions, and ongoing Israeli violence against Palestinians. In my case, these challenges have included an ongoing struggle to make sense of the day-​to-​day difficulties and the emotional mess that can define years of researching and living across the boundaries of Palestine and Israel. In this chapter, I will reflect on some of my experiences of doing prolonged fieldwork in Israel/​Palestine as a foreign researcher, with the goal of making the practical and emotional challenges of this engagement visible. More than three years of continuously living and working in Israel/​ Palestine came to a temporary conclusion for me during a particularly violent and polarizing time, the summer of 2014. Throughout this period, I conducted research as a young anthropologist and also continued reporting on evolving events as a newspaper correspondent. The crucial events of that summer evolved as follows: On 12 June, three young Jewish Israelis were kidnapped and later killed by Hamas-​affiliated Palestinians outside a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. In response, Israel launched an extensive search and arrest operation, which lasted until their bodies were found on 30 June. On the morning of 2 July, Jewish Israeli youth kidnapped a 16-​year-​ old Palestinian nearby his home in East Jerusalem and later forced him to swallow petrol and burned him alive. The murder was believed to have been executed in revenge for the earlier kidnapping of the three Israelis in the West Bank. As tensions in the West Bank and East Jerusalem ran high, anti-​ Palestinian rhetoric and protests by Jewish nationalists stirred up a climate of fear and confrontation in Israeli cities. On 7 July 2014, the Israeli army launched its military operation in the Gaza Strip, with the stated objective of stopping ongoing rocket attacks by Hamas and destroying its capabilities to conduct operations against Israel. This was followed by a ground operation and ongoing airstrikes until the operation officially ceased on 26 August. At the end of the operation, Israeli attacks had killed 2,251 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians, of which 551 were children and 299 women. On the Israeli side, 6 civilians and 67 soldiers were killed during the conflict (UN 2015). DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-8

Staying sane and safe in Israel/Palestine  77 The small apartment I rented in Tel Aviv, where I conducted research among Palestinians who lived in the city, was on the top floor of a residential building. Whenever the city’s rocket alarm sirens wailed, I had to run down to the bottom of the stairway and wait for the sound of an explosion, which usually meant that the Israeli army’s air defence system had intercepted the rocket. Most of my interlocutors and some of my friends during this research were Palestinians, and like me, many among them lived or worked in Tel Aviv, the modern urban centre of Israel. While their hearts were beating for the victims of Israel’s attacks on Gaza, they shared buildings, classrooms, and workspaces with people who supported the very soldiers they disdained. As I tried to continue with meetings and interviews among Palestinians and Palestinian citizens of Israel in Tel Aviv, I became increasingly exhausted and unsettled by the tense and polarized climate in the media and on the streets. Anti-​Palestinian racism had become overt and the ostensibly liberal city of Tel Aviv showed its nationalistic face. Although I would come back for two months of research in the West Bank in 2017, my experience of this violent summer and its impact on the Palestinians I knew triggered a kind of Israel/​Palestine “burnout” in me. Of course, I was immensely privileged in the sense that I could simply leave and write up my PhD thesis in the quiet and beautiful city of Edinburgh in Scotland. But when the airplane left Tel Aviv in September that year, I felt an unusual sense of relief and wasn’t sure if I would come back any time soon. The 2014 Israel–​Gaza conflict marked an emotional and professional breaking point in my journey as an anthropologist and journalist based in Israel/​Palestine. In Edinburgh, I soon focused my energy on having a “normal life” and on writing up my research diligently. Otherwise, I mostly disengaged myself from the Middle East and would not return for another three years. I constructed an intentional distance to the place and people that henceforth lived on for me only in the stories and experiences I documented in writing. I even avoided talking about the Middle East in conversations with peers at university because it simply exhausted me. Remote and calm Edinburgh functioned as a safe haven and instead of working through the emotional and personal repercussions of fieldwork, I took refuge in the daily writing routine that was an enjoyable yet isolating process. Looking back, I feel that I needed to deal with some of the emotional baggage I brought with me –​metaphoric suitcases full with memories and difficult experiences that I didn’t want to open. Witnessing violence and conflict changes us, although we may not always understand how and sometimes refuse to admit it. Although I did not actively deal with the personal and emotional baggage brought with me from fieldwork, not dealing with it explicitly allowed me to construct an emotional distance that may well have been necessary. In focusing on a new life and on the difficult task of writing up the research, I did eventually work through many aspects of my experience, but I did so from a distance, filtered through a scholarly sieve between my personal life and my research.

78  Andreas Hackl As a social anthropologist and journalist, I spent more than four years living, working, and researching in different locations across Israel/​Palestine since 2008 and continuously between 2011 and 2014. While my own experience is by no means unique, students and colleagues often asked me intriguing questions about the practicalities of researching and living in this place as an outsider. Some of these questions were: How do you deal with dangerous situations? How does the violence affect you? How do you po­sition yourself vis-​à-​vis Palestinians and Israelis? How do you get around and cross boundaries safely? My intention with this essay is to review some of my own experience to formulate answers to these questions in a way that students and researchers may find useful. The experiences I draw from are naturally limited in scope and their relevance for others may be limited by my own positionality, which is that of a male white researcher of Austrian nationality. In the following I argue that my experience reflects a lack of preparedness and awareness concerning both the practicalities of research and its emotional and personal repercussions. The two are so deeply connected in Israel/​Palestine because the particular challenges of researching across ­boundaries of conflict and military occupation can entail a need to keep some things hidden from others. This ranges from the need to hide one’s political opinions and intentions from security forces or border police, to the need to modify how one communicates information across different locations and social settings. It is no surprise, then, that this kind of research environment made me prioritize pragmatic thinking, which may have come at the expense of articulating one’s personal opinions and emotions. In dealing with all this, I would have benefitted greatly from access to tailored institutional and professional support, both during and after research, to be better prepared to face tense and dangerous situations and to be better prepared to deal with the emotional implications of such research. Before turning to the more personal side of this experience, I think it will be useful to briefly situate the particular current time period of researching Israel/​ Palestine against the backdrop of a long historical engagement of foreign and local researchers with this place.

A difficult time for anthropology in Israel/​Palestine? The ethnographic engagement with Palestine and Israel has covered a wide range of themes and time periods since the 19th century (Furani and Rabinowitz 2011). After the Arab-​Israeli war of 1948 brought about the coerced flight and expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians (Robinson 2013, 70), the social sciences generally disengaged from research on Palestine for a few decades. Meanwhile, sociologists and anthropologists wrote about the new emerging realities of Israel, including Jewish immigration, the Kibbutzim and life in agricultural cooperatives (Goldberg 1976). Israeli

Staying sane and safe in Israel/Palestine  79 anthropologists also began to study Palestinian citizens of Israel, who were mostly the descendants of those Palestinian Arabs who remained in or managed to return to Israel between 1948 and 1950. Most of these Israeli studies constructed these minority citizens as a “fragment” of traditional Arab society within a modernizing Israeli state, rather than as a part of Palestine and the Palestinian people (Pappé 2011, 11; Nakhleh 1977). At least in part, this fragmentation continues today partly for practical reasons, because Israeli scholars have had very limited access to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, or most Arab countries. This is especially so since the relatively open and hopeful years of the Oslo Peace Accords in the 1990s culminated in the Second Palestinian Intifada, the subsequent construction of the Separation Barrier, and the entrenchment of the ensuing physical and emotional divides. Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the occupied territories, and foreign citizens of various nationalities all have highly diverging kinds of access and different capacities to move across boundaries. Therefore, they also face different pragmatic challenges in conducting their research. With the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987, especially international research on Israel/​Palestine increased dramatically in the social sciences and in journalistic writing (Furani and Rabinowitz 2011, 482). Since then, the troubled history, cultural diversity, and enduring political conflict of this part of the world have inspired generations of anthropologists and other scholars to seek answers to their questions through local ethnographic research. A particularity of foreign anthropologists who embark on their first fieldwork in this area may be that they are often unfamiliar with the specific challenges of this demanding field site. Uncertainties derive from concerns about the researcher’s safety, about crossing of militarized borders and checkpoints, or about the ethical challenges of political partiality and privileged access. As part of their work, anthropologists have long been concerned with the “management of danger” during their research (Hannerz 1981). Others have addressed the challenges of crossing borders and ­boundaries, and raised questions about legitimacy, trust, ethics, and secrecy in conflict and security research (Goede, Bosma, and Pallister-​Wilkins 2019). Research in conflict environments poses significant challenges for any scholar. Yet, some methodological and emotional aspects of field work in conflict environments have not been as systematically analysed as one would imagine (Cohen and Arieli 2011). This is despite several influential publications that have opened the discourse and provided important reflections and guidance on the anthropology of violence and conflict (Nordstrom and Robben 1996; Sluka 2020; Kovats-​Bernat 2002). Complementing the important mission behind this book, my essay answers the call for a stronger focus on a “pragmatic strategy for dealing with threats to the safety, security, and well-​being of anthropologists and informants who work amid the menace of violence” (Kovats-​Bernat 2002).

80  Andreas Hackl Although not aiming to define such strategies, I intend to focus on this pragmatic side of conducting research in Israel/​ Palestine, including reflections on my ethnographic experience and the social manoeuvring across ­boundaries and through difficult fieldwork situations. While each ethnographic engagement with Israel/​Palestine is different as topics and field-​sites vary greatly, one can argue that the 21st century in which I conducted my research poses some specific challenges that are rooted in particular po­litical developments at the time, many of which are ongoing. Some of these are hardly new, yet others are a symptom of the current political and socio-​ economic environment: • • • •

The increasingly sophisticated apparatus of Israeli control of borders and of human movement within the occupied territories and in Israel/​ Palestine more generally (Peteet 2017; Berda 2018). Israel’s systematic delegitimization of critical research in Israel/​Palestine and in the Palestinian territories in particular, with consequences for access and sustainability in ethnographic research. The polarization of Palestinian and Israeli public discourse and the associated difficulties in doing research across divides in multiple locations. The entrenched territorial and political division between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the severe mobility restrictions imposed on entry and exit.

A result of these problems in the current environment is an increasing difficulty to conduct long-​term research in a sustainable way, which either requires months or years of continuous presence, or several re-​ entries. Israeli policies against foreign academics and journalists labelled as “pro-​ Palestinian” combine with restrictions imposed by the Israeli occupation regime to undermine sustainable research practice. As Israel expands its control of the Palestinian people and their movement ever more deeply and moves to colonize or annex ever more territory, anthropologists will struggle to evade this de-​facto sovereignty no matter where they conduct their research. In this sense, research in Palestine today always also means research in Israel, if only practically and administratively so. It follows that any longer ethnographic research endeavour in Israel/​Palestine will need to cross social and political boundaries, even if the primary field site is a single Palestinian or Jewish Israeli place.

Pragmatic considerations: getting in One of the major concerns in ethnographic research of conflict and violence has been access. Accessing a field site usually means crossing a formal border at which the necessary documentation and identification becomes necessary. One of the key problems for foreign anthropologists who are researching

Staying sane and safe in Israel/Palestine  81 in Israel/​Palestine is that all international air traffic leads through Israeli-​ controlled airports. Land and sea borders are equally controlled by Israel, with the exception of the tightly regulated Gaza-​Egypt crossing. The common practice for foreign anthropologists from eligible countries has been to enter as a visitor and obtain a tourist visa valid for three months on site, which could then be extended with the help of re-​entries. For citizens of some 100 countries, such a tourist visa is available on arrival, while entry permits for citizens from most Arab and some Muslim countries are more contentious and complicated. Once arriving at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, the foreign anthropologist on a first field trip may already find him or herself in a dilemma. This is particularly so for those planning to conduct research in the occupied Palestinian territories and among Palestinians more generally. At the immigration desk, border control will pose some version of the following question: “What is the purpose of your visit?” The most common approach has been to insist that the purpose is merely travelling, and subject to a few additional questions that probe the visitor’s intent, the visa is usually granted. However, there are many exceptions to this, due to racial and religious profiling and occasional longer interrogations as part of a “paradigm of suspicion” that singles out certain people as a security threat (Shamir 2005). Alongside people from certain ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds, “activists” especially have been increasingly targeted by Israel authorities and such political profiling now complements racial profiling. For anthropologists conducting research within Israel or in association with Israeli universities or non-​governmental organizations, a formal invitation letter, a confirmation of a visiting fellowship, or another kind of association will usually be helpful. However, invitations from Palestinian universities and organizations may have the opposite effect of triggering further interrogation. Especially those anthropologists whose research focuses on Palestine and Palestinians are therefore left with little alternatives to talking their way past the immigration desk innovatively. This strategy becomes increasingly difficult with every re-​entry into the country, although so-​called “visa-​runs” have been common practice. In this case, the researcher would travel to Jordan or fly to Cyprus before the tourist visa expires only to re-​ enter Israel after a few days to get another three months permit. Needless to say, repeated runs may cause suspicion among border officials. Indeed, coming back does not always go smoothly. The young Austrian anthropologist Claudia, who I interviewed for a media report about her experience in 2011, tried to re-​enter through Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport when she was pulled into a separate interrogation room at 4 am. She had been told to leave the country a year earlier, when she conducted research and participated in political demonstrations in a contentious area of the West Bank, in South Hebron. She was planning to pick up the fieldwork she had left unfinished but Israeli security did not believe her claim. They accused her of being a pro-​Palestinian activist, took her fingerprints, detained her for

82  Andreas Hackl three days in a cell with 11 other women, and deported her back. This may have been a difficult and traumatic experience in itself, but from the perspective of a researcher, the worst part of deportation is probably 10 years of denied entry to Israel and by extension, to the Palestinian territories Israel occupies. My own experience was different and maybe a little unusual in several ways. The year after my Masters-​level dissertation research in Bil‘in, I returned to Jerusalem for an internship with the International Crisis Group. I then moved back to Austria and graduated from Vienna University. At that point, I learnt about a potential job opening at a German NGO in East Jerusalem and so I travelled back once again to do a short consultancy there for two weeks. However, the job never materialized and I decided to try my luck as a journalist. Writing a regular column on Israel/​Palestine for an Austrian online newspaper then allowed me to apply for journalist accredi­ tation. Once I officially became a correspondent for an Austrian newspaper, while also writing for other media outlets, I had an Israeli press card issued by the Government Press Office (GPO) that opened the path to a renewable one-​year work visa for foreign journalists. This background meant that when I eventually decided to take up doctoral studies, I continued to work as a journalist alongside and managed to retain the work visa. My work as a journalist not only allowed me to write about anthropological themes for wider audiences, but it also facilitated a sustainable form of access to prolonged field research in Israel/​Palestine and brought with it an official status that was far less legally ambivalent than that of an ethnographer on a tourist visa. While clearly not every foreign anthropologist in Israel/​Palestine will want to work as a journalist, my experience suggests something about sustainability in ethnographic practice: if there is a way to gain some kind of formal status that eases mobility and makes access more sustainable, then it is usually worth the effort to get there. Anthropologists may be able to collaborate with media outlets, international organizations, or local NGOs in violent and conflict-​affected field sites in effective ways that benefit all parties involved. Yet, the problem is that any association with organizations deemed Israel-​critical by the State will increase the risk of denied entry and is unlikely to ease passage. However, when doing research among Palestinians, especially where experiences of personal suffering are involved, being embedded with local organizations that support them has often guaranteed the anthropologist trustworthiness in a climate of frequent betrayal, gossip, and treason (Buch Segal 2016, 23). While this does not solve the problem about entry, it will provide some security and trust in the specific location of research. It also helps to deal with the ambivalence of the researcher’s position between critical observer and sympathizer, an ambivalence that almost got me into trouble when I conducted fieldwork as a student back in 2009.

Staying sane and safe in Israel/Palestine  83

Balancing the line between research and activism: on night patrol in a besieged village It was in the middle of the night in the Palestinian West Bank village of Bil‘in, when the voice of a local activist tore me from sleep: “Come, we need you. The army is on its way into the village!” Several international activists rose from their foam mats and dressed hurriedly to get ready for action. I saw how some of them picked up markers and wrote a phone number onto the inside of their lower arms. As I would learn later, these were the phone numbers of lawyers they needed to contact in case they were detained by the Israeli army. The presence of international and Israeli solidarity activists in Bil‘in and other villages aimed at supporting civil resistance struggles of Palestinian communities against the construction of the Israeli Separation Barrier on their lands. Their presence bore witness to injustice while their mostly white European and American bodies served as a human shield against Israeli military violence, which was bound to different rules of engagement if Israeli citizens or internationals were present. Some of the activists had been in Bil‘in and other hotspots of the Palestinian struggle for weeks or months, while others had arrived recently. I had not come to the village as an activist at all, or at least not intentionally so: working towards my dissertation in social and cultural anthropology at the University of Vienna, I had come to conduct research on the growing phenomenon of cross-​border solidarity activism in Palestine. The activists had clearly adapted to the routine of this regular “night patrol”. They wrapped scarfs around their necks against tear gas; they packed their cameras to document injustice; and they wore dark clothes to blend into the night of the West Bank’s rural hillside. What happened that night was the recurring nightmare of this besieged village, which gained international prominence for its creative and steadfast civil resistance struggle. The Israeli army’s regular incursions into the village often ended with the detention of a villager, either an adult or a teenager, who may have been active in the protests. In the event that solidarity activists were on site when the army tried to remove someone from their home, they often inserted their bodies between soldier and detainee, or tried to delay the army’s advance in any other possible way to allow the targeted people to escape. At other times, the only thing they could do was film or photograph what was happening and send the footage out through activist e-​mail lists and posting reports on websites. Although I embedded myself among activists in this village with a clear purpose of research, I was unprepared for what could have happened that night and was reluctant to risk a direct confrontation. As I drowsily watched everyone get ready for action, I hesitated. Iyad, a local Palestinian leader who woke us up, may have sensed my uncertainty when he turned to me

84  Andreas Hackl saying: “Are you coming?” I said yes but thought something else. “What if I am detained for being there?” I wondered. My research would be over and I would likely be banned from entering Israel/​Palestine for years to come. “What if I was shot at?” In the end my curiosity and the peer pressure were stronger. I joined the party on their walk through the village. This situation was a critical moment of research in another sense: it was clearly a test of confidence and trust. As an anthropologist I depended on the trust of the local movement and the other activists. Distinguishing myself as a coward may not only have lessened their respect for me, but it may have raised mistrust among them. Activist organizations such as the International Solidarity Movement, which supported and recruited most activists in the village, have had recurring experiences with infiltrations by undercover security agents. As we left the house and walked along the road, we were all on the lookout and I felt both nervous and excited. This was exactly where I wanted to be in terms of research: to be where things happened. But it was also where I felt uncomfortable and scared. On the way some of them told stories of soldiers who once hid under the olive trees. Others discussed what they were planning to do in case of a direct encounter. Everyone listened carefully to the environment and stayed alert for another hour or so, until it became apparent that they had either already left or did not come. We spent the rest of the night sitting on one of the highest flat roofs in the village to observe the area and search for signs of army vehicles or troop movements. The conversations I had with these brave people and the insights I gained into their lives during this and other nights formed a key part of the research I later published (Hackl 2016). At the same time, it was perhaps not entirely necessary for me to take such risks and most of the depth of my research insights came from the long conversations and interviews I had with activists while spending time with them in the village. Good ethnography in conflict settings does not need to be dangerous, but it can be, and therefore it is crucial to set clear boundaries for engagement where possible. More than a decade after that night in Bil‘in, thinking about these situations still makes my stomach flip because of how unprepared and unexperienced I was. How can we make sense of such precarious situations in ethnographic practice, and how can anthropologists and students be better prepared to deal with them? One answer that is both true and wrong is that one cannot prepare for such a situation. It is true because ethnography always entails unforeseen situations and requires situational innovation and decision making. It is wrong because differences in the support, knowledge, and skillset with which one faces such a situation can make a huge difference. Looking back, there are two aspects of these I believe are worth highlighting. First, playing with the ambivalence of the position between researcher and activist is unhelpful and I should have avoided it. While I do not suggest that one cannot be both anthropologist and activist, I now know that making the boundaries as clear as possible serves the interests of all parties involved.

Staying sane and safe in Israel/Palestine  85 This is especially true in a place such as Israel/​Palestine, where a polarized conflict and power asymmetries sometimes nurture a climate of mistrust and suspicion. In Bil‘in, I had placed myself in a contradictory position because I was there for research but also presented myself as a supporter and wanted to blend in as a fully recognized activist, but “without being an activist”. A formal written agreement of understanding may not have been appropriate in this informal context, but there are many ways in which the boundaries between research participation and action could be defined and mutually agreed. Although not always easy to execute in practice, setting clear limits of engagement together with research participants may ultimately increase trust and solidify one’s recognized position as a participating observer whose involvement does not cross certain ­boundaries. On reflection, I believe that I increased the risk of mistrust by clumsily navigating the boundary and by hesitating what to do, while setting clearer terms would have increased the local’s trust even if it meant not being seen as a solidarity activist. Second, it puzzled me afterwards that these activists were well prepared and all had access to the phone number of a lawyer while I had not even considered such a move and simply had little clue as to what I would do if I was detained. My fieldwork preparation gave me no training in mitigating such risks and in dealing with these situations, and I had no access to expert legal advice.

Crossing boundaries and managing signals Ethnographic research often comes with an unavoidable partiality, at least in the sense that one cannot easily be immersed at different sides of a po­litical conflict simultaneously. Crossing boundaries of such divides can consequently make trust-​building difficult. Indeed, scholars in warzones are not “immune from the taint of unwanted affiliation”, not least because a researcher’s “friendship group” becomes their safety net; ethnographers in conflict can thereby become part of a “tribe”, a party to a conflict, and this also involves dangers because they can become the target of hostility or subject to mistrust by others. “Who we are, how we are seen, and with whom we interact matter and, ultimately, play a substantial role in the creation of our ideas” (Malejacq and Mukhopadhyay 2016). What precisely constitutes a political divide in Israel/​Palestine is of course a complex question, but generally speaking, the Israeli occupation marks a clear boundary between Israel and Jewish Israeli settlements on the one hand, and Palestinian territories on the other. There are of course Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, and left-wing Israeli activists who express solidarity with Palestinians under occupation. Nevertheless, crossing back and forth between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, for example, has created complicated situations in my experience that raise questions about how one can maintain the sort of “tribal” affiliation while also conducting research across political divides.

86  Andreas Hackl In 2008, at the age of 23, I moved from a one-​month Arabic course in Syria to a summer camp at Birzeit University in the West Bank, and then onwards to a Middle East “peace conference simulation” in Tel Aviv. Taking the land route from Syria towards the West Bank via Jordan involved its own balancing acts, but one of the most difficult situations was to tell my Palestinian friends at Birzeit that I was attending a conference in Tel Aviv. Naïve as I was at the time, I thought I was merely making use of my international agency and privileged mobility to understand this “complex conflict” from its various perspectives. However, my Palestinian friends living in the West Bank could not access Israel without a permit, which they were often refused. They could not swim in the Mediterranean. To them, Tel Aviv was the quintessential metropolis of Zionism. When we met in a café in Ramallah, they gave me a kuffiyeh as a goodbye present, perhaps intended as a signal that I belonged to their “tribe”, although I knew that I would not be wearing it in Tel Aviv. However, it was still far too important an item to me –​alongside several Arabic books and dictionaries –​ not to bring with me to Tel Aviv airport when I flew back home. At the time I was entirely unaware of how thoroughly luggage is searched there: not only did they find a Palestinian scarf and several Arabic books in my rucksack, but also my second Austrian passport that included the visa for Syria and Jordan.1 I still remember the look on the airport security manager’s face when he waved that passport at me: it was the kind of face your parents give you when they discovered you failed an exam at school after you tried to hide it. It was the first and only time that I was escorted all the way to the gate by a security agent. Boundary crossing between the different sides and parties of a conflict, or a settler colonial occupation, imposes a certain responsibility and comes with an emotional burden. I found that the more I travelled back and forth, the more difficult it became to blend in either among Palestinians living under occupation, or among people living in Israel. I always felt uncomfortable sharing any experiences I had in Israel among Palestinian friends in the West Bank, while many Jewish Israelis I met reacted to my sharing of experiences among Palestinians with a sense of suspicion and mistrust, even if some were eager to hear more. On several occasions, I experienced certain aspects of boundary crossing as a security risk. It is crucial for the ethnographer’s safety that they are conscious about the political signalling they do in a particular place, whether the signals are intentional or unintentional. To underline the dangers of being unaware of such signalling I can recall two experiences: one in the West Bank, the other in the Gaza Strip. Mistaken as a settler in the West Bank In 2017 I conducted a two-​month research project on the effects of Palestinian labour in Israel on the economy and social life in the West Bank. Although

Staying sane and safe in Israel/Palestine  87 I stayed in East Jerusalem, I spent longer periods and several nights with a host family in the town of Yatta, which had a very high share of the local labour force employed inside Israel. Although Yatta is the West Bank’s third largest city, its houses spread more like an overgrown village across dusty hills in all directions. Its roads are winding and difficult to navigate for outsiders. One afternoon, after having spent a week in Yatta, I got ready to drive back towards Jerusalem. Having driven out of town to the junction at the main road a few times already, I did not consider it necessary for my Palestinian friends to lead the way. Yet, for reasons I still cannot explain, I got lost and ended up asking random people on the street for directions. The rental car I was driving had an Israeli license plate like most rental cars, because Palestinian-​plated cars hired in the West Bank are not allowed to cross over into Jerusalem and Israel. After what seemed like countless turns, sections of dirt road and paved road, I found myself in an increasingly dense built-​up area characteristic of refugee camps. The street that ran through it appeared on the map to lead directly towards the main highway I was searching for, so I continued. What I was unaware of in that moment was that a new-​looking small blue car with an Israeli license plate, with a fair-​haired white man of European phenotype in it, really stood out in this kind of place. Traffic was moving slowly and many of the people walking on the dusty sidewalk glanced at the car and checked who was inside it. Suddenly, I noticed a group of boys taking special interest, turning their heads around curiously as I passed them. “Settler! Settler!” one of them screamed, and just as I had realized what was happening, I saw them running after me in the rear mirror. They were frantically shouting “settler” and seemed to pick up stones from the roadside. As I was blocked by another car in front of me, they got closer quickly until eventually the car ahead of me took a turn. With my heart beating fast, I put my foot on the gas pedal and sped ahead as far as I could, precariously jumping over a few speed bumps on the way. Ten minutes later I was back on the main road but I was still shocked and annoyed about my stupidity. How should these kids know that I am not a lost Jewish settler who lives on occupied land nearby? They could have easily smashed my windows with stones before I could have explained myself in Arabic –​and no one knows if that would have made any difference at that point. Briefly detained in Gaza Another example of the foolish behaviour of my younger self resulted from the flawed sense that being European somewhat protects you from the dangers of violence and persecution in Israel/​Palestine. Being able to enter the Gaza Strip with a journalist card was itself a significant privilege, for neither most Palestinians nor Jewish Israelis could simply go in and out of Gaza through the checkpoint at Erez crossing. This high-​security terminal led into a sterile hangar-​style hall past bullet-​proof booths staffed with officials who

88  Andreas Hackl check documents. After further security checks, one walks through a caged over-​ground tunnel across no-​man’s land to the Gaza side of the border. Journalists in Gaza who have not spent much time there usually hire a so-​called “fixer” who arranges logistics and provides a car, while sometimes also facilitating connections and meetings with key informants. During this trip, however, I was on my own and visited a contact at the Gaza ​office of a German organization I had worked with. At that time Egypt had closed the Rafah crossing in southern Gaza and I was planning to document the situation at this border crossing, as thousands of Palestinians were waiting to cross into Egypt for study, work, family visits, or hospital appointments. When I reached the border crossing, I took photographs of the masses of people cramped into the waiting hall and crowded with their suitcases and belongings outside. Many of them had arrived before dawn in the hope that they would be allowed to cross over that day. What I did not consider enough was that the Palestinian security forces at the crossing had no interest in random visitors taking pictures of what was happening: I was approached by a man in uniform who asked what I was doing and who I was taking pictures for. I said I was a journalist and an anthropologist from Austria, but did not show my Israeli press card because this could have made things worse. He said I needed a permit from the Hamas government in Gaza. He took me into the arrival hall and from there into a corridor that led to a plain room lined with white tiles, but nothing else in it. They demanded my passport, my camera, my wallet, and my mobile phone and closed the door. Time passed and I waited anxiously with one particular thought troubling me: what if they somehow came to the conclusion that I might be working for Israel? My mobile phone had Hebrew letters printed next to the English keyboard and my wallet contained an Israeli press card with a Star of David on it that said, GPO, State of Israel. After about half an hour a different person in plain clothes came into the room, holding my belongings in his hands. “You can go”, he said with a very serious expression in his face. “But don’t do it again.” Although I was very lucky, this situation and many similar ones could have ended in trouble. Being constantly aware of the potential implications of one’s presence and actions seems especially important when crossing between boundaries in polarized conflicts. Moreover, a strong awareness of unintended signalling may contribute to safer ethnography. Indeed, researchers often lack the power over how they are perceived and received (Malejacq and Mukhopadhyay 2017).

A note on ethics, boycott, and visibility As many academics around the world mobilize in boycott of Israeli policies and universities, which are often implicated in aspects of the state’s violence, warfare, and occupation, working through and with Israeli institutions as an anthropologist is becoming unethical to many. At the same time, Israel has

Staying sane and safe in Israel/Palestine  89 been blacklisting many organizations and individual academics who openly support the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. In 2016, Adam Hanieh, then a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS London, landed in Israel on his way to deliver classes at Birzeit University in the West Bank. Israeli security reportedly interrogated him for ten hours and detained him overnight, before deporting him back to London. A representative of the Israeli Ministry of Interior informed him that he was banned from entering the country for ten years.2 This politicization of academia in relation to Israel/​Palestine demands a difficult balancing act from anthropologists and poses particular challenges for young and aspiring ethnographers who have it all ahead of them. The result of the current environment is a climate of uncertainty around questions of entry and access and a reluctance to openly collaborate with institutions, because visibility is a weapon in this ongoing war over justice, conscience, and legitimacy. While each individual anthropologist may have different political positions and boundaries when it comes to these issues, it seems generally true that the concern about the public visibility of our activities, opinions, and research is more urgent than ever. While the primary impulse may be to defend academic freedom and free speech without giving in to the deterrent of deportation, it is equally true that access to Israel/​ Palestine as a site for important anthropological research is being mediated in highly politicized ways. Sometimes prioritizing that access over political visibility can be a legitimate choice, even if it feels like submitting to the Israeli regime.

Conclusion: researching across boundaries Looking back at my early research visits to the Middle East, I would have benefitted greatly from access to tailored institutional and professional support, both during and after research. Universities cannot harvest the fruits of publications and reputations that emerge from risky research without playing a stronger role in mitigating those risks in the first place. Rather than avoiding responsibility, say by preventing students from doing field research in places that have an official travel warning, as is increasingly the practice in the United Kingdom, universities are required to establish stronger support networks and capacity in important field sites: to provide psycho-​social support, to facilitate research permits or other recognized accreditation, to offer legal advice, to facilitate local trustees that act as gatekeepers and mentors, and to protect researchers and their informants. If ethnographic research is indeed no less of an intervention as humanitarian interventions are (Malejacq and Mukhopadhyay 2016), then the principle of do no harm must embrace both the subjects of research and the researchers themselves. This also includes a need for a tailored post-​research support programmes for students and established academics who conduct fieldwork in conflict settings and on other forms of violence and suffering.

90  Andreas Hackl Although it can only be one part of a larger set of actions, admitting one’s own mistakes and analysing one’s conduct to shape future best practices is particularly important. The intensity with which I felt an Israel/​Palestine “burnout” when I left the Middle East for Edinburgh in 2014 only really occurred to me a few years down the road. While it is widely understood to be “normal” that foreign researchers desire some breathing space and a break after long and intensive fieldwork, I believe that an ongoing and focused post-​fieldwork support programme would have gone a long way towards opening some of the emotional and experiential baggage I shoved under the carpet. However, my own experience of returning from the field also points to a somewhat contradictory conclusion: although I would have appreciated stronger post-​ fieldwork support and a guided emotional and psycho-​social debrief, writing up the research with some degree of emotional distance to the field was a perfectly viable pragmatic approach. Writing in distant and quiet Edinburgh was therapeutic in and by itself. Sometimes not overtly delving into the emotional and experiential baggage brought back from research in conflict and violence may be a feasible approach that processes experiences from a professional distance. My experience of researching across boundaries in Israel/​ Palestine suggests that pragmatic considerations are key to success and survival during fieldwork. This refers to the need to maintain awareness about the political signals anthropologists send while being in the field to avoid dangerous misunderstandings. Such pragmatism also refers to how academic (un)freedom translates into the local context of research. Academic freedom needs to be enshrined in stronger international institutions, with widely accepted accreditations of researchers. Indeed, a more widely recognized research accreditation backed up by pressure from governments and international organizations might help counter the dangerous ambivalence and vulnerability ethnographers can face in relation to their statuses. My experience, which I believe some foreign researchers who have worked in Palestine and Israel will share, has been fraught with informal workarounds, precarious lies to state officials, the taking of recurring personal risks, and a range of potentially dangerous situations that could have been avoided. While some risks and informal workarounds will certainly always define the practice of ethnography in conflict-​affected field sites, I strongly believe that more can be done to address them. Ethnography across the boundaries of a conflict and other asymmetric violent situations, such as Israel’s settler colonial occupation of Palestinian territories, requires pragmatic balancing acts but such balancing is not always easy to live with emotionally. During my long-​term research among Palestinian citizens of Israel, I learnt much from their own experiences with living in-​between divides, as Palestinians who are also citizens of Israel, often not Palestinian enough on one side of the Separation Barrier, and not Israeli enough on the other.

Staying sane and safe in Israel/Palestine  91 One of these Palestinian citizens of Israel once told me a fascinating story about the difficulties and emotional consequences of boundary crossing –​a story with which I would like to end this essay in an intentionally open-​ ended fashion. Walid Fahoum was a former vice-​mayor of Nazareth and a prominent author, lawyer, and intellectual in the communist party. Talking in his Nazareth home in 2013, he recalled how he used to work as a lawyer defending political prisoners in the 1970s. At the time he would often drive up from Jerusalem to the city of Jenin in the Israeli-​occupied West Bank, then crossing over into Afula in Israel and back to Nazareth: When I went to the occupied Palestinian territory, in order for them not to throw stones at my car because of the Israeli license plate, I fixed a kuffiyah [a Palestinian scarf] over the front of my car. One day I went back home from Jerusalem and I forgot about the kuffiyah as I crossed into Israel. In Palestinian territories it saved me from stones being thrown at my car, but in Israel it did the opposite. I took it down as soon as I realized. But when I was back in Nazareth, I felt as if me and the kuffiyah were becoming schizophrenic. I felt that the scarf looked at me, asking: “where do I belong?”

Notes 1 At the time Austrian citizens could apply for a second passport if they worked or conducted research in different states that were in conflict with another, as is the case between Israel and most Arab countries. 2 www.soas.ac.uk/​news/​new​site​m115​804.html

References Berda, Yael. 2018. Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Buch Segal, Lotte. 2016. No Place for Grief: Martyrs, Prisoners, and Mourning in Contemporary Palestine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. Cohen, Nissim, and Tamar Arieli. 2011. “Field Research in Conflict Environments: Methodological Challenges and Snowball Sampling.” Journal of Peace Research 48 (4): 423–​35. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​00223​4331​1405​698 Furani, Khaled, and Dan Rabinowitz. 2011. “The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (1): 475–​ 91. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1146/​annu​rev-​ant​hro-​081​309-​145​910 Goede, Marieke De, Esmé Bosma, and Polly Pallister-​Wilkins. 2019. Secrecy and Methods in Security Research: A Guide to Qualitative Fieldwork. London and New York: Routledge. Goldberg, Harvey. 1976. “Anthropology in Israel.” Current Anthropology 17 (1): 119–​21. Hackl, Andreas. 2016. “An Orchestra of Civil Resistance: Privilege, Diversity, and Identification among Cross-​Border Activists in a Palestinian Village.” Peace & Change 41 (2): 167–​93.

92  Andreas Hackl Hannerz, Ulf. 1981. “The Management of Danger.” Ethnos 46 (1–​2): 19–​46. https://​ doi.org/​10.1080/​00141​844.1981.9981​208 Kovats-​ Bernat, J. Christopher. 2002. “Negotiating Dangerous Fields: Pragmatic Strategies for Fieldwork amid Violence and Terror.” American Anthropologist 104 (1): 208–​22. https://​doi.org/​10.1525/​aa.2002.104.1.208 Malejacq, Romain, and Dipali Mukhopadhyay. 2016. “The ‘Tribal Politics’ of Field Research: A Reflection on Power and Partiality in 21st-​ Century Warzones.” Perspectives on Politics 14 (4): 1011–​28. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1017/​ S1537592716002899 Malejacq, Romain, and Dipali Mukhopadhyay. 2017. “Yes, It’s Possible to do Research in Conflict Zones. This Is How.” Washington Post, 5 April. www.was​ hing​tonp​ost.com/​news/​mon​key-​cage/​wp/​2017/​04/​05/​yes-​its-​possi​ble-​to-​do-​resea​ rch-​in-​confl​ict-​zones-​this-​is-​how/​ Nakhleh, Khalil. 1977. “Anthropological and Sociological Studies on the Arabs in Israel: A Critique.” Journal of Palestine Studies 6 (4): 41–​70. https://​doi.org/​ 10.2307/​2535​777 Nordstrom, Carolyn, and Antonius Robben. 1996. Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Culture. Berkeley: University of California. Pappé, Ilan. 2011. The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel. New Haven: Yale University Press. https://​books.goo​gle.com/​books?id=​dUAWM​ tUH7​5QC&pgis=​1 Peteet, Julie. 2017. Space and Mobility in Palestine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Robinson, Shira. 2013. Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State. Stanford: Stanford University Press. https://​books.goo​gle. com/​books?id=​XcM6A​AAAQ​BAJ&pgis=​1 Shamir, Ronen. 2005. “Without Borders? Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime.” Sociological Theory 23 (2): 197–​ 217. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​ j.0735-​2751.2005.00250.x Sluka, Jeffrey Alan. 2020. “Too Dangerous for Fieldwork? The Challenge of Institutional Risk-​Management in Primary Research on Conflict, Violence and ‘Terrorism’*.” Contemporary Social Science 15 (2): 241–​ 57. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1080/​21582​041.2018.1498​534 UN. 2015. Report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry Established Pursuant to Human Rights Council Resolution S-​21/​1. New York.

9 Involved and detached Emotional management in fieldwork Anna Hedlund and Steven Sampson

Even in the most benign situations, ethnographic fieldwork is always an emotional experience. How could it be otherwise, when we use our very selves as our research tool while interacting with other human beings? Ethnographic settings are hazardous in different ways. Some are overtly dangerous or spontaneously violent, while in other situations, there is in­security, intimidation or implied threat. In these cases, emotional pressures increase. The ethnographer must therefore learn to ‘read’ a s­ ituation which is inherently uncertain, insecure, perhaps secretive. We need to decipher signals, codes or messages which even our own informants may not be all too sure of. Situations of insecurity may thus vary, as do the consequences. This chapter provides two examples of uncertainty, insecurity and how real or potential violence affected our emotional reactions to fieldwork. It draws on our own experiences from fieldwork in, respectively, the eastern Congo (Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)) during 2012–​2014 and in pre-​1989 Romania. Hedlund’s fieldwork, among a group of Rwandan rebel military units in the Congo, was marked by the continuing threat and occurrence of violent confrontations. Sampson’s fieldwork in communist Romania took place with people who were surveilled and intimidated by the Romanian secret police and a network of informers. In both these ­situations, the emotional challenges were marked by insecurity, frustration, fear for oneself and anxiety about one’s informants. In this sense, while these two fieldwork situations certainly differ, we believe that they can be instructive in revealing the dangers of being too close to one’s ‘people’; of being too involved. It is an axiom of social anthropology, in contrast to the other social sciences, that an emotional engagement with our interlocutors via participant-​ observation is the key to truly understanding the worlds of others. Typical accounts of fieldwork, while they describe the practical problems of access, building rapport and obtaining data, also describe the fieldworker’s po­sition, emotions, frustrations and anxieties. The problem is often depicted as being an ‘outsider’, and the standard solution is to keep immersing oneself, and to sustain our empathy and solidarity with informants and their life situations. Our emotional engagement, the inserting of our participatory ‘self’ into our DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-9

94  Anna Hedlund and Steven Sampson ethnography, is supposed to create insight. This preference for ever more proximity, friendships and engagement, however, has a down side. It may mislead our research process and distort our theorizing. Sometimes, we need to take a step back. We argue, therefore, for a dialectic between emotional proximity and the need for restraint. This restraint we call ‘emotional management’. We argue that ‘letting go’ of our emotions does not necessarily always help us gain anthropological insight. Rather, there are points and junctures in the fieldwork and post-​fieldwork process where we should keep our emotions in check, try to regain control or simply ‘back off’ from the field, at least for a moment, when we analyze our data. It is this kind of control that we will call ‘emotional management’. The problem of emotional and existential dilemmas in tense, insecure or violent settings has been raised by other anthropologists (Maček 2014; Weiss 2014). These studies describe how settings of conflict or crisis affect the researchers and research topic. They remind us of the need for caution and sensitivity when working in volatile or violent settings and how ‘empathic knowledge’ can help researchers deal with emotionally demanding material (Maček 2014). From these studies, it is clear that we cannot divide the emotional field simply into two poles, with solidarity and engagement on one side as open, expressive and therefore good, versus a more repressed and closed detachment that is by definition bad or unproductive. Rather, ‘empathic knowledge’ can broaden our understanding of demanding field sites, and help us achieve deeper knowledge of violence, oppressive states, or other sensitive subjects (ibid). In this light, we view emotions on a continuum of expression, and our use of the word ‘management’ is meant to imply a more nuanced view of our own emotions as we conduct fieldwork and analyze data, even in situations as tense and unpredictable as Eastern Congo and communist Romania. The ‘management’ approach, we argue, can help us in two ways: first, we can gain a better understanding of the people and situations in which we find ourselves; second, we can formulate more productive theories about how people live in vulnerable or violent situations. How do we acquire and then apply ‘emotional management’ while we are ‘out there’ doing fieldwork? One obvious strategy is for ethnographers to become familiar with messy stories of emotional ambivalence during fieldwork. Stories of such ambivalence help us acquire some kind of reference point for our own experience. Such a reference point might take the form of, ‘I am in the same kind of tense situation as was X when she did fieldwork in Place Y’, or ‘I don’t want to make the mistakes that A did when he did fieldwork among the Group B’. It is these kinds of messy fieldwork stories that we will present below. The stories are not guidelines or checklists for conducting the perfect fieldwork. They are illustrative cases of dilemmas where we really do not have the answers. These dilemmas gave us anxiety and concern, even after years of reflection. As human stories rather than

Involved and detached: emotional management in fieldwork  95 purely scientific problems, they have an emotional component to them. They are our experiences. Which is why they are messy. Both of us carried out fieldwork in partially unpredictable settings (the unpredictability due partly to our own naiveté), and we both experienced some emotional rollercoasters. Nevertheless, we believe that the emotions eventually helped enhance our understanding of our field situations.

Feelings as knowledge production? Conducting fieldwork is an intersubjective activity. Our objects of study –​ other people –​are themselves subjects. We use ourselves as research tools, which gives our research an emotional component. Ethnographic fieldwork is about positioning oneself while at the same time describing someone else’s lifeworld. It is proximity and distance at the same time. Anthropology has acknowledged that our research questions, analytical frameworks, methods and conclusions are themselves products of our own positions and ‘frames of reference’. These frames have an emotional aspect to them, in so far as we are not just engaged but at times profoundly committed to our scientific mission, including the mission of ‘successful fieldwork’. Nowadays, it is necessary for anthropologists to present their own self-​reflections in order to show how their ‘positions’ (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, class) may have influenced knowledge production in the field. One of the positions often missing, however, is our emotional position. Every fieldworker thus experiences moments of intense involvement and then detachment or distance. In our ethnography, we are in the position of being involved and detached at the same time. The ethnographic project is to enter a community (or organization or network or ‘assemblage’, be it close to home or far away). We are supposed to hang out where we can, get to know people, observe their activities and their life situations, and then at some point exit, perhaps returning, but always with the possibility of exit. Age, gender, race and class aside, being an outsider (even if we do fieldwork ‘at home’) is a very ambivalent position. The researcher can walk out of the village and back to the missionary station, or today, return to the NGO aid office; we can pack up our bags and notes and return home. Even when doing fieldwork close to home, we can leave the organization or group that we have chosen to study, we can reduce our fieldwork when grant funds run out, we can reduce our lines of communication, stop logging in and return to the university or just move away. While it is true that our informants can now easily contact us, we can decide not to respond, we can unfriend or unfollow when things become too intense or unpleasant. No matter how much solidarity or friendliness we have with those we study, our outsider status, for all its problems, is a position of privilege. And this kind of privileged po­sition gives us a very different outlook on the risks and emotions involved in fieldwork, as we shall describe below. In particular, it demands, besides

96  Anna Hedlund and Steven Sampson sensitivity, responsibility and reflexivity, a particular kind of emotional management. Emotional management takes place while we are in the field, when we exit the field, and for some of us, for a long time afterward. Here we will describe two ethnographic fieldwork stories where emotional management was part of our fieldwork. For simplicity’s sake, we can call this a dialectic between involvement and detachment. Detachment, however, is not a lack of emotion. It is a tactic for balancing intimacy and distance. The first setting we describe is Hedlund’s fieldwork with an armed group in the DRC. This group had violent confrontations with other militias and with government troops, and they also perpetrated attacks on civilians. The second setting is Sampson’s fieldwork in Romania during the Ceaușescu era, when he was tracked by the secret police as a potential spy, declared ‘persona non grata’ on entry, and where his informants were followed, interrogated and even threatened. Hedlund’s situation was one of insecurity and physical danger. Sampson’s was one of surveillance, suspicion and paranoia. Both led to strong emotional responses during and after our fieldwork, especially anxiety or guilt about interlocutors. And both fieldwork experiences were for us lessons in emotional management. After presenting the two cases, we offer some concluding remarks on how to navigate the dialectic between involvement and detachment in fieldwork, suggesting that the two concepts can help us ‘manage’ emotions in fieldwork.

Example 1. Fieldwork with armed groups in the Congo It is not a new insight that fieldwork in so-​called ‘conflict zones’ poses unique challenges to research ethics in terms of the obligations of the fieldworker, responsibility toward those with whom we do fieldwork, as well as the attendant difficulties in establishing trust and long-​term relationships (see for example Wood 2009; Vlassenroot 2006). Many anthropologists have also highlighted the dangers of conducting fieldwork among hostile groups and perpetrators (Sluka 1995). Others have discussed the epistemological consequences of analysis and interpretation in settings where it is difficult to build rapport and trust. How does the researcher’s conceptualization of a ‘conflict zone’ and violence, including gratuitous violence, affect both the researcher and those ‘being researched’? Furthermore, anthropologists have discussed how researchers themselves cope with violence and trauma and how ‘existential shocks’ (Robben and Nordstrom 1995) affect analysis and theory building (see for example Cyanne and Simoni 2014; Kovats-​Bernat 2002). A further identified concern is the analytical problems that might arise if researchers begin to empathize with perpetrators or fall into what Antonius Robben (1996) calls ‘ethnographic seduction’. We might misinterpret our own friendly feelings for our informants as ‘good data’, thereby compromising the kind of objectivity and critique that is essential to any analysis (Jauregui 2013: 144). Other scholars have raised the possibility of the

Involved and detached: emotional management in fieldwork  97 political hazards associated with conducting research among perpetrators of violence. The perpetrators themselves may feel empowered by the recognition and attention given to them by researchers; furthermore, the researcher, by writing about groups and people who commit violence, may also become unintentionally responsible for reproducing ideologies of violence or even accused of culpability. These are all legitimate concerns. Research is never a neutral exercise (Cloke et al. 2000), but where a peaceful setting may serve to mask the tensions between different interests and objectives, fieldwork in a conflict zone polarizes these tensions, throwing them into sharp relief. Even though fieldwork in insecure settings poses ethical and moral challenges, many anthropologists, including the authors cited above, argue that it is essential that we engage with those who carry out violence if we are to improve our understanding of conflict and of the root causes of violence. I will elaborate on this issue by describing my Ph.D. fieldwork with a group of rebel combatants in eastern Congo. As a doctoral student at Lund University (2009–​ 2014), I conducted long-​term fieldwork in the eastern Congo (DRC). For decades, the eastern Congo has suffered from war, poverty, disease, refugee crises and intermittent conflicts between various rebel groups, militias, political factions and governmental troops. As part of my fieldwork, I lived in a rebel camp controlled by a group who had fled Rwanda in the 1990s and were now living in the Congo with their families. Since fleeing Rwanda, partly due to accusations of having participated in the 1994 genocide, this group has carried out vicious acts of violence against the Congolese population for more than 25 years. Violence and conflicts, and the need to flee from attacking troops to a safer camp deeper in the forest, were now a part of their everyday life. In the camp where I conducted my fieldwork, I spent time with both the armed combatants and their wives and children. The camp was run by its military leaders, but it was also vulnerable. It was home to many refugee families, and it could be attacked by Congolese military forces and other armed groups. The group had a hierarchical structure and a political and military agenda based on liberating Rwanda from what they viewed as an illegitimate regime. Propaganda against the current Rwanda government was part of daily life in the camp. In my research, I sought to understand the motives behind acts of violence from the perspective of the combatants, how the group was organized, and how their ideologies justifying practices of violence were transmitted from one generation to another. My research, therefore, focused on the daily life routines inside the rebel camp and the structures and behaviors behind these. Why did the group continue to fight what seemed to me to be an endless war? How did they justify acts of violence? I have addressed these questions in other publications (Hedlund 2015, 2017, 2019). I have also described the methodological and ethical difficulties in conducting fieldwork in a conflict zone with people accused of war crimes, and who are still actively conducting violent military operations in the Congo against both military and civilian targets. In

98  Anna Hedlund and Steven Sampson these studies, I have tended to downgrade my own emotions throughout the process. I overlooked how I confronted, or ‘managed’ emotions such as fear, insecurity and confusion throughout the period of fieldwork, and long after the fieldwork ended. In this retrospective vein, let me look back on the emotions during my fieldwork.

Managing emotions in contexts of insecurity Any anthropologist who spends time with the people they study inevi­ tably becomes emotionally affected by their life stories. This involvement is even more pronounced when the situations include the high intensity emotions connected to conflict and violence, with accounts coming from victims, witnesses and combatants. Although I had prepared for how to ‘manage’ danger and risks by reading previous ethnographic research, ethics discussions in methods books, and various risk assessments, it was difficult to fully plan for the fieldwork and remain in a position of control. In the Congo as anywhere else, fieldworkers are at the mercy of fortuitous events and situations. As described elsewhere (Hedlund 2019), when I was invited to visit the military camp for the first time, I stepped into an unknown setting of combatant and rebel activity. I had to learn the functions of hierarchy and military discipline, I had to address the soldiers by their rank rather than by name, and I soon learnt not to question the authority of the leaders. While the early weeks of the fieldwork were characterized by mutual distance, I never experienced any real hostility from either the rebel soldiers or residents of the camp. I was treated with respect and courtesy, and I felt that people in the camp were genuinely positive about having a visitor in the camp (even if it was also obvious that they used my foreign position as a vehicle to transmit propaganda). My fieldwork consisted of regular participation in daily life and interviews and conversations with combatants and their family members. In the camp, I simply walked around carrying a tape recorder, pen and notebook. In the daytime, I took part in the ordinary life of the camp, following the soldiers to the bamboo churches to pray, to the fields looking for food, and conversing with them and their families. During the evenings, I would sit by a fireplace speaking to the leaders and other high-​ranking soldiers living close by. By participating in daily activities, I sought to gain insights into how my informants experienced their lives and to understand what it is like to live in the midst of insecurity (I did not participate in any military operations or violent attacks that were conducted outside the camp). Although camp activities were peaceful, violence was still present in narratives and in everyday life; the camp was highly militarized, combatants carried guns with them, and people regularly spoke about violence, threats, traumas and danger related to their personal history and present situation in a war zone. Following the unpredictability of war and the fact that conflicts can quickly escalate there was also a sense

Involved and detached: emotional management in fieldwork  99 of danger surrounding the camp. People in the camp said they were living in fear of being attacked by enemy groups. The fear of violence was also close by, because many of my rebel informants were perpetrators of violence inside the camp as well. The atmosphere in the camp, therefore, was not one of simply a refuge from violence outside; there was also everyday fear inside the camp. After only a few days in the camp, I heard stories of how lower-​ranking soldiers, many of whom had been forcibly recruited (kidnapped) from villages that rebels had attacked, would be killed or taken to the ‘forest prison’ if they tried to escape from the camp (although I am not sure this is actually true, I heard similar stories several times). While the camp commanders spoke freely to me, the lower-​ranking soldiers, women and children had less freedom of speech. They were the objects of manipulation, propaganda campaigns, compelled to make various ‘performances’, and generally deprived of their individual freedom to express their opinions, talk to me informally, or leave the camp. Fieldwork in this context posed methodological, and, of course ethical dilemmas. One dilemma was my dependence on the rebels for practical advice, and my need to trust them to ensure my personal security. During fieldwork, I was completely reliant on the rebels’ knowledge of the local situation. I had to trust their advice on where to go and where not to go. My control over the situation was turned upside down –​it was the rebels, not I, who had control of my fieldwork situation. As an outsider, I had to trust the rebels with whom I lived, and I had to acknowledge their stories ‘as truths’ in order to be included. Conducting ethnographic fieldwork in an insecure and unpredictable region is also emotionally tense. I often found myself being suspicious of what people said, and I sometimes had doubts about whether I could trust my interlocutors. I felt a lack of control over the situation, and I experienced difficulties getting close to my interlocutors. I sometimes had doubts about my own security, and I worried about all the things that could go wrong in a conflict area. I wondered to what degree I could trust my informants’ accounts and advice and what I would do in a situation of real danger. I also felt guilty about being close to a rebel group that had been causing so much harm to others. In the field, I knew that the safest way to conduct fieldwork was to be accepted by the group. Becoming included would enable me to get access to more dimensions of their lives. As a way to ‘manage’ the many feelings on a personal level, I kept notebooks and field diaries. The daily writing became a means of not only reviewing my data but also as a way to regain some kind of control and to manage my feelings of anxiety, fear and suspicion of others. However, just because I realized that these emotions were perfectly normal and predictable under the circumstances of fieldwork did not reduce their intensity. Although I sometimes had doubts about my fieldwork and the potential danger it could pose to myself and my interlocutors, I did not experience my fieldwork as naive or dangerous at the time. This was partly because I was working with coworkers whom I trusted

100  Anna Hedlund and Steven Sampson but also because I believe that my interlocutors had a genuine interest in talking to me about their lives so that their situation could be known to outsiders. In anthropology, we know the importance of integrating our subjectivity into our research. We have to learn how to balance the situation, how to be involved in our informants’ daily lives (to get good data but also out of care for our interlocutors) while also learning how to detach ourselves. Interpretation, including interpretation of ethnographic data, requires some detachment from the situation. This is why analyzing fieldwork data takes months or years. The detachment is necessary so that we do not misinterpret the data. Achieving this detachment in violence-​prone situations is difficult. One technique of achieving detachment is to be aware of signs of over-​ empathizing with informants, what Robben (1996) called ‘ethnographic seduction’. Robben (1996) notes that perpetrators of violence often begin by depicting themselves as ‘the good guy’, presenting themselves as victims and describing their violent acts as purely self-​defense. As an example, Robben (1996: 73) gives an account of his interviews with high-​ranking generals of the Argentinian junta (1976–​1983). Despite knowing that they were widely accused of torturing civilians, kidnapping and causing the ‘disappearance’ of innocent people, Robben found that his informants met him with the utmost kindness, courtesy and gentlemanly good manners. Robben soon found himself in a situation where he was interviewing men whose politics he detested, but for whom he grew to feel a personal liking and attachment. In this sense, Robben’s experience is very similar to my own. My informants had a political project that included defense (and denial) of having participated in the genocide in Rwanda. They were views that I detested, but I did not endeavor to argue or provoke them, which only led me to feel more guilty. Even though my interlocutors always treated me with courtesy and politeness, I still knew that some of them had carried out brutal acts of violence and had views I deeply detested. People in the camp often spoke to me about their suffering in the forest, and much of the group’s collective identity was based on a shared victim discourse. At first, I was swayed by the presentation of the victim discourse and people’s stories of suffering. Indeed, who would not sympathize with refugee f­amilies, in fear of attack by government troops or other militias, seeking only to return to their home country and seek justice? My interlocutors repeatedly spoke about their misery, their fears of enemies and daily hardships, such as lack of shelter, food, and medicine. At the same time, it was obvious that some of the commanders were distorting the truth about their past history, denying and giving me false information (for example about the genocide in Rwanda). It was also obvious that they tried to promote their po­litical agenda and convert me to their cause in the hope that as a foreigner, I could be useful to them. For them, I was a sympathetic listener and a useful po­litical tool.

Involved and detached: emotional management in fieldwork  101 Reflecting back on these experiences, I know there were times when I was blinded by the friendly relationships I had with my interlocutors, and I often struggled against becoming biased or swayed by my own sympathy for their everyday predicament. This involvement took on many forms, such as feeling sorry for the women and children in the camp, being pleased that the high-​ranking rebel leaders were nice and polite (denial of the real ­situation), feeling suspicious about the narratives they provided, but also having a genuine curiosity in trying to understand the root-​causes of groups who were clearly committed to a violent way of life. It was sometimes difficult to manage emotions in the field and not analyze people’s stories from my personal moral or ethical standpoint. Years later, sitting in Sweden and having since acquired some emotional distance, I now find it easier to reflect upon individuals’ responsibility for their acts of oppression and violence against others. Some of my informants were war criminals, and I ‘represented’ them in my monograph. The issue here is not under what circumstances we legitimate the victim discourse and under what circumstances we dismiss, denounce or undermine it. Rather, the problem is to find a way to present the worldview of the people we study in a way that does not also promote their ideology. Our task is to represent the perpetrators without necessarily empowering them. This is a dilemma that I have not yet resolved. The solution, I think, is to take a step back, detach from some of the more intense feelings, to listen to what people say and put aside some of my personal judgments or moral standpoints. I spent much time thinking about this while writing my dissertation. Instead of only dismissing the victim ideology or describing the rebels’ propaganda as ‘false’, I let the ethnography speak for itself. This helped me to theorize about identity, meaning-​making and shared ideology, which in the end provided a deeper understanding of how this particular group legitimized its acts of violence, both within the camp and toward the outsiders whom it attacked. Allowing the ethnography to speak provided an understanding of the way in which suffering is embedded in their own justification of violence. It can reveal how ideologies of violence are transmitted from one generation to the next, as well as showing how central these ideologies are to the group’s very existence as a group. Above, I have outlined a few dilemmas in the field. Emotions cannot fully be detached from the fieldworker, nor should they. However, we can learn how to manage and control them. As mentioned in the introduction, a privilege that many anthropologists have is that we can escape the field and go home, even when the field is in our own home towns or countries. It is often when we are back home that we can sit down and reflect upon our data, reread and reanalyze our field notes, and try to make sense of the messy reality we have observed and the experiences we had. We read our field notes over and over again, recall how we felt in specific situations, and reflect upon what people have said. These processes create that detachment which is necessary for ethnographic analysis. We don’t want to repress or neglect our feelings. But we should try to manage them.

102  Anna Hedlund and Steven Sampson

Example 2. Paranoia in Romania Paranoia is an unreasonable fear that one is being watched, threatened or persecuted. To call someone ‘paranoid’ is to imply that their judgment of reality is distorted or flawed, that they are irrational. If you feel like there is a ‘they’ and that they are ‘out there’ watching you, that you are under threat from an unseen enemy, well maybe there is something wrong with you. You are suffering from paranoid anxiety. The feeling of being watched generates not just anxiety, however. It can also generate inflated feelings of importance. You feel important because you believe that others, especially others with some kind of special power, find you important, if not threatening. According to the cultural theorist Sianne Ngai, paranoia is one of those ‘ugly feelings’ (2009). Unlike the grand emotions of anger, fear, passion and jealousy that can inspire toward great literature, ‘ugly feelings’ like cynicism, boredom, irony and paranoia are feelings that cannot be fully resolved or expressed. Paranoia, Ngai argues, is a way in which the subject constructs a world together with the object, a world of power in which the subject is now a player. Paranoia, conspiracy theories, and similar delusional emotions are in this sense empowering. You are an important person for the powers that be. So you look out for them. Even if you’re not sure they are there. It was this combination of watchfulness and self-​ importance that I developed when I first went to Romania to conduct fieldwork. The year was 1974. I was a Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts-​Amherst. Romania was a communist authoritarian state under the brutal Ceaușescu regime. After six months fieldwork in 1974, I returned in 1975–​1976 as part of an official academic exchange program between the United States and Romania, administered by the Fulbright Program (named after U.S. Senator Fulbright) and financed by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), which manages exchanges to Eastern Europe. Like the other American exchange researchers in Romania, I was assigned a local academic advisor, and this advisor, a sociologist, was supposed to facilitate our research. However, the advisor also reported about us to the authorities, including the Romanian secret police, the Securitate. I have written about this fieldwork elsewhere (Sampson, 1984, 2019, 2020; Kideckel and Sampson 1984; Sampson and Kideckel 1989), so I will not go into details on the larger context (see www.ste​vens​amps​onte​xts.com). Suffice it to say that I was doing research in a Cold War setting. For the Romanian regime paranoid about spies, an American researcher, even if he said he was an ethnographer, was someone to be watched. (For diplomatic reasons, Romania allowed a small number of American researchers into the country, most of them ethnographers, folklorists, linguists, historians, etc.) As American grantees, we were oriented about the political environment in which we worked. We were instructed by IREX and by the U.S. Embassy cultural attaché to be careful about what we said and did. We should not

Involved and detached: emotional management in fieldwork  103 initiate political discussions, distribute anti-​regime or religious literature, nor should we carry out any illegal activities such as smuggling icons or dissident manifestos or do illegal money changing. We should assume that our hotel rooms were bugged with microphones, that our activities in the villages were being monitored, and that anyone who talked to us, no matter how friendly, might be an informant for the secret police or simply called in for interrogation. In short, we should assume that the Romanians thought that we had some kind of ‘mission’, that we were spies of some kind (this atmosphere is described in detail in Verdery 2018). Americans and West European scholars who went to Romania, about ten a year, tended to live in the capital of Bucharest or in the university towns of Cluj or Iași. Here they could be easily followed, literally from door to door. We anthropologists had a bit more freedom: we were out in the villages, living amongst the villagers (after receiving permission), and we had learned to speak Romanian. Precisely because of our unique situation, this also made us especially interesting targets for observation. The Romanian security organs assumed that any person from the West (and even from Hungary) was an agent or instrument of some espionage service. Spies uncover secrets. Did we anthropologists, doing fieldwork in villages, uncover secrets? Yes we did. Because a secret is not necessarily something of high strategic or military value. A secret is any kind of knowledge that a political regime does not want others to know. As ethnographers, the secrets we discovered were about how Romanians really lived and how Romanian society worked. The secrets that I discovered were what most Romanians already knew: that things did not work according to the plans, that many policies were propaganda and many actions pure theatre. This was ethnography for me, and in anthropology we learn that the ideology and the reality never match. But these same contradictions, that things did not go according to plan, were strategic knowledge for the Romanian authorities. It made me and my work a threat. It made anyone who talked to me suspect.

Was I a spy? As an academic, I disseminated the knowledge that I had acquired in Romania in the form of conference papers, academic articles and articles and presentations in mass media. This kind of knowledge could be harmful to Romania, a country that had just signed the Helsinki Declaration of Human Rights and was under Western pressures of various kinds. This pressure came from governments and from various Romanian and Hungarian anti-​ communist exile groups in the West. The assumption that we could be connected to this agenda, that we were spies, was therefore not unreasonable when seen from the regime’s point of view. After all, we researchers had U.S. government scholarships, we were there on a government exchange program, and we had relations with people inside the U.S. embassy, where

104  Anna Hedlund and Steven Sampson we could collect mail from the diplomatic pouch and have a pizza. Some diplomats even visited us in our villages. One day I was visited in the village by the U.S. Ambassador in his giant Cadillac limousine, with the U.S. flag. In short, the Romanian authorities were paranoid about us, and it turned out that we were naive about them. In the village where I did my fieldwork, I lived with my wife in the home of a Romanian peasant family. Just outside the village was a secret uranium factory, called ‘Factory R’ (the factory is not secret anymore and has since been closed). Many young local men worked there. I was not interested in the factory as such, but of course I met some of these young men when I went to the village bar or visited their homes. I was not a spy, but everyone in the village knew that since I was approved to live there, that I must somehow be connected to higher powers. How else could I be there? They were correct. I was connected to higher powers. The authorities had allowed me to live there, the local mayor had an official letter from the regional administration. So that made me special. I was American in a Cold War context, with the mystique of American strategic power and American popular culture (TV shows such as ‘Columbo’ and ‘Dallas’ on Saturday nights). I wore blue jeans, had a beard and drove a foreign car. As a foreigner in Romania, I also had special privileges. I could shop for Western goods in special ‘dollar shops’ using my U.S. dollars (which were illegal for Romanians). Every anthropologist has similar experiences of being a stranger, having special resources that attract some people and create suspicion among others. Being special in Cold War Romania had its unique combination of privilege and suspicion. Like any ethnographer, I went around the village, visiting people in their homes, at workplaces and in the fields on the collective farm. My research focused on village planning and infrastructure. No one could figure out why I would be interested in their village, except for the presence of the secret uranium factory. Once in a while, our conversations got around to topics of American espionage and spying; sometimes in a humorous or nervous way, since Romania also had its own secret police which for decades had been spying on its own population. I tried to explain in a rational way: if we Americans wanted to find out what was going on here in the village, we did not need to send an American student with a beard and blue jeans, driving a foreign car, with a blond wife, into the village to be a spy. We had satellites for that, I explained. I also tried to explain what an ethnographer was. Most Romanians knew about etnografi and folclor, which was normally associated with folk music and folk traditions. This village had nothing of this kind. What kind of ethnographer was I, wanting to study urban planning and infrastructure? Why would an ethnographer want to see household census documents or go to local communist party meetings? So again, I was a suspicious character. It was frustrating. There was no central authority I could talk to who could clear up this confusion about me. And I also know that far up into the Romanian security apparatus, they believed

Involved and detached: emotional management in fieldwork  105 that I had some kind of secret mission. I know this because I have been able to review my secret police file, all 600 pages, containing interrogations, reports, observations, and photographs. The files spend a lot of space trying to figure out my true mission. During my fieldwork in the village and at the planning office in the town of Brașov, I spoke with peasants, young workers, pensioners, planners and party officials. I drank beer with schoolteachers, played chess with the dentist, attended weddings and parties, and made friends with several village families. I finished my village fieldwork in 1976, after 18 months, but returned for a few weeks each year. From 1980, I undertook another research project at the Romanian Communist Party Training School in Bucharest, where I studied village leaders and visited other party training schools in the provinces. I had thus developed a network of friends, colleagues and informants in Bucharest and in other towns, and in some villages. This network included party officials, urban intellectuals and ordinary peasants and workers. It also included many Romanians seeking to emigrate from the country, which was a brutal Stalinist dictatorship. Through the mid-​ 1980s, I returned to Romania usually twice a year, sometimes with my wife and child, doing research, updating my data and just visiting friends and colleagues. I felt at home, and people felt at home seeing me when I returned after many months away. It is a familiar emotion for most anthropologists when people say, ‘Oh now, you’ve returned to us again’. During the 1980s, however, Romania’s political and economic situation deteriorated. There were shortages of food, electricity, heat, everything. There were also worker protests and small human rights movements among intellectuals and the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, where I worked. The government’s suspicion of foreigners also increased. A law was now enforced making it illegal for any foreigner to stay overnight in a Romanian home. In addition, any Romanian who even spoke to a foreigner had to submit a written report to the police. Academic contacts were restricted, and all communications between foreigners and Romanians –​letters, phone calls, visits, and so forth –​were monitored, censored, controlled or simply forbidden. My own secret police file contains reports by police observers, statements written by ordinary Romanians explaining how they met me and what we talked about, copies of papers that I had presented at conferences abroad and letters I sent into and out of the country. In Denmark, where I have been living since 1978, Romanian diplomats in Copenhagen also made their own reports about me, having met me at meetings of the Danish-​ Romanian Friendship Association or when I applied for a entry visa. I was a ‘person of interest’. I was approached by the embassy and asked to gather information about exiled Romanians living in Denmark; and by the Danish security police regarding a suspected Romanian spy living in a Danish asylum center. One evening in Copenhagen, a Romanian diplomat, the embassy’s political officer, knocked on the door of my apartment with a gift of football tickets to the Denmark–​Romania match. His report is in my file.

106  Anna Hedlund and Steven Sampson Yes, life during the Cold War had this curious combination of paranoia and excitement. Why were the Romanian authorities and the embassy officials so interested in an American anthropologist researching village planning, employed as an ordinary teaching assistant at Copenhagen University? One uses up emotional energy simply speculating on this. The Romanians’ interest in me derived from the fact that many of my articles depicted socialist Romania in a negative light (see www.ste​vens​ amps​onte​xts.com). I had written about planning and improvisation, bureaucracy and corruption, the underground economy, political rumors, emigration, Radio Free Europe and the secret police itself. My publications were also floating around the country among my Romanian friends, and they were found among the possessions of other foreign researchers in Romania. I had given interviews on the BBC and written for Danish and U.S. media. A few privileged Romanians who visited me in Denmark or who met me at conferences also made reports about me and our conversations. Some told me never to visit them in Romania, that they would get into trouble. Others invited me into their homes whenever I came to Romania, but they also filed reports with the secret police afterward. Everyone had their reasons, as Katherine Verdery (2018) has described in detail. By the mid-​1980s, I had become dangerous enough to ‘qualify’ as a threat to the state. The final pages of my secret police file detail my detention at the Bucharest airport in 1985, when I tried to enter Romania on holiday with my wife and two young children. I was now persona non grata, my file stating that I had ‘conducted activities that were contrary to the interests of the Romanian state’, and that I should be denied entry into the country for a period of five years.

‘Don’t visit us again. You only make trouble.’ Let me now return to the years just before I was denied entry into the country. After ten years visiting Romania, I had made some close friends. Two of my closest friends were ‘Andrei’ and ‘Maria’ (pseudonyms). My wife and I had originally lived in the village with Andrei’s uncle, so we got to know each other at these family gatherings. Andrei and Maria lived in the city of Brașov, 20 km away, in an eighth floor apartment, with their young daughter. Andrei was an engineer in a tractor factory, and Maria worked in an architectural planning office. They were my age and very personable, and whenever my wife and I went to Brașov, we invited them out for dinner or just sat around and talked in their home. When I visited them, we could relax, gossiping about people in the village or talking about conditions in Romania (in a low voice). I would bring along some Johnny Walker whiskey, Kent cigarettes or Toblerone chocolate from the ‘dollar shop’, where Romanians could not enter. When visiting from Denmark, I would bring Danish baby clothes for their daughter or cosmetics for Maria. Over the years, we exchanged letters and phone calls, and I visited them whenever I came to Romania. They even invited me to stay overnight in their home illegally. Of course, we talked

Involved and detached: emotional management in fieldwork  107 about them visiting me in Denmark, a procedure that required me to send them a formal invitation, after which they would apply for a passport to visit the West. By the mid-​1980s, my visits to Romania had become more stressful. I could not obtain a research permission, so I visited on a tourist visa, sometimes with a Danish charter group going to a nearby ski resort in Brașov or to the Black Sea beaches, and then went off on my own. I tried to remain inconspicuous, traveling light and speaking as a Romanian. Visiting Andrei and Maria in their apartment at night, we talked softly. We did not go out anymore. I used the same procedure with other Romanian friends. I was paranoid, but as it turned out, naive. In 1983 I sent a formal invitation letter to Andrei and Maria to visit me in Denmark. They would now have to apply for a passport, which involved extensive investigation and interrogation by the passport bureau and the security police. For Andrei and Maria, my invitation thus led them to have several interviews with the Romanian police and the security organs regarding their relations with me. Since I was not a relative, and since my name was already in their files, my invitation to them was suspicious. How did they know me? What had I asked them about the factory in the village? What about the factory in Brașov where Andrei worked? Did they know that I was a spy? Did not Andrei, an engineer in a strategic factory, understand that he was being used by me? Didn’t he understand that I had invited him to Denmark in order get secrets out of him? After some weeks, their application was rejected, and they were told not to correspond with me or meet with me if I came to Romania. In the summer of 1984, I returned to Romania for a brief visit. I had written to Andrei and Maria that I was coming. I landed in Bucharest and took a train to Brașov and made my way to their apartment. But they were never at home. For several days, every time I went to their apartment, there was no answer. Their phone did not answer either. I figured that they must be on vacation on the Black Sea coast. Some years later, they explained to me that they were terrified of meeting me for fear of the police. Every day for that week I was in Brașov, they had gone out into the forest for a picnic in order to avoid seeing me. Waiting to contact Andrei and Maria, I went out to the village, where people were more accommodating and happy to see me. I stayed with my former host family. I had brought a gift package for Andrei and Maria, some chocolates and children’s clothes. Andrei’s mother lived in the village, so to be safe, I asked the young boy from the family with whom I was living to walk over to Andrei’s mother and give her the package with my greetings. She should tell Andrei and Maria that I was here, and that if they were around, they could come around the corner to where I was staying. They never came. The next day, walking through the village, I ran into Andrei on the street. He was here visiting his mother. He spoke to me briefly and coldly: ‘Thank you for the package. No, we cannot meet. Please do not visit us. Don’t visit

108  Anna Hedlund and Steven Sampson anybody, you’ll only make trouble for them. Good-​bye’. Then he walked away. I knew things were bad, but it was not until now that I knew how bad. Here was a guy whom I had known for ten years, having spent hours and days in their apartment, and he just walks away like I have some kind of disease. This was a period when any Romanian who spoke to a foreigner had to make a report to the police, and when others could inform on them. On the other hand, I had met dozens of people who did not care about the law, including the family with whom I was staying. So I could never be sure who felt intimidated by these laws and who did not. I later found out that Andrei and Maria, even though their request to visit Denmark had been rejected, continued to be called in for interrogation. Their situation was so serious, they explained later, that they contemplated suicide. Their relationship with me was making their life horrible. Andrei had been threatened that he would not be promoted to chief engineer in the factory. Their daughter would not be allowed to enter gymnasium. Because of me, their life was falling apart. Following my brief encounter with Andrei, I returned to Denmark, depressed and paranoid. Perhaps I could do something to alleviate the situation. In Copenhagen, ever the American optimist, I visited the ­ Romanian embassy to try to renew my invitation to Andrei and Maria, and to ask the embassy attaché if they could intervene. Perhaps there was a mistake. One of the diplomats happened to come from the same village where Andrei had been born. I asked him if he could help with the invitation so that they could visit me in Copenhagen. We talked cordially, and he was impressed that I knew so much about his home district. The attaché said he would look into the case. Of course, nothing came of it. Instead, he also wrote a report about me in my secret police file, saying that I was suspicious. How naive was I. After he retired, he wrote several books about his life as a secret police operative. The next summer, I again returned to Romania with my wife and two kids. Perhaps I could find a way to see Andrei and Maria again and find out what had gone wrong. Arriving at the Bucharest airport passport control with my tourist visa, the red light on the border police’s computer began to blinking. The young policeman in the passport control looked at me, looked at my passport, looked at me again, and then told me to wait over in the corner of the transit hall. I later discovered from my secret police file that some months earlier, I had been declared ‘forbidden to enter’. My family and I remained in the hot, stuffy Bucharest airport transit hall that night, and the next day we were put on the flight back to Copenhagen. Back in Denmark, I continued to write about Romania as the situation deteriorated. But I did not send any letters or Christmas cards to Romanian friends. On December 25, 1989, following mass demonstrations, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife were captured, quickly put on trial for crimes against the Romanian people, and executed by firing squad. That was the end of the communist regime in Romania. Some days later, I received a Christmas card

Involved and detached: emotional management in fieldwork  109 from Andrei and Maria wishing me and my family all the best and hoping that we could now meet. Three months later, I was in their apartment in Brașov. They explained what had happened to them: the forest ‘picnics’ to avoid meeting me, the continuing interrogations, the thoughts of suicide. All because of their relations with me. Because of me. Some months later, they finally visited me in Denmark, and I have met them several times since then. We discuss the secret police each time. They just bring it up, it’s a traumatic experience for them, and I feel like shit. I can also see the records of their interrogation in my secret police files, where not just them but many other Romanians whom I felt close to had to make statements about their relations with me, after which the police would then draw conclusions as to my activities (one of the senior officers writes, ‘Well, is he a spy or isn’t he?’). Of course, I can say to Andrei and Maria, ‘Well, neither you nor I did anything wrong, it was an oppressive system’. But then of course, I realize that perhaps I was naive, thinking that relations between individuals could somehow dominate or win out over an oppressive system. I know other Romanians didn’t give a damn about the police, especially those in the village, with little to lose. But do I have the right to accuse Andrei and Maria of being too paranoid? Was I just too naive? Was I not paranoid enough? Should I have been less engaged and more detached? As anyone who has lived in or studied an oppressive system knows, people adjust to such systems differently according to circumstance and context. Some people endure their oppression silently, but will then suddenly become openly resistant. Others use their energies trying to beat the system, playing it as if it were a game, some as criminals, others trying to get around the censorship. Still others are simply passive, trying to live a normal life, shielding themselves from the system. Finally, it is the nature of oppressive systems that they can recruit, intimidate and reward people who col­laborate. Some collaborate out of a sense of survival, while others collaborate for crudely opportunistic reasons that they can rationalize later as ‘I had no other choice’ or ‘Everyone was doing it’. In Romania, I came to know all these types of people. Some Romanian functionaries were visibly nervous if I walked into their office. They knew they would have to explain what they were doing talking to an American. They knew that they would now have to file a report. Other people did not care at all about the police, as when I observed an old peasant woman openly insulting the policeman when he came to visit her house during our visit. Andrei and Maria’s reactions lie on one end of this fear/​paranoia spectrum of how people cope with oppressive political systems. In the early days, both they and I were rather naive. Later on, they began to realize that their relations with me carried some risk. They became paranoid, I remained naive. Finally, especially when the education of their child was threatened, they decided that maintaining relations with me was a genuine

110  Anna Hedlund and Steven Sampson threat: ‘Don’t visit anybody, you’ll only make trouble for them’. I’ll never forget it. I still grapple with whether I should have been more paranoid. Should I have been more detached? Did I not let my optimism as an American, or my feeling of importance as a foreigner in Romania, overshadow my judgment? Did I have some kind of ‘right’ to engagement with my informants-​cum-​ friends in Romania when I knew that it might get them in trouble? Or should I insist to Andrei and Maria that they were wrong to blame me when it was the system they should blame? Max Gluckman once edited a book entitled Closed Systems and Open Minds: The Limits of Naivete in Social Anthropology. I think of this book when I look back on my relations with Romanians during this time. We learn as ethnographers that we should be open and involved with the people we study. We are told to express solidarity with them, to be friendly, to expose ourselves, to put our ‘self’ into our fieldwork. We learn engagement. We don’t learn detachment. We don’t learn paranoia. Perhaps we should have.

Conclusions: ‘distance learning’ We have provided two examples of fieldwork in difficult settings. Despite the different settings –​conflict and violence in the Congo and surveillance and intimidation in communist Romania –​both cases involved working in contexts of unpredictability, anxiety and fear. We have shown that while anthropologists are often taught that access and proximity will ultimately generate good data about people’s lived experience, we anthropologists also need to learn how to distance ourselves. We need to learn how to back off sometimes. How do we find the balance between the desired proximity of fieldwork and the scientific distance needed to make competent analysis? How do we avoid falling into the traps of ‘ethnographic seduction’? How do we prepare for ‘messy’ fieldwork? One way to deal with methodological or ethical dilemmas that might arise in the field is to read about other ethnographers’ dilemmas in the field. While we often teach students that anthropological methods are about getting close to the people we study, we should also teach them about distance, and how our own emotions may impact our research. This is the ‘emotional management’ we are advocating here. In Hedlund’s case, the problem was knowing when ‘ethnographic seduction’ was taking place and how it impacted the research. She needed to be aware of this when dealing with people who have carried out acts of violence. From an emotional or moral standpoint, she had to take a step back and try to understand how informants incorporated their violent practices into their life-​world. This task is difficult and emotionally burdensome. Observing and hearing accounts of violence is not just gathering of ethnographic data. It generates its own emotional effects. We thus need strategies

Involved and detached: emotional management in fieldwork  111 to distance ourselves from these experiences and learn how to better take care of and manage our feelings after fieldwork so that we do not produce analyses that are overly based on feelings. We need more ‘distance learning’ as we prepare for fieldwork. In Sampson’s Romanian case, there was a combination of naiveté in understanding the power of an oppressive state to affect personal relationships, and the guilt caused by the privileges that an ethnographer has in being able to enter and leave the field setting at will. Here the task is to gain a better understanding of the setting in which one enters, and the possible emotional pitfalls that can arise when one becomes close to certain informants. Emotional management means knowing that someone is always keeping a file on you. Sometimes the file is written down; other times the ‘file’ is embedded in the attitudes and assumptions of others who may want to get close to you for the resources you offer, or who may distance themselves from you because you pose a risk. The proximity–​distance dilemma is a kind of double bind. Calling this ‘messy’ is a euphemism. Messes can be cleaned up. Ethnographic double binds of this kind cannot. It requires some kind of emotional management. Management does not solve the problem; it only ‘manages’ it. We are beginning to read more about the messy realities or the ­ethical or emotional dilemmas that other anthropologists have experienced. There is more ‘confessional ethnography’ out there. Nevertheless, it is still those texts that are polished and finished, those with more intellectual analyses and theoretical insights that have priority. The ‘feelings’ of the ethnographer are used to provide the context. The emotional part of the ethnography remains in the introductory section, rarely forming the object of the analysis. As social scientists, we are afraid of appearing narcissistic; after all, our ethnography is supposed to be about them, not about us. Hence, we tend not to share ‘behind the scenes’ stories or talk about our own emotions and how that may have affected the analysis. We may talk about our fieldwork with other researchers or colleagues when we have a drink, but we refrain from talking about hardships and emotions and how they influence the research process. Such talk makes us look vulnerable or (Heaven forbid!) unscientific. The task, therefore, is to replace this fear of vulnerability by combining the proximity so essential to ethnography with distance. We need both involvement and detachment. We need a new kind of ‘distance learning’, not in front of a computer screen, but learning how to distance ourselves from our ethnographic object. This promotion of ‘distance learning’ may seem paradoxical. We spend so much time and energy trying to get close; we spend weeks, months, even years. With a distance learning agenda, we also need to learn how to be there physically, but to detach emotionally, how to take a step back. It is the dialectic between involvement and detachment which is the core of ethnography, and which can make for better anthropology.

112  Anna Hedlund and Steven Sampson

References Cloke, Paul, Cooke, Phil, Cursons, Jerry, Milbourne, Paul, and Widdowfield, Rebekah (2000). Ethics, Reflexivity and Research: Encounters with Homeless People. Ethics, Place & Environment, 3(2): 133–​154. Cyanne, Loyle, and Simoni, Alicia (2014). “Research Under Fire: Researcher Trauma and Conflict Studies”. Blogpost, October 30, 2014: available at: http://​pol​itic​alvi​ olen​ceat​agla​nce.org/​2014/​10/​30/​resea​rch-​under-​fire-​res​earc​her-​tra​uma-​and-​confl​ ict-​stud​ies/​ (Accessed January, 2021). Hedlund, Anna (2019). Hutu Rebels: Exile Warriors in the Eastern Congo. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hedlund, Anna (2017). Simple Soldiers? Blurring the Distinction between Compulsion and Commitment among Rwandan Rebels in the Eastern Congo. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 87(4): 1–​19. Hedlund, Anna (2015). ‘There was no Genocide in Rwanda’: History, Politics, and Exile Identity among Rwandan Rebels in the Eastern Congo Conflict. Conflict & Society: Advances in Research, 1(1): 23–​40. Jauregui, Beatrice (2013). Dirty Anthropology: Epistemologies of Violence and ethical Entanglements in Police Ethnography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kideckel, David, and Sampson, Steven (1984). Fieldwork in Romania: Political, Practical and Ethical Aspects. Amherst: UMASS Research Report nr 24 (www. ste​vens​amps​onte​xts). Kovats-​ Bernat, J. Christopher (2002). Negotiating Dangerous Fields: Pragmatic Strategies for Fieldwork amid Violence and Terror. American Anthropologist, 104(1): 208–​222. Maček, Ivana (2014). Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory and Representation. Abingdon: Routledge. Ngai, Sianne (2009). Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Robben, Antonius (1996). Ethnographic Seduction, Transference, and Resistance in Dialogues about Terror and Violence in Argentina. Ethos, 24: 71–​106. Robben, Antonius, and Nordstrom, Carolyn (1995). The Anthropology and Ethnography of Violence and Sociopolitical Conflict. In: Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, edited by Robben, Antonius and Nordstrom, Carolyn. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–​25. Sampson, Steven (2020). Tattoos and Ankle Bracelets: Recalling Fieldwork in Romania. In: Recalling Fieldwork: People, Places and Encounters, edited by Raluca Mateoc and Francois. Ruegg. Zurich: Lit. Forlag, pp. 119–​141. (www.ste​ vens​amps​onte​xts.com). Sampson, Steven (2019). How I became a ‘Romania expert’. Studiu Sociologica Univ Babes Bolyai, Cluj 2/​2018 ed. by Iuliu Ratiu (www.ste​vens​amps​onte​xts.com). Sampson, Steven (1984). National Integration through Socialist Planning: An Anthropological Study of a Romanian New Town. Boulder: East European Monographs (www.ste​vens​amps​onte​xts.com). Sampson, Steven, and Kideckel, David (1989) Anthropologists Going Into the Cold: Research in the Age of Mutually Assured Destruction. In: The Anthropology of War and Peace , edited by Paul R. Turner and David Pitt. Granby, MA: Bergin and Garvey, pp. 160–​173. (www.stev​ensa​mpso​nste​xts.com). Sluka, Jeffery (1995). Reflections on Managing Danger in Fieldwork: Dangerous Fieldwork in Belfast. In: Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of

Involved and detached: emotional management in fieldwork  113 Violence and Survival, edited by Nordstrom, Carolyn and Robben, Antonius. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 276–​295. Verdery, Katherine (2018). My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Durham: Duke University Press. Vlassenroot, Koen (2006). War and Social Research. The Limits of Empirical Methodologies in War-​torn Environments. Civilisations, 54:191–​198. Weiss, Nerina (2016). Research under Duress: Resonance and Distance in Ethnographic Fieldwork. In: Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory and Representation. Edited by Maček, Ivana. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 127–​140. Wood, Elisabeth Jean (2006). The Ethical Challenges of Field Research in Conflict Zones. Qualitative Sociology, 29:373–​386.

10 On Catalina’s silence and the things about her I still do not know how to say Simone Toji

It still lingers. That silence. I met this girl. A girl from Paraguay. I met her in São Paulo and fieldwork1 was never the same again. It was December 2013. I was temporarily working at a restaurant owned by South Koreans, when Catalina2 and her boyfriend Jonny arrived to replace the employees who had left for Christmas in Paraguay. The South Korean owners gave them aprons. Jonny was given a tray to serve the customers’ tables and Catalina was directed to the kitchen to slice scallions. One day in January 2014, Catalina and I were drinking in a local corner bar. Gales of alcoholic laughter were already resonating throughout the place. I offered my glass of cachaça3 to Catalina, but she ordered a bottle of Skol4 and commented, ‘In Paraguay, people are used to aguardiente5 Tres Leones.’ She had just left her work shift at the restaurant at about 22:30 and I was not working there any more. After sipping from her glass of beer, she asked me, ‘How was your New Year’s Eve?’ ‘The usual,’ I said, ‘family, partner, greetings at midnight, nothing special. How was yours?’ I enquired. She gulped down the beer and revealed, Jonny locked me in my room when I was going to celebrate the night with a female friend. He said he would join his cousins … He came, took the keys and left me all alone. I shouted all night long, I tried to phone some friends, but everybody had already left to party. I threw away all Jonny’s stuff through the window. The bastard came back around 5 A.M. Shocked by Catalina’s story, I instantly offered my help because if she wished, she could report Jonny to the Women’s Special Police Office. I would certainly assist her to do so. Although my intention was to be sympathetic to her, I risked being judgemental. In the face of what I considered to be violent, I felt an insurmountable responsibility to do something about it. At least, to be available to go through lawful measures with her, if necessary. Realizing that I took her too seriously, Catalina placed her glass on the table and very DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-10

On Catalina’s silence  115 affably dissuaded me from this idea. ‘No, no! New year, new life!’ She added that Jonny was not living with her anymore; he was staying with his cousins in another neighbourhood. My impulsive reaction was unexpected for Catalina, as her tolerant attitude regarding Jonny was for me. All of sudden we became aware how distant our moral worlds stood from one another. After this day, I only had sparse communication with Catalina through a mobile application. She often posted very sensuous pictures of herself on her app profile that mimicked those portraits of vintage femmes fatales. I generally considered this to be an expression of self-​esteem. However, on 5 February 2014, she posted something unusual: (Imagine here a picture of a large female eye with a dripping tear on the corner)

Caty

Status: Oh, pain that stabs my heart

I immediately texted Catalina asking how she was and she wrote back, ‘In fact, Simone, I have to tell you, I trust you, I’m pregnant and don’t know what to do.’ I advised her to look for the local health unit or to buy a pregnancy test in order to be certain about it. I also offered my availability to accompany her in either option. A few days later, she texted me: ‘Test is positive.’ I then wrote back asking: ‘What do you want to do?’ She took some hours to reply, but later that afternoon she shared a decision: ‘I want to see Jonny to decide what to do.’ By the end of that month, Catalina had updated her profile again: (Imagine here a picture of Our Lady of Caacupé in close-​up)

Caty Status:

When I identified the image of Our Lady of Caacupé, patron saint of Paraguay, and Catalina’s blank status on her profile, I suspected that her conversation with Jonny had not gone very well. I immediately texted her again asking if she was okay. She did not reply, though. For a while, she remained silent to my messages and I was left wondering what happened to her. I could not prevent myself from worrying. I then imagined the moment when Catalina, a few weeks pregnant, became aware that the man who was responsible for her situation was not going to support or provide for her. I knew she had to make the difficult decision between having the child of an absent father in a country where she did not have the papers to stay or risking her life in an illegal abortion, as in Brazil abortion is generally considered a criminal offence. I was left imagining that in being alone in São Paulo, the pregnancy would change Catalina’s previous plans of working in Brazil and sending remittances to her ten-​year-​old son and mother in Paraguay. For reasons unstated, going back to her mother’s house in her country of origin was not considered an option at that moment. Catalina worked informally in a restaurant owned by migrants from South Korea

116  Simone Toji and the pregnancy would simply reinforce the precarious conditions of her life in Brazil. Intriguingly, at such a critical moment, she renewed her connection to Our Lady of Caacupé. Catalina appealed to the divine grace of a more-​than-​human entity using a mobile phone application. In doing this, she made somewhat public, for those who had her number, something about her current state. Left wondering, I was moved by her situation. This provoked me to establish an empathetic attitude concerning Catalina’s silence. I wanted to be sympathetic to this silence, but it caused me much uneasiness since I could not agree with Catalina’s insistence on being attached to someone who, by the standards of my values, had mistreated her beyond what was reasonable. I was deeply affected by her circumstances since I considered them to be treacherous. However, Catalina did not see the circumstances the same way I did. She was noticeably tormented, but she refused to blame Jonny or claim any compensation she could be entitled to. In such a quandary, what is the ethics that can bind us evenly without causing us to fall into acts of patronization or disregard? Wouldn’t it be equally brutal to assign violence to an event to which the recipient of our concern does not? Would it be negligence not to raise awareness about our perception of violence on such occasions? Is it possible to be ‘right,’ ‘unbiased’ or ‘appropriate’ during such episodes? Touched by Catalina’s particular drama, but without knowing how to deal with it, I found recourse to transform it into a fictional piece. Through fiction, I attempted to comprehend what it would be like to have such an intimate relationship with a mobile phone and the social media application that allowed Catalina to build the most varied representations of herself. I also wanted to sense what it meant to live in very precarious labour conditions with other international migrants from other countries of the world in a city such as São Paulo, and the power relations it involved. Through fiction, I had to admit that nothing that I wrote about Catalina was real, but at least I could open an alternative space that did not impose easy and irresponsible characterizations of her situation. Through fiction, I could explore the contradictions of her apparent choices and the blurry moti­vations that puzzled me. As a result, by integrating imagination and fiction as an ethnographic practice regarding my experiences with Catalina, I eventually found a research attitude which assumed that ethnography should be open enough to cover the complexities and particularities of life and the world. This was how the short story below emerged. It is not how things happened; it is my imagination inspired by some events in Catalina’s life, and it is the way I found to attend to her silence.

Selfie Oh, baby, how beautiful you are with your hair falling on your shoulders. Yeah, this little red mouth, it makes one crazy to bite. Now, look at those almond eyes … a danger, tigress. Yes, Catita, now like Marilyn Monroe,

On Catalina’s silence  117 arms close to your neck and mouth pouting. Cute. Seductive smile, almost Angelina Jolie. Catalina posed alone in front of the full-​length mirror and captured frames of herself with the mobile. She was searching for the best angle by moving her right arm down and left shoulder up. Oh, that’s it. She chose the photo in which she’s sitting on the bed, covered only by the beige sheet of purple flowers, legs half-​open, long hair loose over her right shoulder. It did not look like she had just woken up. She posted the image and wrote: Only true love saves. Then, she waited.

No sign of Jonny He did not come to sleep that night, did not respond to her messages, nor did he like her photos. She called his mobile several times and nothing. She just saw him again at work at Mr Kim’s restaurant. Jonny came in smiling, with his peroxide blonde hair and worn-​out jeans, bouncing confidence. Hello. He did not even have time to justify himself to Catalina; maybe he had not even thought about it. He received the apron and tray from Mr Kim’s hands, who immediately dispatched him to the customers without hesitation: Table 10. Catalina remained in the kitchen chopping chives and followed Jonny’s silver hair travelling among the tables of the restaurant. Meanwhile, Ms Li lost patience with her team of Paraguayan assistants. Oh, no, where’s the lettuce? Caty, scissors. Go, get scissors. Francisco, kimchi, kimchi, bring it. Catalina hurriedly wiped her hands on the apron and searched the kitchen for the scissors. She had an instant of cursing: Miserable Korean, fifteen years in Paraguay and she still doesn’t speak decent Spanish. And now living here in São Paulo she doesn’t speak Portuguese either. Finally, Catalina found the scissors under the dishwasher and, still wet, she handed them to Mr Li, who immediately cut the pajeón6 into symmetrical squares to go to the customers. The bell of the restaurant rang, signalling the presence of other customers at the barred entrance. Catalina glanced towards the security circuit TV while cleaning the bean sprouts. On the black-​and-​white screen, she squeezed her eyes and could not make out anything very well. Because of the delay in opening the door, Ms Li shouted at her: Brazilian or Korean? Catalina continued looking at the screen, and without getting any response, Ms Li got impatient and went herself to see the TV. Oh, they’re Brazilians … Go, Caty, tell them that the restaurant is closing, that there’s no more food. Off she went to lie to the unwanted visitors with her precarious portunhol7: Sorry, everything is now closed. Returning to the kitchen, she saw Jonny across the hall. He did not even smile at her and continued to serve the tables as if she were not there, because there, in fact, only the Korean customers’ desires mattered. At the end of the day, Jonny, of course, was not waiting for her.

118  Simone Toji

Beauty, you are irresistible! Loosen your silky hair and turn your face to the left. Yes, great, close your eyes and blow a kiss with your right hand. Do not forget to bend your waist to the left. A little more to the left, more and … Yes! Catalina pressed the button on her mobile and was pleased with the image of herself. She updated her post and wrote: When love is eternal, nothing else matters. Then she pressed a kiss on the mobile screen. Whoever noticed the left corner of the picture would see the almost imperceptible part of a window. From that corner, the broken glass let in a heart-​shivering cold wind. But Catalina did not perceive it. God, she could not believe it when she realized that the door latch turned. Her heart accelerated, and when she saw that Jonny was entering the room, she could not prevent herself from shouting with joy. It was New Year’s Eve and she hadn’t seen him for ages. She had just put on her white polka-​dot dress and was about to apply some lipstick in front of the mirror. She was getting ready to leave with other Paraguayans who wanted to take advantage of the New Year’s celebration on Paulista Avenue. Nívea came to call her from the corridor, but without even opening the door, Catalina hugged Jonny and simply shouted out a No, dear, I’m staying here, thank you! Jonny smiled at her and placed the kiss on her mouth that she was desperately longing for. Oh, my god. Both fell on the creased bed. Jonny unzipped his shabby jeans and then nested himself between Catalina’s legs. Catalina did not have time to understand what had happened, but she was glad to have Jonny back in her room that night. She just did not expect him to get up, close the zipper and tell her, I’m going to celebrate with my brothers. He went to the bedroom door, took Catalina’s keys from the latch and locked the door from outside. Catalina, still dishevelled, could not believe what was happening. Jonny, Jonny, she screamed while forcing the lock on the door without success. Jonny, don’t leave me alone, I beg you! She decided to call for Nívea, but her friend had already left. She yelled for help in case there was somebody left in one of the other little rooms. But nothing, no one. She did not dare to scream out the window; she was afraid that the police would come because she didn’t have the papers to stay. She became infuriated and began to put together everything that belonged to Jonny, the black Mizoono8 cap, the Men Active deodorant, the blue Calvin Clein9 underwear. She took what was his and hurled it through the window facing a car park. When Catalina realized that the fireworks were bursting across the city, she could not bear the commotion in her ears and started to scream out loud. She began the new year already breathless and voiceless.

Baby, I do not see anything different You look pretty as always. Satin skin, shiny hair, soft lips. Catalina travelled the mobile around herself, examining the moving image carefully. You are

On Catalina’s silence  119 still very beautiful. Arriving at about her waist, she held the device for a moment and shrugged her belly. She shrank it a little further and lifted the mobile to her head again. She drew the phone closer to her right eye, but the camera could not focus so close; she clicked the blurred image of her honey-​ coloured pupil. She posted the photo and typed: Love is blind. In the restaurant, usually, there was not a second of respite. Catalina and her colleagues cut the vegetables, washed the utensils, carried out the trash. When the house was at its full capacity, no way. But that day, as soon as she stepped into the kitchen, Catalina was summoned by Ms Li: Caty, Jonny says you’re pregnant. We don’t want you like this. Mr Kim will pay you the month.10 Catalina tried to argue that she could still work and needed that job, but Ms Li was emphatic: Like this, we don’t want you, we don’t want you. But Catalina wanted to. She wanted to be in Jonny’s arms and, now that she carried a child in her womb, she hoped to bring him definitely into her life. Sitting on her bed, she called his number on her mobile phone and waited. It rang once, twice, it rang three times. It rang for the fourth time and Catalina was fading inside. It rang for the fifth time and, to her surprise, the bastard answered. Catalina had a moment of rapture. However, it lasted only a second, because the voice on the other side did not even give her room to murmur a hello. It was like a slap on her face: Fuck, don’t bother me, I’m with my girlfriend! And he hung up on her. Catalina kept the phone in her hands. She breathed once, twice, and did not feel she was alive. She turned on the camera mode and looked at the device screen. She looked and stared at the image of her own face, observed the screen amplify her protruding belly and thick legs. She felt ugly, fat and alone. She chose not to take a photo and continued to follow the mobile screen, now exploring her feet, the bed and the floor of her bedroom. She noticed the consumed mattress and the damp beaten floor. She pointed to the red closet without a door, the grimy two-​burner stove and the tiny space between the bed and the door. Without work, the pots remained empty on the tiny improvised sink. From the window, light burst through the screen in white torrents. But it was there, at the corner of the window that she recovered the image of her Virgen de Caacupé. It was the size of a beer can. She approached her mobile to the saint, framed it in full screen and pressed the button. She posted the photo but did not write anything that day. She just joined her hands on the right side, pressed the phone to her chest and fell for a silent and inspired prayer. In 2017, I showed a translated version of this short story to Catalina. I was anxious about her reaction. She was working in São Paulo, but her two sons were living with her mother in Paraguay. When she finished reading, she said that the text was beautiful; however, for her, ‘Everything had already passed.’ In her usual pragmatic mood, she stated that she did not care about Jonny anymore and, if I wanted to, I could even publish the story with her real name. I explained that I used pseudonyms not to expose her and other’s

120  Simone Toji identities and so everyone could continue their lives without any major disturbance. Catalina grinned slightly and directing her eyes to the sheets, startled me once more by declaring, ‘You know, I am not this girl anymore.’ It was then my turn to smile and be in silence, pondering these last words. Disarmed by her response to the fictional piece, I sensed that all my questions became irrelevant. It was not the time to clarify the ethnographer’s disciplinary afflictions. It was time to move on and just share bits of our current lives. The meeting was far from being elucidating; it actually maintained all the ambivalences that were already in place. Still, regarding the short story, it was significant that even if the piece had its own characters and plot, Catalina recognized it as something referring to her, though a past and supplanted version of herself. In a way, her reaction confirmed to me that fiction can open a generous interpersonal dimension within which Catalina and I could partake in something outside of the standards of explication. By using imagination and fiction, I wanted to reach a generous ground upon which the anthropologist’s moral world could meet the interlocutor’s, being humanely mindful about the stakes at play. Assuming that one of the purposes of the anthropologist’s work ‘is to enlarge a specific experience to the dimensions of a more general one, which thereby becomes accessible as experience’ (Lévi-​Strauss 1963:17), I consider that writing fiction in the way I did for Catalina may be a way to accomplish such an end. First, it made a difficult and unclear experience accessible for the anthropologist. Now that the short story is being shared here with a larger audience, it is time to see if such an experience resonates with other readers. While deducing relations, models or diagrams from fieldwork has been the usual procedure undertaken by anthropologists to reach a more general dimension of reflexivity, I like to believe that writing fiction from field experiences may be another means to get to this dimension, a dimension that should also embrace a dense sense of what it is to be human from very particular –​even personal and contradictory –​ experiences of life.

Notes 1 During my doctoral studies, I spent 16 months in São Paulo and a couple of cities in Bolivia and South Korea from September 2013 to January 2015. In my dissertation, I focused on the personal trajectories of international migrants of varied places of origin, such as Paraguay, South Korea, China and Bolivia, in order to discuss questions of subjectivity, belonging, ethnography and urban studies. 2 All names are pseudonyms. 3 Brazilian spirit made with sugarcane. 4 Brazilian beer. 5 Paraguayan spirit. 6 Korean dish made from a batter of eggs, wheat flour, rice flour, scallions and often other ingredients depending on the variety. 7 The language mixture of Spanish and Portuguese.

On Catalina’s silence  121 8 Reference to cheap products imitating famous brands. 9 Another reference to cheap products imitating famous brands. 10 The character is not a native speaker.

Reference Lévi-​ Strauss, Claude. 1963. ‘History and Anthropology’. In: Lévi-​Strauss, C. Structural Anthropology. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1–​27.

11 Side effects How fieldwork and ethnography helped me reclaim my life Molly Hurley Depret

Introduction I almost didn’t write this. I almost didn’t write any of this –​not this article, not the dissertation that I deposited almost exactly one year ago, not the pulp fiction that I began publishing in February 2019 while beginning to jettison my decade-​long career in policy. In fact, I had hardly written since leaving the Anthropology doctoral program at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2008–​2009. Paradoxically, despite not writing, I still wrote. A lot. But I wrote for other people, in other people’s voices. I wrote speaking points and op-​eds. I wrote blog posts for a European Commissioner in an upbeat, optimistic yet sage and authoritative voice. I wrote to editors at the Guardian or FAZ or l’Obs to pitch them story ideas about my clients’ latest research findings. I sent them “quotes” that I had written. I wrote press releases that made headlines around the globe. I was The Wizard of Oz, an ethical spin doctor for good causes. And I was hiding. These were not my projects. No matter how “good” or noble they were –​ speaking truth to power about climate change, EU development policy, or off-​grid energy in the global south –​they were nonetheless removed from me. They were removed from what I consider my “real” creative work, my purpose, an essential part of who I am. My work, my creativity, my curiosity were taken from me, and now I’m reclaiming them. In doing so, I’m reclaiming my life. Let me tell you a story.

A flash of the past On 7 August 2018, I was on the “Shop Life” tour of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City while on vacation with my partner, Etienne. Our guide, a researcher originally from Germany, was walking us through the history of this space, a former bar that then transformed into a kosher butcher’s; a lingerie shop; a convenience store, among other things DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-11

Side effects  123 over time. We moved to a room where an interactive exhibit allowed us to pick up objects from the shop’s past and hear and see their histories via some technological magic. I chose a wallet and placed it on a table and began to see photos and to listen to the histories of a family who had owned this shop at one time. Maybe through the materiality of this object or maybe by listening to their voices, or some alchemy between the two, I thought of my own archives of people’s histories in Ballynafeigh/​the upper Ormeau Road of Belfast, Northern Ireland from 11 years earlier. I realized in a gut-​ punching flash that I had to recover them, listen to them, write about them. Like Walter Benjamin’s “flash” of the past (Benjamin [1940] 1999, 247), I had to seize it and recognize it before it disappeared. I spoke intensely to Etienne on the M train afterwards and told him it was finally time to write about the people I had known. Once back in our hotel room, I began writing in a journal like I had years earlier in Belfast. I wrote in a journal that I bought in the gift shop of the Tenement Museum, unaware of its purpose, drawn to its pink and green cover of a map of New York City. I finally realized what I had known all along: that these histories were not mine to keep stored away on an old hard drive or in dusty notebooks in a storage room on the outskirts of Brussels, the city where I had lived immediately post-​fieldwork. They deserved a proper home, and an audience to hear them. I had to return to Belfast, not physically –​though I would eventually in October 2019 –​but through digital files of decade-​old conversations, hard drives, field notes, and through the evocations of journalists, novelists, poets, anthropologists, and philosophers. As you’ll see, I, too, am a part of this archive, not merely its interpreter mining it for “meanings of history” (Collins 2015, 357) but as part of the process of writing about my and others’ experiences as history. Some days later, still in the United States with my files at home in Luxembourg, I was panicked by whether I would be able to recover the files from my old hard drive. My father assuaged my worries: unlike people, hard drives don’t forget anything, he said. If they were there at one time, they would still be there. A sort of techno-​shaman, while listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, he prepared a disc that would allow me to boot my old laptop in Linux, allowing me –​we hoped –​to go around password-​protected files in Windows, the password long since forgotten –​provided the computer would still boot. Etienne gravitated from NewsHour in the living room to watch and listen. Days later, finally returning to Luxembourg and jetlagged from our flight, I immediately found my old laptop. Within moments, its blue light glowed again. I listened to some of the recordings of people I had known. It was good to hear their voices. On a sunny Saturday morning in October 2018 after I had begun to write again and listen to even more of their voices, I sat in bed thinking about the people I knew in Belfast, how they had each found their own ways to begin healing and make sense of their experiences –​both

124  Molly Hurley Depret Troubles-​related and not –​and how I would need to discuss healing and anthropological approaches to healing. Googling “anthropology healing” for inspiration, I came upon an article (Miller 1994) and I was struck by a quote from the ethnography Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Taussig 1991): “As for the shaman, despite his solidity and caring he is also a strategic zone of vacuity, a palette of imageric possibility.” The previous day, I had received a new copy of Taussig’s book in the mail –​a book I had not read in over a decade. Inspired by this quote, I got up from the bed and grabbed my copy. Opening it, I flicked through. The first sentence my eye was drawn to was this very sentence, which continues: “Just as history creates this fabulous image of the shaman, so the montaged nature of that image allows history to breathe in the spaces pried open between signs and meanings” (444). To a non-anthropologist, maybe this sounds a bit odd. Or perhaps even a fellow anthropologist finds it strange, though if I trust anyone to understand me, it is likely an anthropologist or someone who doesn’t yet realize they are an anthropologist. Why was this so significant? The words spoke to me because a phrase I had been returning to in my notebook for the past several days was “spaces of possibility,” which I had come across while reading another ethnography for inspiration (Collins 2015, 32). In this section, Collins talks about the space between binaries of different sorts, drawing from the work of Garber (1991). It spurred me on to think of Ballynafeigh/​ the upper Ormeau Road and the spaces of possibility within this area for the people who lived there, the spaces of possibility that I encountered during my fieldwork. “Up there is just a sea of possibilities,” said Patti Smith (1975) in “Land”: There is no land but the land (Up there is just a sea of possibilities) There is no sea but the sea (Up there is a wall of possibilities) There is no keeper of the key (Up there there are several walls of possibilities) Except for one who seizes possibilities, one who seizes possibilities. In other neighborhoods, there are sometimes still “keeper[s]‌of the key” who jealously guard its boundaries. But not Ballynafeigh/​the upper Ormeau Road, or at least, not exactly. Though it, too, was mired in the 30 years of conflict involving the various arms of the British military and intelligence and loyalist and republican paramilitaries. Although its residents had witnessed bombings, shootings, and other violence like poverty and fear, it offered spaces of possibility unlike anywhere else in the city –​and not only for the affluent and upwardly mobile. These histories were told in a particular time and place: a “mixed” or “shared” area of South Belfast, which also had a UDA/​UFF loyalist paramilitary presence and many Protestant/​ unionist/​loyalist symbols, especially during the summer when Protestant Orange Order/​Apprentice Boys march between Easter and the early autumn.

Side effects  125 I lived there almost ten years after the Good Friday Agreement, at a moment when power-​sharing between Sinn Féin –​an Irish nationalist party –​and the DUP –​a British unionist party –​had finally been achieved. It was a neighborhood most people viewed as evidence of quasi-​normalcy and the possibilities of coexistence if there were any.1 As Carolyn Nordstrom has remarked about war and supposedly “post-​ conflict” contexts such as the one in Northern Ireland, one of my central tasks was to “grasp the fleeting glimpse of dreams people carry with them … of the creative imaginary through which people give substance to their thoughts and lives” (2004, 13). I wanted to know what people were concerned about in this place and time, and how they were living through this ostensibly “new era,” as some described it to me. Had they created “spaces of possibility” for themselves (Collins 2015, 32, drawing from Garber 1991)? Was some sort of “peace” being crafted on the ground, and if so, how and by whom? Who were the people who “seized the possibilities” of this neighborhood and who, I would argue, created a unique place by their very presence? What were the “hidden histories” still to be articulated (Schneider and Rapp 1995)? Alongside their everyday lives –​ grocery shopping, going to work, making dinner, helping the kids with their homework, having a pint or a “wee cuppa tea” –​how were people experiencing this period, making sense of their lives, and finding –​or not finding –​meaning? How might “spaces of possibility,” both literal and figurative, be linked to healing and recovery in a post-​conflict society? And what, exactly, might the residents of this anomalous area of Belfast be able to teach me about how people could live together before, during, and after 30 years of conflict, or how to reckon with my own experiences of violence and fear?

Dealing with my own past Why the delay in writing about my fieldwork in Belfast? In brief, I could not write about these 14 months in 2007 or 2008 nor in the 10 years after, aside from one brief essay and some false starts. In 2008–​2009, I began to move into a completely different career –​policy, advocacy, and communications strategy –​after relocating to Brussels with Etienne. But that of course is only part of the story, the easier part to tell, and usually where the story ends when people ask why I never finished my doctorate. I was okay with being known as a dissertation quitter, a “beauty school dropout.” I had nevertheless successfully changed careers. I accepted that mantle and minimized how important my research and my writing had been to me since it meant that was where the questions stopped. Like some of the people I knew in Belfast, I also needed to “deal with the past” in relation to traumatic violent events from my own life. Ever the expert procrastinator, I avoided this task for a decade. Writing up my research meant I would have to face my own experiences with violence.

126  Molly Hurley Depret I want to challenge the reader –​and conventions –​by not including any details of these violent events and non-events (by non-events, I refer to fears and anticipation of further assault or abuse, for example). Let me affirm that they did not occur in Belfast during my fieldwork. A focus on so-​called “events” causes one to overlook the banal non-events of violence, the taken-​ for-​ granted, supposedly insignificant, invisible occurrences that were as important, as personally devastating as any of the “notable” violent events, that trace back to my childhood in an upwardly mobile middle-​class family in northwest Alabama. I want to frustrate you, dear reader, by also refusing to provide more details. I initially included some details of these incidents thinking that these were necessary and honest. And they were, in the context of a conversation. But what do they become once I transcribe them here and you read them? Does it simply become a “pornography of violence” as others have suggested (Nader 1972; Bourgois 2001)? Inspired by Anna Burns’ powerful novel, Milkman (2018), I’d rather play with your expectations. I want to refuse to give you what you want, what you’ve come to know as the next part of the story. The big reveal. The familiar pattern of Law & Order or true crime documentaries. In the telling of my own histories and experiences and those of the people I spoke with in Belfast, I will frustrate the desire to know the gory details. Looking back on it now, it was logical that soon after the attack in November 2007 –​for which I was also blamed as having brought it on myself –​I lost my ability or my interest to write up my research. I took a leave of absence about six months later, after writing one short paper based on my dissertation research in the Irish Journal of Anthropology (Hurley-​ Depret 2008). I then threw myself instead into becoming fluent in French, making some new friends, and starting a new career in Brussels, all of which helped me to live with the depression and anger, and what I discovered was post-​traumatic stress only in July 2019. After my one-​year leave of absence ended in 2009, I told my committee members that I had decided not to finish my dissertation due to my new career path, which was true in part, and I left my creative and intellectual life behind. Over the years, I tried to content myself with the thought that maybe I had learned and grown a bit in Belfast, had done some useful volunteer work, and had met some good people. Maybe that was why I had lived there, I told myself, maybe it wasn’t about my dissertation. I never regretted living there and doing this work. Eventually, though I did regret that I did not write about it. I dreamed about it regularly. Though I thought often about the people I had known and the histories they told me, it would not be until 2017 at a conference that I would hear a rumor and think again about this project. And it would only be in August 2018, when I was finally realizing that the assault was connected to my departure from my Ph.D. program, that I would realize in a sudden flash –​while at a museum also about a

Side effects  127 neighborhood –​that I had to return to this project, these people, and their histories. I had to write about them finally. I’m motivated by a sense of responsibility to the people who generously gave me their time and talked to me about their work, lives, aspirations, and regrets. They showed me how they struggled but also often found creative ways to heal from a violent past, depression, and hopelessness. How they had lived with and sometimes overcome fear and loss. How they had transformed their anger and pain into a creative force. In doing so, they taught me how to begin to heal.

“You think it’s fucked up, like?” “But, hey, we gotta be fucked up like.” The neighborhood where I did my fieldwork is known by at least two names: Ballyafeigh or the upper Ormeau Road of Belfast. It has been part of both County Down and County Antrim. It has been within and without the Belfast city boundaries. Lord Donegall lived there.2 So did bakery workers and laundry women.3 It had a massive brickworks in the 19th century4 and Belfast’s first public park, originally part of the Donegall land. Entering into this area from the city center or from Stranmillis, you have to cross bridges; you are now in a different place. It was at once working-​class, bohemian, middle-​class, and affluent. It was loyalist Annadale5; it was Irish music sessions; it was the Kimberley6; it was the Errigle Inn7; it was “mixed”; it was “shared”; it was being overrun by “blow ins.”8 It was Buddhist; it was angels; it was atheist; it was fundamentalist. It was cleaners and journalists, bakers and artists. It was “leafy South Belfast”; it was where he saw a gun for the first time; it was where he saw a murder from his grandmother’s bedroom window. It was where elderly women dandered9 down the road in daytime; it was where children scared adults at night time. It had invisible boundaries that shifted depending on whether you were young or old, male or female, from the neighborhood or a stranger; on the time of day, the time of year; on the accent, the language, the color of skin. It had no boundaries and “there’s nowhere we can’t go.” It was prized as a model of “sharing”; it was derided for not picking a side. It was a known UDA/​UFF stronghold, a loyalist paramilitary group; it was mostly Catholic. Politicians tried to box it in, figure it out, make it fit. It was the “most normal part of Belfast.” It was thriving, and it was under threat. I came to know a man named Hugh while living there. He was a generous person and offered to let me listen to him and his friends talk about their lives over a dinner of chicken tikka masala one May evening that stretched into the early hours of the morning. At one point, we spoke about their sense of humor, which often veered into dark or black humor. “About the sense of humor here…” I said. “It’s dark.”

128  Molly Hurley Depret “We’ve got a black humor here … sometimes after a horrible heinous act has happened, you’ll get jokes about it,” Mike said. “What do you think of our sense of humor?” Hugh said. “I’ll be honest, it took me a little while to get used to it, but I like it,” I said. “You think it’s fucked up like?” Hugh asked. “Yeah,” I said. Mike replied, “But, hey, we gotta be fucked up like … . Humor is a way, and madness, mad humor is a way of defusing a very explosive thing inside a human being.” “A prime example … I says to you about the gig, my mate’s putting a gig on tomorrow night, I said to you about hanging out with a bunch of head cases.” “Are they more honest?” I asked. “If you’re trying to be real straitlaced … the more you hold it in, the more you’re … . Whereas if you let the lunacy hang out of yourself, get drunk, do something stupid … when they do have a lot of anger and a lot of tension inside, they’re going to hurt someone.” In a separate conversation, Hugh talked to me about how he sometimes just wanted to be “a rocket” –​Northern Irish slang for someone who is mad or crazy –​and not have any responsibilities for the night. Was there, then, a connection between humor and “letting the lunacy hang out of yourself”? It seemed from the way our conversation about humor veered into a discussion of their metal “headcase” friends, that dark, fucked up humor was, to them, another way of dealing with “anger and tension,” a way to release that anger in a way that didn’t hurt others or themselves, at least not too much. I decided to return to the emotion and sensation of anger in early March 2019. After all, anger and pain coursed through my dissertation, through the audio interviews, even if they are often couched in the language of depression. One of the only people who truly sounded angry was Jonah, a researcher who had experienced the violence and oppression of the military and the police in the working-​class Catholic neighborhood where he grew up. Another older woman expressed her anger, too, in one interview. From my own experience, anger –​rage, in fact –​is masked by symptoms of depression. Depression tends to be more socially acceptable, so rage is often channeled toward oneself instead of others. Why did I feel compelled to allow myself to pay attention to the anger present in my fieldwork, and what does it have to do with a sense of humor? From my own experiences of violence, an undercurrent of anger still coursed through me. Writing let it out of me. My anger, though, for once was not against myself as it had been for many years. Instead, I felt anger and rage, and I directed it at the rightful perpetrators through my writing. I wrote so much that my arm began to hurt. And as I wrote, I thought about what Mike

Side effects  129 said about “letting the lunacy hang out of yourself,” and I thought about listening to the aptly named Therapy?, a punk band from Northern Ireland, 12 years ago in a Ballynafeigh flat and the way that it now tapped into something different in me, something personal to me. The question mark in their name was simply an accident according to the band, but it meant something more to me. It reflected my ambivalence about the utility of this process, something that I found both useful and challenging yet maddening, irritating, useless, and expensive after trying several counsellors over the years. The dark humor of a band named Therapy? that was actually giving me therapy cracked me up. Maybe I had unwittingly cracked the code to their dark humor. Hugh and I had listened to Therapy? together in 2007, and he allowed me to record our conversation as we listened to it. He would play a song, telling me what it was about. While it played, he repeated the lyrics, repeating them so I could catch them. He sometimes explained what they meant to him. Listening to Therapy? one night in March 2019, I understood better than ever the attraction to their music. It allowed me to tap into my own anger and realize that I am not done healing. Not by a long shot. Even one year on, I still have relapses of self-​harm, a way of coping that I developed when I was a child that re-emerged alongside these violent events in my adulthood. By listening to this music and writing while listening, sometimes I headbanged as though I was at a show –​and not in a self-​harming way. I was less self-​conscious doing it alone at home. Etienne slept next door in the bedroom. I wrote in my notebook: “Now I fucking understand Hugh … I need to be a rocket. I need to be a fucking headcase.” Thinking back to Hugh’s attention to Therapy?’s lyrics, I wrote down lyrics that meant something to me while I listened on YouTube: “take away the future and the present collapses”; “look me in the eye and say it”; “I experience time as a terrible ache”; “I’m living in the shadow of the terrible thing.” True to the spirit of Mike, Hugh, and Luke, though, one line made me laugh out loud: “James Joyce is fucking my sister,” a Belfast crowd chanted, one of Therapy?’s most well-​ known lyrics. Sitting at my desk at three in the morning, I’m sure I looked mad as I scrawled painful, disturbing thoughts in a notebook while headbanging and laughing about James Joyce fucking someone’s sister. As Mike said, “Humor is a way, and madness, mad humor is a way of defusing a very explosive thing inside a human being.” Now I understood. Friendship was an essential part of my fieldwork –​not only my friendships with some of the people I came to know over these 14 months, but witnessing their friendships and how they listened, joked, debated, spoke their minds, and supported one another. This part of my fieldwork allowed me to see that while trust in institutions was relatively weak, trust did exist in other contexts, and in this neighborhood, it sometimes extended across sectarian lines as well as across other social and cultural dividing lines.

130  Molly Hurley Depret The friendships I witnessed during my fieldwork were sometimes themselves ways people were coping with their pain and maybe even partially healing from it. Friendship –​defined in this case as “a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relations” (Google Dictionary) –​seemed critical to solidarity and mutual attempts to heal. These relationships simultaneously challenged and were shaped and constrained by the existing ethnonationalist divisions in Northern Ireland as well as other forms of difference, including faith, race, nationality, gender, and class. Among Mike, Hugh, and Luke there was an ease evident in how they discussed their friendship both implicitly and explicitly. In their conversation, they also spoke about humor and faith, showing how these three elements were sometimes intertwined. Mike, who was born in the late ­ 1960s, had described his first beating at the age of four: “I got a kickin’ for being a Catholic when I was four, I got a kickin’ again for being a Catholic when I was seven.” These were beatings “by older children/​young adults because I was a Catholic.” His family had also had repeated attacks on their home. Despite growing up at a tense time amid attacks on himself and his family, he still decided to cross the lines between Protestants and Catholics, especially through friendship with Hugh and Luke, who are Protestant. “I grew up and because I would’ve went to a Catholic school, most of my friends were Catholics,” Mike said. And you know some of them might’ve written “IRA” or “Brits out” on the walls without really knowing what it meant … . By the age of 11, 12, I maybe had different sets of friends, drifting into Catholics and Protestants together. By the age of 15, 16, my friends were exclusively Protestant, with parents in prison for killing Catholics, … and then it changed again, back to when people hit 18, 19, student days, nobody gives a toss … . I’ve never had an exclusive friendship group ever since. Although he commented that he hadn’t had an exclusive friendship group in years, it was clear to me that these men knew one another well and that their friendship was important to them. Mike came by Hugh’s place to feed Hugh’s cat or check his own e-​mail, and he sometimes brought his daughter there for visits instead of the hostel where he was living in 2007. At the time of our conversation, Hugh was also making an effort on Mike’s behalf to help him move to a house or an apartment in Ballynafeigh since Mike wanted to continue to live where he grew up. All three men agreed that Ballynafeigh, while imperfect, was better than many other areas of Belfast because of the freedom they had to be friends with anyone without a fear of paramilitaries. “It is very liberal, that’s the thing about it,” said Mike. “You don’t have to be … I mean, there’s certain parts of Belfast where you have to be

Side effects  131 with the clique, or else stay at home with your mum. In Ballynafeigh, we don’t have to do that.” “There’s a paramilitary influence in most of Belfast, like in fairness, Ballynafeigh must be one of the only working-​class areas where there isn’t a complete and utter paramilitary grip,” Luke added. “You’re right, it’s not a grip, it’s not a grip,” replied Mike. “But it’s there,” said Hugh. “It is there,” said Mike. “Yes, it is there, and it probably won’t ever go away,” said Luke. “But there’s not the grip, like for example, growing up in [name of Protestant working-​class area], there was a huge grip on every single housing estate, there’s just a huge grip.” For them, it is clear that their ability to make friends across Protestant/​ Catholic lines –​and to avoid being under the “paramilitary grip” that they described –​was important to them. Mike emphasized that he does not have an “exclusive friendship group,” nor does he like cliques that limit his ability to socialize across ethnonationalist boundaries. In talking with Mike, Hugh, and Luke, spirituality was mentioned and, in other conversations, Hugh elaborated on his faith. However, in this conversation, politics, music, and family and friends featured more strongly in our discussion of how they make sense out of life and what is most important. “One of the questions I have … what helps you make sense out of your life, the world, in a general sense? Spirituality, politics … ?” “As human beings?” “So what makes sense out of your life?” “Mine’s probably a bit combined. Spiritual and political like; there’s no point in me trying to deny that I’m political because I obviously am,” Hugh said laughing. “What about you, Luke?” “I dunno, I think the fight, the fight against everything. I would –​” “He wants to get a—​” “I want to start a revolution.” “He wants a big howitzer up on top of the mountain to blow the hell outta Belfast!” Mike said, “Me, what keeps me going is my kids, guitar, I used to play, I’m starting to get back into music. I stopped listening to music for years, I suffer from depression, and because of the horror of having the last five and a half years, having sadly just learned that I have residual depression, which means I’ll never recover … but I’ve got kids, I’ve got mates, I’ve got music, I’ve got … the only way down is to die, and the only other way is up.” “The only way is up,” Hugh said.

132  Molly Hurley Depret “No, seriously, it can’t get any worse for me except for suicide and this is the time for depressives to do suicide, but I’m not going to do it,” said Mike. “Ay, moving swiftly on. [inaudible] … Samaritans,” said Luke. “What’s important to you?” I asked. “I’ll be truthful, this country’s extremely important to me, like, and I feel like I try to be a bastard for my country every day and … I want to make it a better place,” said Hugh. “You are a bastard for your country,” Luke said jokingly. “And that is very important to me … that’s what I live to do like, and do something positive for the community that I’m from and the wider community.” For Hugh, his spiritual and political beliefs were the two most important things that helped him make sense out of life. He had experienced a sort of political awakening at a certain point in his life, where he decided to stop “talking bollocks” and do something, which led him to move to Ballynafeigh. In other discussions about faith, he was somewhat torn, which I understood coming from a similar fundamentalist background. He felt that if he got baptized, he would have to live a life where he really walked the walk and no longer drank, took recreational drugs, or had sex outside of marriage. He wasn’t sure yet if he was ready to live that life. Nevertheless, he kept a Bible out in his home and read it regularly. In Mike’s case he had struggled with being homeless and other challenges, such as witnessing violence as a child. His kids, his friends, and playing the guitar have helped him deal with his depression, even if he might not ever fully recover. His mentioning the time of year when the most suicides tend to occur –​and his insistence that he would not do this –​reflect his ongoing struggle with depression, a struggle that is still unfortunately common in Northern Ireland, which has the highest rate of suicide in the United Kingdom. In the period between 2004 and 2006, “There was a steep rise in the registered suicide rate … [C]‌ompared to figures in the 1990s, deaths have almost doubled” (Irish News 2018). In contrast to Hugh’s political commitments and Mike’s focus on family and music, Luke expressed his feeling of being alienated from politics –​even in May 2007, a supposedly hopeful time. This alienation was linked to his concern that he would never get married, settle down, and raise a family, one of his main goals in his life. “Well, I think at this moment in time, I’m caught between ambitions like,” said Luke. “To be honest, like, there’s nothing really important at this moment in time for me, mate.” “Are there things that used to be important to you that aren’t anymore?” I said.

Side effects  133 “I used to have goals and ambitions and stuff, but I kinda just, I’m fuckin’ never going to get them,” he replied. Hugh countered, “When I first met you, you had things that were really important in your life, and then you went through some really bad times.” “I know, it beat me down like.” “What were important things then?” I asked. “Just work that I intended on doing, and just getting out and broadening my horizons and stuff, and I had wanted to get married, and settle down and raise a family, like that would be highly important to me, that would be one of the things that I do want in life, but I don’t see myself in any sort of position to even consider starting a family, and I haven’t met the person –​well, I thought I’d met the person that I thought I’d want to start a family with … ” “See, women, they are … ” Hugh said. “I know, there’s some bad ones out there,” I said. “I couldn’t offer any sort of political, I’d have nothing to offer the political agenda going on in this country at the moment, I don’t see how,” Luke said. “I second that,” Mike said. “There’s nothing in it to interest you?” I said. “I wouldn’t have anything to offer it because A) I’m not important, maybe I am to myself and to my friends,” Luke said. “I think that’s extremely wrong, I think you have offered something positive, and you’ve offered it in the past with me,” Mike said. “But at the stage it’s at now like, the stage of where this country is and where it’s going, I can’t offer my opinion,” said Luke. “Well, you voice your opinion through voting,” Hugh said. “Well, yes, fair point,” Luke replied, “but there would’ve been a stage like, there’d a been a stage where I thought I could’ve made a difference to maybe young people and stuff, and I don’t know, I don’t see how … I’m insignificant in political terms … . Everyone’s gotten to where they want to be the parties are all happy days, and they’re all kissing each other on the cheeks.” “I think you have as much respect for the honesty of politicians as I do. And that’s not an awful lot,” said Mike. “A lot of people are going to get written into the history books … . Behind the cloak of murder and all the rest for 30 years, politicians are as untrustworthy as anywhere else. Obviously for someone like Hugh, you’re going to get very disillusioned one of these days,” Mike said. “I have done,” Hugh said, “but I challenge it, and change it where I can.” “Same old crap like Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others,” said Mike.

134  Molly Hurley Depret “And you have a seat through your employment and stuff … you have a vehicle to politically influence,” said Luke. “To positively influence –​,” Hugh said. “You have a position where you can do that, whereas the only people I could politically influence and say fuck this, anarchy all the way, which I’m only saying, is with my friends –​” Luke said. “That’s a good starting point,” Hugh said. “I’ve had loads of good discussions with you,” Mike said. “I’m just saying politically, everything now, in terms of my view of the government of this country … ” Luke said. In this conversation, Luke was struggling with his faith in the future in ­multiple ways. He was doubtful that he had any role to play in the future of Northern Ireland. At the time of our conversation, I am not sure if he was working full-​time or not, but he clearly wanted meaningful work. Moreover, he was recovering from the end of a relationship, concerned that he would never get married and have kids, something that was very important to him. One of the significant features of this conversation is that we see an illustration of friendship, emotional support, and care among this small group of friends, especially in the comments of Mike and Hugh who continually encourage him. Their encouragement underscores the ways in which friendship in this liminal context of “not-​ war-​ not-​ peace” helped people who had suffered personal losses. Friendship offered a sense of belonging –​and a certain degree of faith and hope –​to those who felt they had no place among the politicians who had recently agreed to share power. Luke’s sense of ­alienation and despair was palpable, especially his feeling that there was little or no hope to realize his aspirations. His faith, not in God, but in his own future as well as his country’s future, was precarious, reflecting the uncertainty that some felt in this transitional period between 30 years of conflict –​that had spanned most of their lives –​and whatever the future might hold. What Mike, Hugh, and Luke discussed back then had one meaning in that original conversation that I’ve attempted to understand and partially explain. But when I listened to them again in 2018 and 2019, it meant something still different. They may or may not know it, but they helped me. I had become a functioning agoraphobic, social phobic person over time –​able to leave my home if needed but definitely preferring not to. I didn’t feel like I had friends like this to talk to. Looking back, I’m sure there were any number of people I could have contacted, but I felt too afraid –​of judgment, of allowing others to know me, of any further emotional pain, which is ­inevitable if one is alive. Their conversations from 2006–​2007 gave me comfort. They gave me a safe space in which to confront my own anger and rage at the things that had been taken from me. They and many other people helped me to reclaim my life, shed my shame, and begin to create again. Beginning to recover my life ten years later was an unanticipated, chal­lenging, and redemptive “side effect” of my fieldwork.

Side effects  135

Notes 1 McCormack (2017) states that in her article on Catholic identity, she “examine[s]‌ how border crossing opens up a liminal space of possibilities.” Interestingly, I read her article in December 2018 only after working with my data and the concept of “spaces of possibility” via Collins (2015) and Garber (1991) and liminality via Thomassen (2009) that autumn. The fact that McCormack used a similar concept –​and we developed them entirely independently of one another’s work –​further confirms the relevance and usefulness of this concept. 2 “All except the townland of Ballynafeigh (purchased from Arthur Hill some time in the 1630s) had been acquired by Donegall’s distinguished ancestor Arthur Chichester, Lord Deputy of Ireland” (Maguire 1976, 21). 3 Sectarian violence is not the only kind of violence that existed in Northern Ireland: the plight of “laundry women” who lived in “mother and baby homes” run by churches in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland has gained attention in recent years (Wikipedia, s.v. “Magdalene Laundries in Ireland,” accessed 2018, https://​en.wikipe​dia.org/​w/​index.php?title=​Mag​dale​ne_​L​aund​ries​ _​in_​Irel​and&oldid=​871055​820). On the upper Ormeau Road, there was a protest in 2017 to bring attention to this issue. My husband and I sometimes attended the Church of the Good Shepherd where such a “mother and baby home” had existed in the past along with a laundry. In an interview with ITV, Patrick Corrigan, Northern Ireland programme director of Amnesty International, which is supporting calls for an inquiry, said: “Women in Northern Ireland have told Amnesty that they suffered arbitrary detention, forced labour, ill-​treatment, and the removal and forced adoption of their babies –​criminal acts in both domestic and international law”. (ITV News 2017) See also Ó Baoill (2006); McDonald (2002); WDAPA (2002). 4 5 Annadale Flats is a local housing estate. It is widely perceived as a loyalist space, particularly since a large July 11th bonfire occurs there each year ahead of parades on July 12th. However, it was also an increasingly diverse housing estate, including not only Catholic residents but Chinese residents and other ethnic minorities, a source of both tension and hope. People who were from Annadale Flats told me they had Catholic neighbors at least as far back as the 1960s. In the 1980s, a Catholic resident who resided there with his partner said there were not very many Catholics at that time. Annadale, however, has a much longer history in the area. Journalist and resident of Ballynafeigh/​the upper Ormeau Road, Dennis Campbell Kennedy (2017), has delved further into the history of “Annadale,” which is used not only as the name of the “electric flats” and “the flats” but also for several nearby streets, including some further up the road, where the “electric flats” –​the Annadale Crescent complex –​once stood. These flats were also built where a now-​demolished boys’ grammar school once was, which itself was built over the ruins of the former brickworks. Nearby, Annadale Hall, a stately home from the late 18th century, was burned by suffragettes in 1914 and eventually demolished in the 1980s. The site of the brickworks was later excavated by archaeologists (Kennedy 2017; Millsopp 2016). 6 A bar that no longer existed at the time of my research but which was often mentioned. It was a local bar known for being loyalist. A mixed couple I interviewed noted that they went there once but did not like it.

136  Molly Hurley Depret 7 The Errigle Inn is a pub with several rooms and spaces. Each space was known for a different group of people. One room, where I spent some time, was known more for artists and creatives. Those who frequented it were of all ages, but it was known for the “post-​uni” crowd who no longer went to The Bot, a popular student hangout. Rangers and Celtics football team colors or symbols were not allowed. It was considered “mixed” but possibly a bit more Catholic. 8 Non-​locals can include both people from other areas of Belfast or Northern Ireland as well as other countries. 9 “Dander” is a local term for a walk or stroll.

References Benjamin, Walter. (1940) 1999. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Mariner Books. Bourgois, Philippe. 2001. “The Power of Violence in War and Peace: Post–​Cold War Lessons from El Salvador.” Ethnography 2 (1): 5–​34. Burns, Anna. 2018. Milkman. Main edition. London: Faber & Faber. Collins, John F. 2015. Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Garber, Marjorie. 1991. Vested Interests: Cross-​ Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge. Hurley-​Depret, Molly. 2008. “Invisible Interfaces: The Boundaries of Belonging on Belfast’s Upper Ormeau Road.” Irish Journal of Anthropology 11 (1): 35. Irish News. 2018. “Suicide Rates Increase in Northern Ireland,” August 1, 2018. www.irishn​ews.com/​news/​nort​hern​irel​andn​ews/​2018/​08/​01/​news/​suic​ide-​rates-​ incre​ase-​in-​north​ern-​irel​and-​1396​249/​. ITV News. 2017. “Mother and Baby Home Victims Call for Northern Ireland Public Inquiry.” June 14. www.itv.com/​news/​utv/​2017-​06-​14/​mot​her-​and-​baby-​home-​ vict​ims-​call-​for-​north​ern-​irel​and-​pub​lic-​inqu​iry/​. Kennedy, Dennis. 2017. “Anna Who? A Fine Gentleman’s Residence and Some Ladies.” A paper to the Belfast Literary Society, October 2, 2017. www.dennis​ kenn​edy.eu/​anna-​who-​2. McCormack, Fiona Elisabeth. 2017. “Fear, Silence, and Telling: Catholic Identity in Northern Ireland.” Anthropology and Humanism 42 (1): 50–​71. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1111/​anhu.12126 McDonald, Theresa. 2002. “Irish Post-​Medieval Archaeology Group,” 7. Maguire, W. A. 1976. “The 1822 Settlement of the Donegall Estates.” Irish Economic and Social History 3: 17–​32. Miller, Janneli F. 1994. “Paradox, Process, and Mystery: An Exploration of Anthropology and Healing.” Arizona Anthropologist 11: 1–​29. Millsopp, Sandra. 2016. “A Life in the Day of an Industrial Archaeologist.” Bangor Historical Society, February 11. www.bangor​hist​oric​also​ciet​yni.org/​DATAB​ASE/​ ARTIC​LES/​artic​les/​000​026/​002​643.shtml. Nader, Laura. 1972. “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained From Studying Up.” In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 284–​311. New York: Random House. Nordstrom, Carolyn. 2004. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-​First Century. California Series in Public Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Side effects  137 Ó Baoill, Ruairí. 2006. “The Urban Archaeology of Belfast: A Review of the Evidence.” Ulster Journal of Archaeology 65: 8–​19. Schneider, Jane and Rayna Rapp. 1995. “Introduction.” In Articulating Hidden Histories, edited by Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp, 3–​30. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, Patti. 1975. “Land.” Track 7 on Horses. Arista Records. Taussig, Michael. 1991. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thomassen, Bjørn. 2009. “The Uses and Meanings of Liminality.” International Political Anthropology 2 (1): 5–​27. WDAPA (The William Dunlop Archaeological Photographic Archive). 2002. “Annadale Brickworks, Belfast –​William Dunlop Archaeological Photographic Archive.” Accessed January 8, 2019. https://​sites.goo​gle.com/​site/​dunlop​arch​ive/​ home/​annad​ale-​bri​ckwo​rks-​belf​ast-​2002. Wikipedia, s.v. “Magdalene Laundries in Ireland,” accessed 2018, https://​ en.wikipe​dia.org/​w/​index.php?title=​Mag​dale​ne_​L​aund​ries​_​in_​Irel​and&oldid=​ 871055​820.

12 Violent experiences, violent practices Caring and silence in anthropology Lena Gross

“Take care. This will be good data”, I heard from a senior scholar after writing them about several violent and dangerous incidents that occurred during my PhD-​fieldwork. At the time, I did not question it. Neither the words “take care” without further advice following how to do that, nor the statement that these incidents are good data. Are they, though? Does the ethnographer’s close experience of violence, social suffering, and trauma lead to insights otherwise lost? What I know is that the advice and affi­rmation came from a good place with the best intentions in mind. I also know that hundreds of junior scholars have heard similar advice. And I know, that to take care and to be able to make sense of “good data” needs more than kind wishes. In a nightly conversation over some beers at a conference, another senior scholar called anthropology the last front of true adventure. “It’s not ­politically correct, is it, to say so, but really, we like being a little Indiana Jones, don’t we?” Previously he had told a story about needing to escape a dangerous situation with guns involved. Other colleagues recalled situations where they needed to be evacuated from their field because of earthquakes, the start of civil wars or “just” left earlier because they could not receive medical treatment, had received kidnapping threats or experienced sexual or physical violence. These stories, shared after a glass or two, were told to almost complete strangers who had, however, at least two things in common: They were anthropologists and they had been on long term fieldwork.

Violent experiences Coming back from fieldwork, I was overloaded with teaching and family issues that needed to be resolved. I had researched the connection between oil sands extraction and settler colonialism in Northern Alberta, Canada. There was a striking imbalance between the promise of oil wealth and the poor living conditions in most Indigenous communities close to extraction sites. I was especially interested in ideas of masculinity and the meaning of home in the context of pollution and dispossession/​displacement. As many other early career scholars that come back from fieldwork, my life needed to DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-12

Violent experiences, violent practices  139 be reorganized. I had no apartment to come back to, no childcare lined up, and no family close for support. My fellow researchers that all came back from fieldwork about the same time had experienced major events like the Ebola outbreak, serious health issues, a typhoon, and more, which made us incapable of supporting each other like we otherwise would have done. One thing that most of us had in common was that while these events obviously had affected us, their impact on our lives was far less wide-​ reaching than it was for our interlocutors. We also shared that we were supposed to gain distance from the field and start the writing up phase. The first workshop where we should present our findings was up in three months’ time, my midterm exam in five. I had no distance. And I did not want any distance. Who were we, that we deserved distance? While we were distancing us and trying to make a career out of the “data” we had collected, the life of our interlocutors went on without their lost ones, without food and housing safety, with extreme pollution, or whatever we had been researching. To be clear, not all anthropologists research marginalized groups or people living in extreme conditions. However, the close work with people on whatever topic also involves getting to know the dark sides of their life, which can be draining in all circumstances. Experiences of illness, violence, loss, death, or poverty is part of being human, and therefore also part of ethnographic work. These experiences are, however, unequally distributed and the chance for suffering several of these issues on a more frequent basis is closely related to poverty or being marginalized through other factors. Whenever I read theory, it felt empty and meaningless. Our seminars where we anthropologists explained the world to each other: Empty and meaningless. The implicitness with which I and the mostly white, healthy, middle-​and upper-​class people in my surroundings expressed and accepted their wealth, safety, and health felt naïve, spoiled, and almost disgusting to me. It made me feel sick that I felt drained and overworked when I was healthy and had a great job. One of the things I had learned during fieldwork was that most things do not end well. There is a car accident –​everyone in the car will be dead. You finally get a job –​you will have an accident, illness, or some other event in your life that will make you lose it. Your child has a swimming accident –​they will die before you reach the hospital. You are drunk and have no ride home –​you walk and freeze to death. A first responder recalled again and again how they were searching for a baby after a fatal car crash and the graphic description of how they finally found her body haunts me until today. A social worker talked in detail about the suicide of a 14-​year-​old in their community and the impact it had on all of them. An Indigenous teenage girl went missing. Stories of sexual and physical abuse, loss, failure, and struggle were everywhere, and I had nothing else to offer than listening to them. There was also the more indirect violence, the grief when interlocutors told me that they could not drink fresh water when being

140  Lena Gross on the land anymore due to pollution. When berry patches were destroyed or access to ancient graves denied. For Indigenous interlocutors, racism and discrimination was part of their everyday life; they met it while working in the oil fields, entering a shop, trying to find housing. It was a multitiered, often invisible violence that was omnipresent in my interlocutor’s life, normalized by its ubiquitous occurrence and in many cases without an obvious culprit. The cause of violence, capitalist and colonial relations, including environmental devastation that generated, upheld, and strengthened socioeconomic inequality, precarity, and health disparities were hard to pinpoint while being in the middle of it. When I was exposed to violence myself, it was meaningless in comparison to what I knew others had lived through. Of course, this perception overlooks all the things that do go well: it is black and white, and does not give justice to my interlocutor’s agency, their life, or the place they call home. However, it is not completely incorrect either. The experience that there was rarely any help available and that one always had to expect the worst outcome depicts the everyday reality of many who belong to socioeconomic marginalized groups. When I was asked about my research, I did not know what to say. If I answered, it could be that I almost screamed one history after the other into my conversation partner’s face. Other times I could not find words at all. I did not want to talk about it, it felt disgusting, especially if the other expressed empathy; it felt as if I had claimed a trauma that was not mine. The usual reaction from other anthropologists was the advice to be professional, to distance myself emotionally, and to analyze it. I repeated the words “be professional” and “distance yourself” like a mantra, at the same time as I knew that I was not able to follow the advice. I had the stories of abuse, death, and injustice in my mind and in my dreams, and there was no way to just translate them into an academic work that would further my career. Additionally, many of my interlocutors had also become close friends, and our relationship was ongoing, so distancing myself from their life was not an option. Further, I could not accept that my own experiences during fieldwork had had an impact on me. In comparison, they were nothing. The less I could handle all of this, the more worthless I felt. Then I failed my midterms. I had tried to postpone them due to the high teaching load and recurrent sicknesses of my daughter and myself, but was assured that this was unnecessary as they were “unfailable”. So, I went, failed and had my sneaking suspicion confirmed on paper. I was a failure. At this point, I felt exhausted beyond recovery, had nightmares or could not sleep at all, was unable to enjoy time with friends or family, and writing, something that I had loved all my life, felt impossible and meaningless. Living as a single parent without family support in an expensive city like Oslo and as a PhD-​student with an expected high work-​load added further to my already increased stress level.

Violent experiences, violent practices  141 Luckily, I would say, something changed gradually. The feelings of failure and shame turned into anger, and anger turned into rage. It was this rage that helped me to get through this time and that made me finish my PhD. However, there was no space for my rage. I was not brought up to respect rage as a force that had its place and was not socialized into handling rage as a resource rather than a sign of weakness and something that was “wrong”. My upbringing, the social norms in Norway where I spent almost all of my adult life, Protestantism, or my gender ( I am non-​binary but usually get read as a woman) were most likely all contributing factors to my understanding of rage. It even took me years to identify that what I was feeling and what caused much of my behavior, was rage. Sometimes the rage was misplaced, which caused even more feelings of failure, guilt, and shame. At the same time, rage made me find a voice, pushed me to read, write, and discuss. Rage brought me also to the point of sharing some of its causes with one of my supervisors and some of my fellow PhD-​ students. Surprisingly, at least for me, this led to their own breaking of their silence. The following support we both gave and received and my supervisor’s warm humor that helped me laugh away some of the rage, brought otherwise often missing emotional connections and gave me (us) tools to cope. The same rage allowed me to keep silent about the topics I did not want to share. While I am convinced that positionality and situated knowledge are key concepts for good research, rage helped me to feel comfortable to refuse to make myself vulnerable by writing about aspects I did not want to share. During fieldwork, I did not feel rage at all, and my interlocutors almost never expressed rage either, even in the face of utter injustice. One of the most common responses was silence. In the aftermath I wonder if this silence was an expression of powerlessness, pure exhaustion about the repeated experience of injustice/​violence and its normalization, or a sign of strength. Maybe it was a combination of all of this. For me, rage came first when I was back at a supposedly safe place and when there was no space given to safely work through my experiences. However, rage is a violent emotion, and even though it was rage that made me persevere, it also hurt me, and I am still working on making sense of it. Now that the rage has gone, I feel utterly exhausted, but also curious.

Violent emotions Lately more and more anthropologists, most of them female and/​or junior scholars, have started to share their experiences of violence and/​or trauma and questioned our discipline’s practices, imagineries, and ethics. With the use of Twitter, podcasts, and shorter written pieces published on either their personal or academic group blogs, they break the silence and demand a professional debate and changes in our discipline. In particular, the online movements and webpages #metooanthro, anthrodendum, and anthropod have become important sites of testimonies, conversations, and tool-​sharing that challenge the status quo.

142  Lena Gross Greg Beckett starts his contribution to a blog series called Trauma and Resilience, curated by Beatriz Reyes-​ Foster and Rebecca Lester, in the following manner: I don’t remember when it happened, but at some point, I began to respond to questions about my research with a feeling of dread. I wanted to say that it was going badly, or that the research was good but the situation was horrible, that I was sad and angry and that many of my friends and informants in Haiti were in worse shape. Many of them were dead. I wanted to say all of that, but I didn’t. I had come to think of fieldwork as something anthropologists were supposed to love doing, and I felt that if I dreaded going back there must be something wrong with me … I had internalized what might be one of the most self-​destructive aspects of our discipline—​the idea that fieldwork is a baptism by fire from which only the strong survive … It is only recently that I have come to think of my fieldwork experiences in the language of trauma. (Beckett 2019, accentuation by author) When I read this, I was struck by how much it resonated with me. Obviously, I felt very familiar with the silencing of oneself, the feelings of sadness and anger, and last, but not least, the internalization and the conviction that it was oneself that something was wrong with, not the situation. However, it was the last sentence that was stuck in my head: “only recently … I have come to think of my fieldwork experiences in the language of trauma”. It had taken me a long time to acknowledge that having recurring nightmares, vivid violent images appearing out of nowhere, and a constant feeling of threat could not be explained by exhaustion and that they would not disappear by themselves. I slowly started to read up on trauma. However, it took me hideously long to connect the dots, and when I finally realized that I could apply what I read to myself, I felt too ashamed to make use of this insight. Moreover, even though they are typical symptoms of trauma, I could not make sense of my feelings of anger and rage. I felt guilty and ashamed and did not understand how I had become such an angry person. I also had no concept of what either anger or rage actually meant, apart from that they were socially unacceptable and something one should be able to have under control. Only now, four years after my return to Norway, that I have the long-desired distance from both fieldwork and my after-​fieldwork-​self can I see that not only do I need to think of my fieldwork experiences in the language of trauma, I also need to think of my emotions post-​fieldwork in the language of trauma. To think in the language of trauma means, at least for me, also to think in the language of emotions, something I needed to learn. Allan Gibbard, while discussing western (American) morality, talks about anger and guilt as twin emotions and as tools for morality (1990,

Violent experiences, violent practices  143 126). He describes guilt as anger turned inward. Anger and guilt together shape mo­rality as they are usually reactions to the subjective experience of injustice. Morality in return creates the norms that decide when these emotions are fitting and to what extent and what intensity they are appropriate (Flanagan 2018, xxiii). Guilt and anger are often accompanied or followed by shame, and therefore I would add shame as the third component –​as the triplet to the emotions of anger and guilt –​and suggest that these three emotions together constitute not only morality, but also rage under certain conditions. If there is no space given to explore the causes for the triplet-​emotions and through this space the possibility to address the underlying injustice or hurt, the emotion can become one entity without clear boundaries. How this entity expresses itself can change or be different for any person. One expression of it is rage. All the expressions have in common that they are characterized by loss. The content of this loss differs from situation to ­situation: it can for example be loss of trust (in oneself, in others, in a just system), loss of hope, loss of control, loss of motivation, loss of meaningful relations. In particular rage is driven by the feeling of powerlessness and loss of control, and the desperate need and attempt to reclaim what has been lost. Thinking through the meaning of emotions and reading about psychological, philosophical, and other theories connected to them helped me to look at my own emotions and to distinguish them from shame that had been clouding everything. It also allowed me to see emotions in a cultural, social, and political context instead of something private and individual. Anne Bitsch theorizes her own emotions during fieldwork researching how rape is discussed and judged in court rooms as interactional effects and as socially and spatially constituted and constitutive. She shows how micro-​ politics in the field can be made visible through autoethnography and an analysis of the researcher’s emotions during fieldwork (2018a, 2). However, looking back, I had surprisingly few emotions I can recall during fieldwork. I could not allow them. They surfaced much later after I had come back to Oslo. Reading her work reminded me that my emotions could be more than an obstruction I needed to overcome. Sara Ahmed discusses that not only is the personal political, as the second wave of feminism famously claimed, it is also theoretical (2017, 10). However, this aspect is far from acknowledged or accepted in academic circles, and directly prevented by violent ideologies and practices that are part of anthropological habitus in many departments.

Violent practices Bitsch is not the first researcher who has written about emotions in the field; it is almost standard in feminist and queer theory-​oriented research, where the researcher’s emotions are an important part of their positionality. However, much less has been published about emotions post-​fieldwork and their role in ethnographic writing. Even the acknowledgement of

144  Lena Gross the researcher’s emotional struggle with processing violent experiences (including the secondary trauma that can come from listening to people recalling their own traumas) is in many academic settings stigmatized, and therefore silenced. Beckett (2019), who I already quoted above, gives a possible explanation for this: I don’t know what they [fellow grad students/​other anthropologists, author] would have said or done if I had spoken to them about my traumatic experiences. I imagine that they, too, have probably internalized the disciplinary hubris that casts the anthropologist as an intrepid hero, the same habitus that generated all those whispers and rumors about people who couldn’t cut it in the field or that led fellow graduate students to clap me on the back and talk about all the “cred” I would have for working in a place like Haiti. So many of us have fallen for this cruelty that masquerades as intellectual rigor. It was a cultivated dispo­ sition at the University of Chicago, where I trained, and where the same hubris now drives a willful rejection of the very idea of trauma, trigger warnings, and safe spaces. In anthropology, this same hubris can lead to silencing or outright stigma about trauma and the related experiences of anxiety and depression, despite evidence of the high rates of mental health issues among graduate students. Suffering is, according to Ahmed, closely linked to being passive, “to be enacted upon” and to “the fear of emotionality, in which weakness is defined in terms of a tendency to be shaped by others” (2014 [2004], 2). Suffering from PTSD, from depression, or from anxiety after fieldwork is, as Beckett shows against an anthropological habitus, the hubris of seeing anthropologists as above suffering, as able to detach on command from fieldwork experiences, and of being able to turn everything into “good data”, no matter the personal costs. These involve violent practices, like silencing or stigmatizing mental health conditions and accepting that some PhD-​candidates are just “too weak” for the discipline, and through this justifying giving up on them and letting them alone with their experiences and their feelings of failure. I heard a professor saying that a student “just did not have it in him”, when said student discontinued first his fieldwork and then his degree. Maybe this student, like me, and like many others, did not want to disengage from the violence he had witnessed and turn it into an academic paper. Maybe he tried to stay with the feelings instead of suppressing them, and to unsilence the ongoing violence and the role Western states and economic elites have in them and to un​forget how violence also extended to him as a researcher. And maybe this gave him the impression that there was no space for him in academia. Bitsch (2018b) calls rage, anger, and so forth the forbidden feelings in academia. She discusses how rage especially is seen as political and researchers

Violent experiences, violent practices  145 who express rage as emotional. Bitsch continues with the observation that being described as emotional instead of its assumed opposite, namely ana­ lytical, leads to the dismissal of the person in question as a capable researcher and to the loss of the reputation of being a skilled academic. Women’s intellectual capability especially has for centuries been judged as being inferior to men because of their assumed emotionality (Campbell 1994). Emotionality was and is in several cases still seen as irrational, weak, or as a sign of mental illness. The former diagnosis of hysteria and the current one of emotional unstable personality disorder that are both over-​proportionally given to women and people that identify as non-​binary are examples of the last assumption. Antti Kauppinen sees rage as one form of anger, as part of the “anger family” of emotions, which includes, according to him, besides rage also core anger, resentment, and indignation. Kauppinen points out “that mature anger in its different forms involves the thought that someone intentionally or negligently failed to do what they were supposed to do” and therefore is responsible for violating a normative expectation (2018, 32). However, if rage evolves from a mixture of anger, guilt, and shame, or from observing someone intentionally violating a normative expectation, then rage is not based on irrationality. According to Gibbard, anger results from a moral judgment that something is unjust and is both constituted by and constitutive to morality in our social and cultural context. Rage appears when this judgment is dismissed, stays unacknowledged, and therefore unresolved. It is a reaction to the silencing of the subjective experience of injustice and the resulting anger from this act of silencing, and therefore, in some contexts, is appropriate. Reading up on the moral psychology of anger, I stumbled over the following statement: “It has been suggested that anger is a destructive emotion … I am not terribly troubled by this description, because sometimes destruction is needed” (McBride III 2018, 9–​10). If rage is needed to destroy violent practices that have been normalized in our discipline, then rage is not only a useful emotion, it is an emotion of caring.

Care “Take care, this will be good data”. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, this is the reassurance and advice I got from a senior scholar . While it might be true that this was good data, as Bitsch (2018a and 2018b) and Ahmed (2017) among others show, good data is useless without providing the tools to both take care and make sense of experiences of violence and suffering. If the personal is theoretical (Ahmed 2017, 10), then grappling with the experience and emotions caused by it can indeed lead to insights that would otherwise be lost. Describing both emotions and their causes, if possible, is according to Ahmed more than just descriptive work; it is conceptual work.

146  Lena Gross It can lead to the development of “sweaty concepts”: concepts that come out of “the description of a body that is not at home in the world … of a bodily experience that is trying”. Through staying with the difficulty and by exploring this difficulty, the researched and/​or experienced can be seen from a different angle, as sweaty concepts demand a reorientation of perception (Ahmed 2017, 13). However, there is a backlash with this, as Aisha Sultan, Shoshannah Williams, and Helen Lee clearly point out in their conversation about the emotional impact of fieldwork: The danger that our work becomes more about us as researchers rather than our research and our research participants (Sultan 2019). It was partly the fear of this happening that petrified me and kept me from both finding my voice and from writing. Being unable to write after experiencing (secondary) trauma is a normal reaction. Losing one’s voice and having trouble remembering are typical symptoms, and accordingly should be acknowledged by facilitating the time and support researchers need to reverse it. The all-​present advice “keep writing”, both when it comes to field notes and afterwards, can be useful for some; however, for others it can be impossible at the time, and therefore directly harmful. Kimberly Lewis, who was in a dangerous bus crash when doing fieldwork in Ecuador, recalls how fieldwork trauma impacted her dissertation work. Years later, during the final phases of my dissertation fieldwork in Ecuador, I struggled to write about situations that recalled fear, violence, or shame. I often avoided writing at all. Ethnographers famously cling to their memories, running to bathroom stalls to jot notes. I instead spent long stretches of research longing to forget. My dreams became loops of crunching metal –​a terrible kind of data to work with. (Lewis 2019) Helen Lee, too, recalls in a conversation in an episode of AnthroPod, with guest producer Aisha Sultan, the embodied experiences of fieldwork and how that impacted her even today, 30 years after her original fieldwork in Tonga: I mean, I don’t think it’s a choice. I think you are going to have embodied reactions if you’re fully engaged as a fieldworker. You are going to have those reactions, whether it’s nightmares or I spent a lot of the time crying or being angry or crying and being angry at the same time. There’s no way I could have not had those feelings and not being able to sleep, having bad dreams, all of those sorts of things. And a long time after fieldwork, not just during. A long time, and going through my fieldnotes in preparation for today brought a lot of that back … Thirty years ago and, when I look back on those field notes, it was as if I’d written them

Violent experiences, violent practices  147 yesterday. The incidents that I was looking at were so vivid in my mind. I know exactly where I was, I know exactly where the other people I was writing about were. I can, it’s completely burned into my brain. (Sultan 2019) Acknowledging not only the emotional toll of trauma, but also how this toll expresses itself in everyday life through the inability to work, avoidance tactics, or outbursts of emotions like rage needs to be addressed. Beckett, Bitsch, Lester, Lewis, and others that talk and write publicly about the impacts that trauma or secondary trauma from fieldwork has on their work and on them personally open up a space that has not been there in academia before. It is an act of courage, and an act of fighting against prejudices and stigma that are cemented in academic disciplines that have a tradition for working ethnographically like anthropology, sociology, and criminology. Most of all, it is an act of academic care. Care in an academic sense would mean teaching us how to write, how to find a balance between making theoretical use of our emotions and experiences without taking away the focus from the lived life of our interlocutors, and, not least, that it is okay not to write or to omit parts of fieldwork. Not to “eliminate the effort of labor” (Ahmed 2017, 13) without foregrounding this labor. However, in order to being able to process any teaching, we do need other room and care. Room for exploring and displaying emotions, for healing, and for addressing the violation, injustice, or loss in a safe space. Room and care can be given by, among other things, removing the stigma of asking for help. Normalizing the asking for and acceptance of care can for example happen through providing a mandatory debrief after fieldwork by someone who is not in a power relation to oneself and who is trained in trauma-​sensitive work, an intervention that many organizations that send their employees abroad already have in place. By making it mandatory for everyone coming back from fieldwork, no matter if the fieldwork was conducted “at home” or abroad, anthropology as a discipline would acknowledge that our work is –​though luckily in most cases not traumatizing –​always strained on a personal level. Beckett argues that because of the central place of empathy, intimacy, and thick relationships in fieldwork settings, ethnography should be considered as a kind of care work. This view on ethnography opens up for reflecting more on how vicarious trauma might take hold as part of the emotional costs of fieldwork (2019). Being aware of the concept of vicarious (or secondary as it is also called) trauma, and how for example psychologists anticipate these costs by having regular supervision sessions, could help destigmatize emotional reactions and prevent long-​term psychological or physical reactions following the close exposure to other people’s traumatic experience.

148  Lena Gross

Becoming a trauma-​informed discipline As already stated not all forms of or causes for trauma must be discussed in our ethnographic work. On the contrary, some silences and in general personal boundaries are healthy, and making oneself vulnerable, especially in an early-​career state in order to achieve a certain ideal of positionality, might not only hurt the researcher but can also take away the focus from the actual topic of writing. While there should be space for writing about it, it is not what I see as the most crucial. For me, it is trauma-​informed teaching and supervising that needs to be put in place, available resources, and cleaning up with stigmas and hurtful ideals of the anthropologist as the analytical and untouchable researcher who is never affected by what they are witnessing. Likewise, it is the recognition that silence, while protective in the right setting, can be as terrorizing as rage, and that systematic silencing of trauma is an act of violence. While emotional reactions during fieldwork can be used as analytical tools to get a deeper understanding of our interlocutor’s reality and of relations and micro-​politics in the field, emotional reactions post-​fieldwork shine a light on the structures, micro-​politics, values, and power relations in the researcher’s own reality, their discipline, and the society they belong to. Reyes-​Foster and Lester (2019) do exactly this with their series Trauma and Resilience, and they summarize their findings with the demand “that we recognize the fact that fieldwork can hurt, and that we have fostered a disciplinary culture where that hurt has been normalized and even celebrated” (2019). Therefore, we need to prepare anthropologists before doing fieldwork by developing coping tools and identifying resources for emergencies, anticipating that fieldwork can hurt before we do fieldwork. We need to discuss what we can do during fieldwork to support each other, and lastly, we need to create a disciplinary community and a habitus that supports researchers coming back from fieldwork, by different forms of solidarity, non-judgmental space for the expression of emotions, and trauma-​awareness that can both help in handling traumatic experiences as a researcher and supports getting professional help (see also Beckett 2019 and Lewis 2019).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2014 [2004]. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Beckett, Greg. 2019. Staying with the Feeling: Trauma, Humility, and Care in Ethnographic Fieldwork. June 22, 2019. Anthrodendum. https://​anthr​oden​dum. org/​2019/​06/​22/​stay​ing-​with-​the-​feel​ing-​tra​uma-​humil​ity-​and-​care-​in-​ethno​grap ​ hic-​fieldw​ork

Violent experiences, violent practices  149 Bitsch, Anne. 2018a. “The micro-​ politics of emotions in legal space: an autoethnography about sexual violence and displacement in Norway”. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 23(3): 1–​19. Bitsch, Anne. 2018b. Forbudte følelser i akademia.18. April 2018. Forskerforum. www.forsk​erfo​rum.no/​du-​er-​sa-​emo​sjon​ell-​utb​rot-​vei​lede​ren-​min-​kort-​tid-​for-​vi-​ gjo​rde-​det-​slutt Campbell, Sue. 1994. ‘Being dismissed: The politics of emotional expression’. Hypatia 9(3): 46–​65. Flanagan, Owen. 2018. Introduction: The Moral Psychology of Anger. In Cherry, Myisha and Owen Flanagan (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Anger. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield International. vii–​xxxi. Gibbard, Allan. 1990. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgement. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kauppinen, Antti. 2018. Valuing Anger. In Cherry, Myisha and Owen Flanagan (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Anger. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield International. 31–​48. Lewis, Kimberly. 2019. Writing, Silence, and Sensemaking After Fieldwork Trauma. 6 November 2019. Anthrodenum. https://​anthr​oden​dum.org/​2019/​11/​06/​writ​ ing-​sile​nce-​and-​sens​emak​ing-​after-​fieldw​ork-​tra​uma/​ McBride III, Lee. 2018. Anger and Approbation. In Cherry, Myisha and Owen Flanagan (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Anger. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield International. 1–​13. Reyes-​Foster, Beatriz and Rebecca J. Lester. 2019. Humanizing Fieldwork. August 5, 2019. Anthrodenum. https://​anthr​oden​dum.org/​2019/​08/​05/​hum​aniz​ing-​ fieldw​ork/​ Sultan, Aisha J. M. 2019. “When Fieldwork Breaks Your Heart.” AnthroPod, Fieldsights, February 14. https://​cula​nth.org/​fiel​dsig​hts/​when-​fieldw​ork-​bre​aks-​your-​heart

13 Hospitality and violence Writing for irresolution Aya Musmar and Ann-​Christin Zuntz

How to read these letters Experiences of violence during fieldwork are often hard to communicate and make sense of, and are sometimes shameful. In the exchange that follows, an anthropologist and an architect come together to make sense of their doctoral research with Syrian refugees in Jordan. These letters shed light on similarities and differences between two female early-​career researchers, one from Jordan, the other from Germany. We both did our postgraduate studies in the UK and write in English, which is not our first language. Only one of us is a native Arabic speaker. This letter exchange took place during a transition period, while we finished our doctoral studies and started our first academic jobs in the UK and in Jordan. Hence, it contains multiple voices –​ our own! –​as we discuss our struggles and lessons learnt while doing a first independent piece of research, and preparing for academic careers. Our exchange undermines easy distinctions between the Global North and South, and how indigenous and foreign researchers relate to their study subjects. It highlights that witnessing violence “in the field” cannot be reduced to isolated incidents that can be addressed through debriefing and counselling sessions for academics –​it has to be understood in concert with power inequalities in academic knowledge production more broadly. Hence, our letters go back and forth between reflections on experiences of gender-​based violence during fieldwork, and other, less obvious forms of violence: uneven geographies of research that shape how we are positioned in the global academic community, and to which extent our voices are heard in scholarly debates, but also the epistemic violence that we risk inflicting on research participants when we tell their stories. In these letters, we discuss multiple forms of violence in relation to another concept: hospitality. Scholars in the Middle East often benefit from their research subjects’ great generosity, be they locals or displaced people. Hospitality directed at researchers thus becomes a precondition to doing fieldwork. But we have also witnessed other forms of hospitality, including refugees’ reception in “host” countries and by humanitarian actors. We do not aim to romanticise the hospitality encounter. Rather, we remain attentive DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-13

Hospitality and violence: writing for irresolution  151 to its fragile nature: it is a process with frequent setbacks, and fraught with power inequalities, unheard stories, and unmet expectations. Framing the letter exchange as a continued series of hospitality encounters creates a safe (enough) space for us to ask each other discomforting questions, and to sketch out a continuous ethical engagement with research participants and with each other. Writing letters becomes a therapeutic methodology, where we confront the difficult emotions that accompany fieldwork, and may linger on afterwards. In these letters, we demonstrate that the researcher’s shock, discomfort, and shame are valuable data, and should be included into further analysis. Beyond reflecting on hospitality encounters of the past, these letters create a space for future forms of hospitality, in person and on the page. This allows us to envision new ways of writing about our research participants beyond “refugee stories”, and to reimagine how we can collaborate and, indeed, be friends, as academics across the North/​South divide. Please read these letters as an ongoing dialogue, where neither of us has the last word. Dear Ann, I began writing the body of this letter without realizing I had forgotten to start it with the typical kind of greetings that people normally exchange through their written correspondences. Resisting my desire to perfect the beginning of this letter and so to adjust the first few lines of this paragraph, I thought that maybe I should question the reasons beyond my forgetfulness. Why had I started pouring out what I have in my heart and mind and had not simply hoped that “this letter finds you well”? As you probably know, in Arabic culture (also in other cultures), it is important to greet those whom one would encounter in her environment; those whom she knows and those whom she does not know. My six-​year old niece, Salma, reminded me of the origins of this cultural code when she once turned back from school reciting repeatedly one hadith that she had learned that day in her Arabic class, “a man asked the Messenger of Allah: ‘which act in Islam is the best?’ He replied, ‘to give food, and to greet everyone, whether you know them or you do not’” (Al-​Nawawi 2018). Yet, our cultural codes would apply to our relations with those whom we don’t know more firmly. I feel that greeting someone is a necessity if the other is someone with whom I am not familiar. When the other is perceived as a “stranger”, or, in Jacques Derrida’s terms, as a “foreigner” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000), greetings are exchanged as gestures of hospitality; they aim to bring forward some familiarity that reduces others’ foreignness and allows them in. This urgency would, however, fade away when these exchanges take place between people who are more familiar. For example, my

152  Aya Musmar and Ann-Christin Zuntz parents would often apologize for showing lower hospitality standards by reminding their guests of their cherished familiarity: “you are not a stranger; you are one of us”. Receiving them with lower hospitality standards does not indicate disrespectfulness. Rather it is evidence of the host–​guest shared intimacies. An un-urgent and moderate perfor­ mance of hospitality becomes, in itself, an act of hospitality. In this place of familiarity, we stand at an intimate proximity with others. It is a place in which we, willfully and tactically, share our precarious conditions of being. It is a space of friendliness that one could take for granted; greetings in this space are, therefore, unnecessary. In a similar space, I stand with you Ann, I ask you to take me for granted and so take our familiarity with each other for granted. Dear Aya, Thank you for inviting me in, and for creating a shared space for us. If it was not for the pandemic, we might have had this conversation in your living room, or mine. As it stands, these letters will have to make up for the back and forth of coffee, tea, and food that I imagine we would have treated each other to. If I understand Derrida (and the Jordanians) correctly, then the welcome that we extend to a stranger, and even to friends, can never be unlimited. As Derrida points out, if the host gave away all their belongings, their generosity would abolish the very foundations of hospitality. (Or, as my Jordanian host mother might put it, guests can sit in the madafa1, but they are not allowed to serve themselves from the fridge!) Becoming familiar with each other, then, involves the constant renegotiation of boundaries, between what separates us, what is yours and what is mine. There is always a risk that you might reject me, or that I might take your place. Incidentally, hospitality is also the precondition to conducting fieldwork. Familiarity is what we try to establish with our interlocutors, because it allows us to develop a deeper sense of what it truly means to be in another person’s skin. You and I do research with Syrian refugees in the Middle East, with people who have long grown accustomed to tailoring their stories to the expectations of UNHCR officials, aid workers, and Jordanian civil servants. We both know that, only by getting invited into refugees’ houses, by sharing a meal with their ­families –​and by returning, day after day, to prove that we are friends, not one-​time “humanitarian visitors” –​we can build the trust that will allow us to grasp the complexities of their lives. When we do research in humanitarian contexts, we are confronted with different forms of violence. Some, such as the bureaucratic exclusion of refugees from the formal labour market or their internment in camps, are considered legitimate, and are sanctioned by the international community. Other forms of violence are singled out as problematic,

Hospitality and violence: writing for irresolution  153 and turned into the target of humanitarian interventions. For example, during my fieldwork in Jordan, multiple NGOs ran awareness-​raising programmes to end domestic violence. Refugees can receive assistance, but only in specific ways –​for example, as victims of displacement and gender-​based violence, but not as the target of restrictive asylum ­policies. Their experience of humanitarian protocols of how, and which types of, violence should be addressed, coincides with their more mundane survival strategies: they learn how to read the subtle signs of violence in the streets, in the news, in the air, how to interpret multiple and contradictory policies, and how to devise practical ways to keep themselves safe. As researchers working with displaced people, this is one of things that we seek to understand: how violence deposits itself in people’s bodies, feelings, friendships, and dreams. In these letters, I would like to use the example of Soraya, a Syrian refugee in Jordan, to discuss how researchers may approach a life at the intersection of multiple forms of violence. I met Soraya during my PhD fieldwork in Mafraq in 2016 when she sought help from an NGO that I was volunteering with. For Soraya, violence had begun long before her family fled to Jordan as refugees, and it had not ended when she crossed the border. There is no time to recover, as Soraya keeps finding ways to deal with the violence that she has to confront every day. I would like to use my familiarity with you to share an ethnographic encounter that got me sucked up in Soraya’s violence. It put to the test the fragile relations that I sought to build in the “field”, and the stories that I hoped to tell of my interlocutors. In 2016, Soraya, then in her mid-​twenties, was a year younger than me, but looked much older. Worn, battered, but also defiant. When Soraya was 13, her father married her off to a relative. A year later, her first son was born prematurely, and she spent many months at the hospital with the tiny baby. Ten years later, the Syrian conflict took her family, now including five children, on an odyssey from Homs, their natal city, to Damascus, Aleppo, Raqqa, and finally to Mafraq. Over the duration of 2016, an unexpected intimacy grew between Soraya and myself as I was increasingly put in a position to speak on her behalf. One of Soraya’s younger children needed hearing aids, and the small NGO that I volunteered with got involved. As a Western woman who could easily be mistaken for an aid worker, I forced my way into local NGO offices and churches, Soraya and her son in tow, pleading for money. Once, a specialist doctor in Amman explained the treatment to me in Arabic while Soraya was in the room, rocking her screaming son. In a country in which Soraya and I were both foreigners, doors opened for me, but not for her. Somehow, my stumbling Arabic became more intelligible than Soraya’s thick Bedouin accent. I am wondering how you, as a fellow researcher and a native Arabic speaker, might have felt in my position. How do we measure when it

154  Aya Musmar and Ann-Christin Zuntz is “ethical” to speak on behalf of others? Most NGOs have protection protocols in place that aid workers can follow when they witness violence and suffering. But how should academics, who often sit uncomfortable on the edge of humanitarian action, respond? Who gets to speak for whom, and whose voices are being listened to, or ignored? Do you find it easier to speak with and for others when there is no linguistic barrier, and from the relative comfort of your own home(land)? In Jordan, both Soraya and I were guests, but she also frequently hosted me in her own living room. In these complex configurations of hospitality, who retained the upper hand? Was I her visitor, but also a usurper? Dear Ann, When we think of hospitality, we think of it as a virtue whose performance requires a physical space. Like your Jordanian family, I have long practiced hospitality as an exchange; today you are the host and I am the guest in your living room, tomorrow I am the host and you are the guest in mine. This idea of exchange endows hospitality with certain economies that ponder it as a cultural currency rather than a virtue. The physical space is where hospitality as a cultural currency is, eventually, deliberated. Hospitality is an aporia, as Jacques Derrida argues, and the conflicting quality of its absolute law and other laws seems to be never ending. At one moment, I would be very excited to see you, to be seen by you and would be willing to give you my space. In another moment, I may be intimidated by your attendance in my space and would seek communicating with you why is it important for me to keep our boundaries in place. Hospitality, in this sense, is territorial and is invested in an exhaustive practice of border-​making (Musmar, 2021).   But, what if we think of hospitality beyond the physical space? An answer to my question can be found in the origins for the Hadith that my niece had recited. The virtue of greeting those whom I know and those whom I do not know is established in a history of relationalities and ethicalities that were first introduced through nature. Through the desert of the Arab peninsula –​an environment of scarce resources –​people are accustomed to a constant movement. Hospitality emerges out of these natural conditions as a mutual morality necessary for maintaining the life of the collective. Greetings, accordingly, aim to open another type of space that allows for a mutual hospitality beyond that grounded in the territorial boundaries of the “physical space”. Greetings, themselves, become more of a speculative threshold across which people address as well as respond to each other. When I invited you in, I had hoped for this mutual hospitality where we may get the chance to speculate on each other without being bound

Hospitality and violence: writing for irresolution  155 to the host–​guest formalities (or hierarchies). I do not want to change you, nor to be changed by you. I do not expect you to assimilate into my world, nor can I assimilate into yours. In her seminal account on “mutual hospitality”, Lucy Irigaray thinks of the words we use to welcome someone; these words should allow for the other not to feel she is a hostage of hospitality (2013). Probably my use of the terms –​intimacy, familiarity, and proximity –​may suggest that the limits of your world and mine are merged. Rather, I explore the transversality of these words across the limits of your world and mine. Like Irigaray, I seek the means of “entering into relations” with you; I observe the prepositions each of these words would need when constructed in relation to the other (ibid., 46). I return now to your questions and to my world as a researcher who conducts her research in her own context and in her native language. Identifying with the boundaries of my world might have not involved the same labour that is involved in curating this space between your world and mine. Yet, it has been invested in so much emotional labour that brought me closer to myself. The word “violence” is a tricky one, especially in a humanitarian context; it has been mainstreamed in a way that associates the barbarism implied in violence with certain societies. Even its translation in Arabic, “Unf –​ ‫ ”عنف‬has been infected by its English associations. As a Muslim Arabic-​speaking researcher, investigating the applications of this term first applies to myself. I often explore the performativity of violence in my actions, responses, and sometimes the way I look. One fellow Arab researcher whom I met in Sheffield once asked me, “do not you think that our language, ‘Arabic’, is rude?” He continued, “I think it is rude; the way Arabic is pronounced, the way Arabic is used in everyday discourse, it is just so rude!” As racialized others, we tend to see ourselves, as Mohanty puts it in the title of her famous article, Under Western Eyes (1988). The disgust that my friend had felt towards his native language mirrors my exploration of violence in the way my body performs its life. Under Western eyes, I often feel I am already accused of “violence”, even if I am speaking from the position of the subaltern. In defence of my own position, I once expressed to my Western friend: “I am not a radical person”. I thought that starting my conversation by annihilating my connections to “radical” thinking would validate me through this conversation. I wanted to show that I am a civilized, intellectual and ultimately non-​violent person with whom Westerners could discuss “sensitive” matters. I worry my unsatisfied voice would disrupt others’ comforts and fracture our guest–​host intimacies that I have exhausted myself curating. Even when I carefully translate my frustration into an intellectual argument, it is hard for my body, my face and/or my eyes to hide or refine emotions that unsettle them. I remember concluding to my mother once through one of our numerous long Skype c​ onversations,

156  Aya Musmar and Ann-Christin Zuntz “Mama, when I am angry, I feel I become my father. A very powerful feeling, I feel as if my body is inhabited by his anger”. “I am not a radical person … I know how extreme this might sound! But, to be frank, what I find missing in our intellectual debates on ethics these days, the one thing that nobody dares to imagine is what if the right decision for north-​based universities is not to intervene in other places at all?” I was not sure if anybody in my university had ever dared to state this question so explicitly (possibly also this naïvely). To my own knowledge, at least, none of the platforms that I attended to discuss ethics had suggested this non-​interventionist proposition. I, once, expressed similar frustration in one of our Feminist Methodologies research group meetings held in the Arts Tower in Sheffield. The title of that session was Decoloniality and Feminism. Having just submitted my PhD thesis after so many sleepless nights, I said with a sense of resignation: “I have been around for quite some time. I have been to so many discussions on the ethics of fieldwork. For five years, nothing has yet improved in how we ask some questions! What I find problematic is not that we often ask the same questions about positionality, power positions and the ethics of working across them, but that we are caught into some brief fieldwork situations that are studied in isolation from more complex politics that canonise who is researching whom! Often depicted in scenarios that address the intricacies of our fieldwork practices, these scenarios marginalise the necessity for our ethical responsibility towards larger power structures that border knowledge transmission between the north and the south”. Sooner than I thought, I realised that the “what if” question has opened the possibility for a future speculation. My radical statement materialises in a scene. I blink, and I see myself in the future. I do not know “where” I am, nor have I a sense of “when”. For the “how”, I try to observe this future-​version of myself. I hear my voice, it is saying words fluently in Arabic. Swiftly, a memory from the recent past interrupts this speculative image of a far or a near future. Titled as The Camp, my seat on the roundtable discussion faces a young Englishman. “I worked in Za’atri”, he said. Afterward, he spoke about the camp and about Jordan. A sense of entitlement touched his voice as he spoke about the two places; like the sense of entitlement an anchor on National Geographic would have while introducing his audience to a kind of creature he had just encountered. Jordan and the camp are his own brilliant discovery, his excavation or even maybe his amazing invention. Nobody comments on his prejudiced position; nobody is entitled to do so. “Possibly you are too feminist, a pessimist, or, are you getting your period soon?” The voice in my head interrupted the silence that infiltrated the room.

Hospitality and violence: writing for irresolution  157 It strikes me that places which promise us “safety” may threaten us the most. Later, on the same night of The Camp’s, ‘safe space for whom?’, the voice in my head asked as I laid down in bed. To be honest, although doing my best to imagine it carefully, I feared that this image would still upset my friend. I did not want her to think that I do not want her “in”! Like me, it seemed that my friend found my radical argument heavy. However, she agreed. She seconded my argument by expressing her discomfort with her position. She made the choice not to work with the Middle East; she would avoid the disparity between her power position and those whom she is researching. It would be naïve to think that people on the other side of such radical arguments would necessarily agree. I dwelled on this discussion knowing this possibility exists already. But, I also thought that this space of friendship that my friend and I share will permit these questions that we equally carry about empire, rights, positionality and violence to just be. Dear Aya, Allow me to delineate more uncertainties that follow from your question about the power dynamics of knowledge production across the North/​ South divide. When I read your letter, I was afraid that this might be the end of our conversation. In my previous letter, I had been hoping to discuss epistemic violence that occurs when researchers speak in lieu of research subjects during (and possibly after) fieldwork. In your response, you shifted the focus to the epistemic violence that researchers from the Global South inflict on themselves, and the self-​censorship that might come with looking at your own work “through Western eyes”. Am I getting this right? Are these radical questions a threat to the shared intellectual edifice that we inhabit as academics? Although one of us is a “foreigner” and the other an “indigenous” researcher, we both wrote and defended our PhD theses according to the standards of UK academia and, by extension, academia in the Global North. The risky relationships of hosting that you describe, and which characterize our interactions with our refugee-​interlocutors, also apply to our “academic lives”. At the core of hospitality (at least according to Derrida) are power struggles about who gets in, who is shut out, and about how long the guests are allowed to stay. This has real-​life consequences for Syrian refugees who face the limitations of a temporary welcome in host countries, but also for early-​career researchers like us who try to establish themselves inside academic debates and institutions. In the past, when we have discussed our research at the same panels, we both spoke English, which is not our first language. Needless to say, you and I are unequally positioned in this system, which is not only deeply gendered, but also racially and geographically biased. Do we have a shared language in common outside the academic conventions of the Global

158  Aya Musmar and Ann-Christin Zuntz North? Your questions indicate that in these letters, we walk on slippery ground, and we should not take our exchange for granted. Allow me to get back to my story about Soraya, and I will try to tie these loose ends about physical violence, and violent forms of knowledge production, together. For a long time, I only sensed the violence that Soraya lived with through absences: through pictures of her mother on her phone; through expressions in her dialect that I did not understand; through her lack of knowledge and words. This changed when I paid her a visit in the second half of 2016. Soraya rolled up her dress and took off her tights. From the hip down, one half of her body was badly bruised. ‘He walked all over me’, she said matter-​of-​factly. At a loss of words, I offered her a cigarette, and soon we were joined by her 19-​year old neighbour, who already knew about the injury. ‘Thanks God, not all husbands are like this’, I sighed. Her neighbour burst into tears. Most husbands in their building, it turned out, frequently beat their wives. Soraya called upon me as a witness because she wanted the beatings to stop and take revenge, but she did not know how. From the solutions that we discussed that day, I got a sense of how she thought about herself in relation to others, and how isolated she felt. Soraya did not want to seek help from her father, who lived in Mafraq and had already sent her back several times, because he was too poor to support her. I suggested involving an older Jordanian man from a local church, who often acted as a mediator during family conflicts in the refugee community. ‘If I tell him, my husband will beat me even more.’ She also refused to turn to the local office of the Jordanian Protection Unit, which could have rehoused her and the children in a (temporary) women’s shelter. Like many Syrians, Soraya had long learned never to put her faith into institutions. In Mafraq, most Syrian women were too afraid to report domestic violence for fear of repercussions for relatives without proper documentation, or who worked in the informal economy. Some days later, I mentioned Soraya’s case to a Jordanian friend who had trained at the national police academy, and now worked as a security officer inside Zaatari Camp. He offered to give his friends at Mafraq’s police station a call and make the following arrangement: every time Soraya would report her husband, they would take him in and give him a proper beating. I thought about this long and hard. In the end, I did not tell Soraya about my friend’s suggestion, and she did not bring up our conversation again. I was scared to set things in motion because I had never met her husband, had never heard his side of the story. I also found the idea of having a stranger beating up –​a refugee who, in his own way, was also vulnerable and legally insecure –​revolting. And I was afraid that any intervention might result in the loss of the family’s only, albeit unreliable, breadwinner. From then on, I felt that I had abandoned her.

Hospitality and violence: writing for irresolution  159 I wanted to discuss Soraya with you because we rarely address ethnographic encounters that fail, and even less often encounters when we fail others. Still, there is value in discussing them because they bring to the fore what fieldworkers tend to conceal through their well-​intentioned efforts of immersion: the gulf of privilege that often divides us from our interlocutors, and that also divides researchers like you and me from each other. Lines of privilege, however –​be they related to having the right (or wrong) skin colour, gender, passport or educational status –​are never straightforward, and they may shift. Getting involved in Soraya’s domestic struggles made me feel simultaneously powerful and helpless. She was right in suspecting that, as a Western woman who frequently travelled to Amman, it was much easier for me to socialize with higher-​ ranking NGO and security staff. At the same time, she overestimated my influence and networks. In fact, I had met my Jordanian friend, the security officer, at a house party in Amman and we had struck up a friendship, not because I was part of the capital’s wealthy and well-​ connected elite, but over a shared love of his Circassian culture. I knew that Soraya was hoping that I might find a way to protect her, but I could not. For people like Soraya, living with violence is not an abstract thought experiment. It means identifying resources that could help them deal with violence, not only the spectacular brutality of war and displacement, but also the routine beatings of an irate husband. For a researcher to grasp everyday ways of living with violence, one has to become part of the social relations that people affected by violence mobilise for help. I began to understand this better when I read an account by Hayder al-​Mohammad, a British-​Iraqi anthropologist, about a kidnapping in Basra (2012). Al-​Mohammad, the ethnographer, but also a friend of the victim, got involved in the family’s mad race to collect the ransom, as well as his friend’s struggles to rebuild his life after his release. Al-​ Mohammad makes an important observation: violence is not simply disruptive, it is dispersed through social networks, and it recalibrates them, creating new possibilities for social projects and how people relate to each other. The friends of a kidnapping victim may first become his saviours, and later his creditors, urging him to pay back the money they raised for his life. In a similar vein, Soraya’s request gave me an insider’s view of how she conceived of her position in family and humanitarian networks, and whom she could draw on for support. It also changed the way I thought about myself (was I the kind of person who could have others beaten up?) and made me weigh my loyalties: what did I owe to Soraya, and how did she and I think of my role in her life? Aya, I think we both agree that fieldwork is not simply a disinterested intellectual exercise that ultimately produces “knowledge”, and academic careers, in the Global North. Our kind of research always goes both ways. Being honest about what we hope to gain from our

160  Aya Musmar and Ann-Christin Zuntz interlocutors, and navigating their expectations about how we could be of use to them, becomes part of doing fieldwork. In a situation in which we have no control over wider humanitarian politics, we try to make ourselves “useful” in small, inconspicuous ways, through gestures of affection and care. We try to link up refugees with aid providers, join our friends for walks and coffee, buy them birthday presents, and show them pictures of our families back home. But Soraya’s request throws into sharp relief the limits of this transactional model of fieldwork. Dear Ann, It is my first time to be away for this long. I have just returned from the UK and I feel I have in a way lost my social elasticity! In the past seven years, I visited Jordan as a guest, knowing that I would be going back to the UK soon. It is difficult now to enrol in the temporalities of being a guest when I am expected to stay for longer. Shortly after my family had celebrated my return, my brother and I got into an argument. He told me, “Aya, you have become so rigid and impossible”. This resonated with what I had already observed in myself. I have cultivated an unchallengeable fixed position that has made discussing normal everyday topics with me almost “impossible”. One of my colleagues whose return to Jordan preceded mine assured me that I should not worry about the miscommunication I am experiencing because I will “get used to this” in time. “Get used to what exactly?”, I asked her back. I wonder, how could “this” shattered and inconsistent state of being in which I live in between two separate worlds, the world that I am carrying in my mind and the world where my body is become my new norm? Considering the multiple privileges that I maintain as a (Jordanian) citizen whose movement between different locations (to a certain degree) follows an algorithm of choices that I make, how could we understand the applications of “this” for someone like Soraya who has been forced to move and continues to live under so many social, economic, and cultural coercions?! My brother meant to say that I have been “radicalised”! Following this encounter with my brother, I had to look up the term “fundamentalist feminist” on the internet; to my own surprise, someone had already theorised the symptomatic “impossibility” that my close friends and relatives had observed in my attitude towards life here in Jordan (Case 2011). To be honest with you, this was a scary finding for me. Mary Ann Case’s commitment to her “secular values” and the way she utilises them theoretically in order to dismiss, devalue, and monsterise how Muslims uphold their “religious values” seemed to be going against my decolonialist feminist commitments (ibid., 549). It meant that I may have been observing myself and others through western eyes. For the decolonialist feminist critique, such positions are problematic because

Hospitality and violence: writing for irresolution  161 they do not account for the colonial histories that brought forward such a fixed view of the world that endows secularism with value and Muslim religion with cruelty. This confrontational encounter with my brother worked in my favour, eventually. It was a good reminder that committing to certain ethical grounds means that we continuously bring into question our privileges; not only those with which we happen to be born, but also those privileges that we accumulate as we climb the ladder of class through time. I cannot recall when exactly I wrote my second letter to you, but it was not meant to subject you to any criticism, nor to keep you out. I agree, we should not take the space between us for granted, nor should we run away from its discomforts; it is a space where we care for each other. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa thinks of care as a relational matter; for her, care involves “thinking with” (2017, 71), “dissenting-​ within” (ibid., 78), and “thinking for” (ibid., 84) the other. Puig de la Bellacasa warns against exploitative forms of togetherness and invites care as an act of maintenance and repair. “To care”, Puig de la Bellacasa writes, “joins together an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-​political obligation” (ibid.). Puig de la Bellacasa’s work on care is grounded in Donna Haraway’s understanding of the trouble (2016). For Haraway, staying with the trouble is a feminist act in which we commit to what is troubling to us, not ignore or overlook it. Like Haraway, Puig de la Bellacasa approaches care as a feminist issue; for her, care is a trouble with which she would rather stay. I think of this exchange between you and me as an act of care; the North/South divide is a troubling fact with which we have agreed to stay. Not with the promise that this trouble must be resolved, but as a form of togetherness to which we attend carefully. Like how I perceive “violence”, I am also at unease with the term “ethnography”. It happens often that other researchers would cite the work that I do in the camp as a work of ethnography, yet I do not. Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter lays out the foundations for my critical aversion to the term. He argues that social anthropology is “rooted in an unequal power encounter between the west and third world which goes back to the emergence of bourgeois Europe” (1992, 16). Asad invites us to question the “political neutrality” that we as researchers tend to claim while doing social anthropology (ibid.). It is indeed very difficult to seek this neutrality when we remain academic subjects operating within the paradigm of the colonial university. To address the problematics associated with this political neutrality, situating our fieldwork at the North/​South divide is rather an ethical necessity. It is through these larger power structures already concluded by the North/​South divide that I read my revulsion of the term “ethnography”. In her book, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Sara Ahmed argues that our day-to-day emotions

162  Aya Musmar and Ann-Christin Zuntz circulate in accordance with larger power structures (2004). The semantic link made between “ethno” and “graphic” alienates me from my own self; it sticks on my skin and I cannot but run away from it. What if the researcher happens to represent the same ethnicity that she is researching? It is beyond how it is pronounced, of course; it is more about the inevitability of the white gaze that it is inextricably associated with. Well, I am not a Westerner, nor do I consider myself as a member of the Arab elite who accommodates the white gaze (Said, 1978). What should one like me do with ethnography anyway, right? In my PhD thesis introduction, I disclaim the use of “ethnography” as a way to describe my methodology and instead keep the assemblage of methods and methodologies used in my research “unnamed” (2020, 20). By this disclaimer and leaving my work unnamed, I wished to put a spoke in the wheel; I hoped to explore the other possibilities that using ethnography may be pushing to the margins of my critique. Soraya’s story and the confusion that you had expressed in relation to the gendered complexity that she embodies reminds me of one encounter that I had through my fieldwork in Za’atri refugee camp in the summer of 2017. I was a humanitarian volunteer in one of the international NGOs operating in Za’atri refugee camp. A refugee woman pleaded for help against the violence that she had experienced at the hands of her husband and her mother-​in-​law. She was in the early months of her pregnancy and feared the loss of her baby. Like you, I felt I was expected to offer help. Or maybe this is what I had felt I was entitled to with my humanitarian uniform on. I had never met the young woman myself before. A male colleague called upon me as I was leaving one of the community centres and asked for my help; as a man, he could not be of any use. As I accessed the room (caravan), I saw a young woman walking around the caravan hesitantly with tears streaming down her face. “I do not want to go back home”, she said to me. I asked my colleague to dismiss the organisation bus that was supposed to pick me up, I closed the door of the caravan and turned back to the woman whom I just met. She expressed her fear of her husband and his mother who seemed to have been prejudiced against her since she started her post as an Incentive-​based Volunteer in the NGO. “He kicks me in my stomach. I remind him of my pregnancy, he does not care! His mother encourages him …” , she said to me. “We used to love each other, I do not know what had happened to him … !”, she continued. I asked her about the ways in which I could offer help; if she wanted me to see if she can go somewhere else or if she wanted the protection unit to follow up with her later through the day. She rejected all these forms of support, and expressed that any form of communication might only worsen her situation. She preferred reconciling with her husband rather than having someone interfering “officially” in the situation. However,

Hospitality and violence: writing for irresolution  163 I couldn’t respond to her plea not to tell anyone about her complaint. According to the humanitarian ethics of work to which I had adhered by working through the NGO, I had a responsibility to report this incident. The same colleague later advised me, “if something happens to her, you will be held accountable for not reporting what you had witnessed. Do inform the protection officer”. Minutes after my meeting with this young woman, I called the protection officer and I reported the case to her. Based on the protection officer’s request, I called the woman on the same evening to check on her. This last call concluded my role in the encounter. What struck me the most about this story is my limited capacity to think of my ethical responsibility beyond my humanitarian uniform back then. I had not revisited nor rethought this encounter until only recently. It arrived as a story that I shared with some colleagues while discussing unexpected fieldwork encounters. Through our discussion, the story soon unravelled into something more complex than what it was supposed to communicate. They asked me questions that I had taken for granted, such as, why did you not respond to her story differently? What ramifications would an abstention from reporting her story to the protection officer have entailed? The story soon pondered the challenges (or maybe the impossibility) of an ethically sponta­neous response to human sufferings in humanitarian settings. I still ask myself sometimes, what else could I have done to respond to the young woman suffering beyond my humanitarian responsibilities? And how ethical is it for us as researchers to maintain our focus centred on one research question without acknowledging methodologically as well as epistemologically the emotional and ethical geographies that we inhabit by merely being there in the fieldwork? Dear Aya, I have reread your letters many times now, and the aspect I identify most with is the sensation of being “torn apart”: by different languages, different life worlds, different responsibilities as researchers, humanitarians, and our interlocutors’ friends. Let me plead a case for why this feeling of being torn is precious, and not something we should get used to, but rather preserve, and put at the centre of our writing. Thanks to Soraya, I started to think of myself as a violent person, and about the different forms of violence that I was not simply documenting, but also actively involved in as an anthropologist. This has much to do with how we speak on others’ behalf, in their best (but also our own) interests, and how we write up their stories later. It seems to me that the incidents that we have described in these letters have one thing in common: the women at the centre of these stories demand aid on their own terms. They refuse to resort to standardized procedures of

164  Aya Musmar and Ann-Christin Zuntz humanitarian practice, demanding instead solutions (having a husband beaten up, privately reconciling with loved ones) which fall outside the remit of aid providers. In other words, they refuse to be turned into formal cases that can be documented and intervened upon. As researchers who enter the field alongside humanitarian actors, we do well to scrutinize our role in these encounters, and our complicity in forging “refugee stories”. As Cabot (2016) poignantly remarks, pro-​ refugee activists aim to produce simple, powerful narratives that resonate with policymakers and asylum officials. At first sight, scholars of Forced Migration, with their attention to the minutiae of everyday life, do something very different: in their writing, they avoid painting refugees’ lives in black and white, in terms of spectacular victimhood and suffering, leaving room for the contradictions, inconsistencies and lacunae that make up real people. Or do they? Much like refugee advocates, Cabot argues, researchers compile their material into coherent stories, which are then woven into wider conceptual arguments. These stories, however, never capture the complexity of our interlocutors’ experiences. Look at the way I am struggling to describe Soraya to you, or you cannot fill in the gaps in the young wife’s story. The absences, silences, and disappointments that we have captured in these letters are the result of real-​life violence that has shaped Syrian refugees’ lives. But they also point to the epistemic violence that both of us cannot help inflict on our study subjects. This raises important questions: how do we deal with not knowing? How do we write about stories that do not come to a (good) end? Cabot describes an encounter with a refugee girl who refused aid from the NGO where Cabot was collecting data. Months later, Cabot hears rumours that the girl might have died of tuberculosis; in any case, she never sets eyes on her again. Troubled by the uncertainty of not knowing what happened to the girl, Cabot revisits the encounter in several of her publications: “I wrote the encounter not for resolution, but for irresolution.” I wish that we could take Cabot’s suggestion to heart. How can we write about our interlocutors in ways that do not reduce them to their refugee-​ness and suffering, but leave space for cracks, absences, and multiple identities? How can we engage in ethnographic storytelling that renounces ca­thartic moments and happy endings? How can we do justice to people like Soraya who make us uncomfortable because they exert agency in ways that are not prescribed by humanitarian storybooks? One thing that my encounter with Soraya –​but also with you! –​ highlights is that we are not frozen in our positions as “hosts” and “guests”. Paying attention to, and renegotiating, the nature of our relationship allows us to encounter each other on equal grounds. This may help use see the multiple layers of our fieldwork interactions with “vulnerable” refugees. My difficulty in dealing with the incident that I described in these letters lies in capturing the complexity of Soraya, a

Hospitality and violence: writing for irresolution  165 person whose life was shaped so profoundly by violence. This chain-​ smoking, feisty woman, who beat her children, enjoyed rowdy jokes with her neighbours, and danced too seductively at women-​only parties, was very different from my soft-​spoken Jordanian host mother who gave me lessons on how to behave myself in Mafraq’s conservative society. Soraya had never been to school, and none of her children had a birth certificate. She could not read destinations on buses and was unable to tell Amman, the capital, apart from other Jordanian cities. In Mafraq, she put her mother on loudspeaker and sent her little videos of me and the children –​her mother, who had spent the last four years in an informal refugee camp in Lebanon. Soraya did not know her own neighbourhood in Jordan, but she could communicate across borders. Soraya was a daughter, a mother, a wife, and a “refugee”; she was also rebellious, headstrong, loud, and ingenious. Mutual hospitality might mean to cherish, and write about, these moments when Soraya allowed me to see glimpses of her life beyond displacement. It might also mean that we have to acknowledge that neither party has to assimilate, or become more like the other, for friendships to work. It seems to me that in these letters, we have been treading carefully, tentatively, to build this common ground under our feet. In my daydreams, I imagine that we would take a break now, sit on a rooftop, and watch the lights go on over Amman, while the evening prayer call reverberates from different parts of the city. I hope that there will be opportunities in the future for shared moments between us, which could form the basis for conversations about how we can make a home in the world, and in the academy, which are full of violence and violent histories, but also acts of kindness, friendship, and solidarity.

Note 1 Ceremonial room in many Jordanian households reserved for receiving guests; often has a separate entrance (cf. Wagner 2016).

References Ahmed, Sara (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Al-​ Mohammad, Hayder (2012). “A Kidnapping in Basra: The Struggles and Precariousness of Life in Postinvasion Iraq.” Cultural Anthropology 27(4): 597–​614. Asad, Talal, ed. (1992). Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter. Humanities Press. Cabot, Heath (2016). “‘Refugee Voices’: Tragedy, Ghosts, and the Anthropology of Not Knowing.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 45(6): 645–​672. Case, Mary Anne (2011). “Feminist Fundamentalism as an Individual and Constitutional Commitment.” American University Law Review 19(2): 548–​576.

166  Aya Musmar and Ann-Christin Zuntz Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle (2000). Of Hospitality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Haraway, Donna (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Irigaray, Luce (2013). “Toward a Mutual Hospitality.” In: The Conditions of Hospitality –​Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible, ed. by Thomas Claviez, New York: Fordham University Press, 42–​54. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (1988). “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 12(3)–​13(1): 333–​358. Musmar, Aya (2020). “Witnessing as a Feminist Spatial Practice: Encountering the Refugee Camp Beyond Recognition.” Phd, University of Sheffield. http://​ethe​ses. whiter​ose.ac.uk/​25927/​. Musmar, Aya (2021). “Madafah: Who is Hosting Whom? The Everyday of Za’atri Refugee Camp and the Architectural Encounter.” Inhabiting Displacement: Architecture and Authorship. Berlin, Boston: Birkhäuser, pp. 60–​ 74. https://​doi.org/​10.1515/​978303​5623​710-​006. Puig de la Bellacasa, María (2017). Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Said, Edward (1978). Orientalism. London: Routledge and K. Paul. Wagner (now Zuntz), Ann-​ Christin (2016). “Tiptoeing Across The Doorstep –​ Becoming The Daughter Of A Bedouin Family In The Jordanian Province.” Abwab, CBRL British Institute in Amman, 7 Nov. https://​bi-​abwab.org/​blog-​1/​2016/​11/​7. DROB. ‫ رياض الصالحين من كالم سيد المرسلين‬.)2018( .‫ يحيى بن شرف‬,‫النووي‬.

14 Getting closer to the skin Writing as intensity, writing as feeling Omer Aijazi

Introduction Over the last eight years, my research has revolved around the extraordinary stories of ordinary people striving to make life possible despite overwhelming structural constraints. My interlocutors reside in g­ eopol­itical edges and borderlands where environmental and political fragility and hyper-​intersecting forms of violence coalesce into the daily burdens of living. I have argued that the violence of colonial occupation, militarization, and environmental disasters are rarely definitive ruptures of some coherent lifeworld but part and parcel of the ongoing labor of making life viable (see Aijazi, 2020, 2016). To enable this, I have tried to give primacy to the lived intensities of my interlocutors over some predetermined theoretical gaze. This assumes that using people’s lives as raw material to understand something particular, despite its advantages, must also be understood as a form of epistemic violence. And that writing storied lives in ways that seem incomplete, faulty, elaborate, is a project worthy of pursuit. Such a gesture has the potential to undo the damage inflicted by a utilitarian lens to research that all too carelessly dismisses diverse forms of knowledge in favor of singular or singularizing modes of academic production. Writing incomplete stories can help dislodge (even if momentarily) the inherited notion that adding to literature is the only way to contribute. And provides openings to think more carefully about how to listen and grow humbler in the face of knowledge encounters. Writing stories that are incomplete, messy, elaborate, layered, speak of the processual work that unfolds in the long duration of our research endeavors and in relationship with others as imbued with ethical concern and uncertainty. Opening ourselves to these offerings can assist us in drawing transversal lines between fragmented forms of knowing and placing ourselves and relationships at the heart of our inquiry. In this intervention, I request the reader to momentarily ignore the automatic impulse to only write to understand. But to consider the author as one whose primary responsibility is to make their craft more hospitable to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-14

168  Omer Aijazi the lingering intensities of others. Flowing from this, I hope to assert ethnographic writing as a vehicle for accommodating life, as opposed to a weapon for declaring sovereignty over it. Writing the lives of others is a terrifying proposition, where the dangers of foreclosure are immanent, and deciding how to give a bit of yourself away and to what ends is urgent. I advocate for getting closer to the skin; writing, thinking, and acting in ways infused with the profound emotionality of witnessing in the e­ thical sense. This form of engagement is not held back by the straightening demands of disciplinary writing or knowledge production. Getting closer to the skin can perhaps be premised on an acknowledgment of risk and uncertainty over researcher control or reflexivity (Benson and O’Neill, 2007), as borne out of attunement to the affective intensities of fieldwork. Getting closer to the skin emerges from the plurality and connectivities of bodily and ontological unhingedness and the affective intensities that tie these configurations together. It is a metaphor for capturing the risks and entanglements of working with others, and the many “close calls” that occur along the way, some of which may lead to nicks and cuts, and others a smooth gliding over. In her book Liberalism and Human Suffering, Asma Abbas (2010) takes a sharp point of departure from witnessing as a liberal project of bringing human anguish into focus. This, she argues, though well-​meaning, leads to a flawed politics of redress. Abbas advocates for imagining forms of solidarity that better honor the history and materiality of the labor of suffering, instead of canceling its political force and the alternate forms of life it enables. John-​David Dewsbury (2003) writes that witnessing is about attending to difference –​“those imperceptible, sometimes minor, and yet gathering, differences that script the world in academ­ ically less familiar but in no less real ways” (p. 1907). Kelly Oliver (2015) understands witnessing as an ethical and political project, one that is concerned with the reigning in of the “ethical concern for the singularity of each living being” (p. 475). She argues that witnessing necessarily invites us into the affective and imaginative dimensions of experience, which according to Kathleen Hare (2019), disrupts objective and idealized notions of ­knowledge mobili­zation. Chih Yuan Woon (2013) argues that thinking critically about how emotions are intertwined in the conduct of fieldwork can provide a pathway to appreciate the unpredictable nature of the research process and the broader contexts that shape research outcomes and knowledges produced. Likewise, attending to the affective dimensions of oppression and inequity can draw attention to those very structures in ways that exceed the need to generate the “correct” way forward. Thajib et al. (2019) argue that the researcher’s affects are also an epistemic resource that enables fieldworkers to communicate what is “at stake” in dialogue with traditional ethnographic artifacts such as field notes, interviews, photographs, and so on (p. 12). Davies and Stodulka

Getting closer to the skin  169 (2019) encourage us to consider the enabling role of affect and emotion and what their retrieval from marginal spaces enables. This intervention stretches these conversations and attempts to work through the embodied experiences of fieldwork to reassert the linkages between emotionality and knowledge production (see Hume, 2007). It offers raw and unprocessed commentary on knowing grounded in embodiment and emotionality, and the struggle to center “other” knowledges. Moving further from vulnerability as a shared ethical experience and an openness to others (Butler, 2009, 2006), it draws attention to knowledge borne out of vulnerability, not as something a priori or given, but as a trace of the affective and intellectual work that goes into its very production.

The labor of reciprocity Over several years of working with the same people, there has been a notable shift in the nature of my conversations with these interlocutors. Their stories have shifted from the suffering of past earthquakes and floods or the constant heaviness of military occupation to glimpses of other life projects that also demand centering. For example, I have written about Chandni bibi, a resident of a remote Himalayan village, who believes that the most significant consequence of the earthquake was her blindness that she insists resulted from the tremors, despite her family quietly acknowledging that she had always been visually impaired (see Aijazi, 2016). For Chandni bibi, the only viable offering of the humanitarian apparatus is her eyesight. There is also Niaz, who believes that the most significant dysphoria he has ever experienced is not the earthquake or his paraplegia but the betrayal of his best friend.1 Then there is Abrar, a young man whose life is held back by the double rejection of his girlfriend’s parents and the Pakistani military, where he has been desperately seeking employment for the last five years. Like the countless other people I have met, all three insist that if I engage with them, it must be on their terms and within the frames they deem pertinent –​anything else is a sure betrayal. Often, I have felt that the most important demand from my interlocutors was to acknowledge our friendships and affirm the strength of our evolving relationships. This meant accepting invitations to dinner, even if it meant hiking for several hours to what felt like remote locations, only to show up out of breath and sweaty, but still showing up (see Aijazi, 2019). Or accepting gifts such as the choicest of cucumbers picked from one’s field or a freshly laid egg, fully knowing that these are most likely prized possessions. It also meant revealing my own stories of anxiety, sickness, and failure, which were initially difficult to share, as well as learning to ask for help, such as when being lost in the mountainscapes, feeling hungry or lonely. Fieldwork has been and continues to be an intense entanglement of getting lost and found (Aijazi, 2018).

170  Omer Aijazi One can expect “fieldwork kinships” to eventually fizzle out. It is chal­ lenging to sustain relationships in a conventional sense after the formal ritu­ als of fieldwork are over and more physical separation is established. This is when the limits and tenacity of one’s allyship are tested. In my case, in the initial months of “physically exiting” the field, I tried maintaining contact with my interlocutors via telephone or text messaging. Admittedly, over the years and given the challenges of communication in the remote locations that I work in, these have become sporadic, and I have felt my enthusiasm fade. Occasionally, when phone contact can be established, I receive specific requests for assistance, such as helping someone get a job, access medical treatment, gain admission into a university, or “take so and so with you to Canada.” I am unable to fulfill most of these requests, and I continue to disappoint my interlocutors. On a bad day, the feelings of insufficiency arising from the inability to reciprocate the expectations of fieldwork kin, combined with the impossibility of fully accommodating their stories into my discursive and written practices, are paralyzing. On a good day, the sense of defeat can conversely energize my efforts to trouble inherited meanings of the social and to make knowledge more alive to experience and feeling. Like most people, I oscillate between good and bad days. Simpson and Smith (2014) talk about “theoretical promiscuity”; the shared risk in theorizing while also maintaining the affective legacy of experience (also see Million, 2014). Richa Nagar (2014) employs the language of “praxis without guarantees” to articulate interdependencies that take root through radical forms of vulnerability. These are all references to the wonders of encountering the Other, which, when allowed, can reshape one’s place in the world, revealing cracks in intellectual or affective moorings and taken for granted certainties. Less a destination, more a journey, fieldwork’s brazen exposure can invigorate negotiations on how we come to tell the stories of others, and on what terms. Or it can prevent us from writing altogether. Negotiating the feelings of enablement with being frozen is perhaps what the written word represents.

Being put together I recall constantly feeling tired during fieldwork. Not from the hours spent walking or talking or taking notes, but from the inability to keep up with the thoughts racing in my head about how to properly honor the generosity of my hosts. This brings me to questions of self-​care and care work as both col­ laborative and as witnessing in the ethical sense. Self-​care, an orientation of care work, is widely accepted within feminist, queer, and activist circles as a mode of self-​preservation to both better perform the work and ensure its continuity.

Getting closer to the skin  171 André Spicer (2019) cheekily asks: “What do professional golfers, radical queer feminists, and Instagram lifestyle influences have in common? They are all devotees of self-​care.” Undoubtedly, the language of self-​care has been co-​opted by neoliberal orientations focused on producing individuated subjectivities. Within such orientations, liberation has transmuted into forms of care exclusively for the self, which melds neoliberal rationality with some kind of an emancipatory project (Rottenberg, 2014, p.433). This can lead to the misinterpretation of structural designs of oppression as individualized responsibility and redress, “obscuring the social, economic, and pol­itical sources of physical, emotional, and spiritual distress and exhaustion” (Michaeli, 2017, p.53). As an individual project of self-​protection and sustenance, self-​care can be deeply depoliticizing, encouraging deep breathing and meditation over anger, protest, action. I share an excerpt of my conversation with a counselor who encouraged me to adopt strategies for self-​care. The counselor insists on maintaining a “healthy” separation from the stories of my interlocutors and myself by wearing “protective bubble wrap”: COUNSELOR (C):  You need to stop stealing from the pain of others. By feeling

their pain, you are diminishing their right /​ability to claim their pain and express it. OMER (O):  How can anyone stop feeling the pain of others? C:  Every time you step out into the world, imagine a bubble around you, or imagine yourself wrapped in bubble wrap, separate yourself. To continue doing your work, you need to distance yourself from the pain of your participants. Imagine a protective shield surrounds you. O:  But that is the opposite of an ethical and feminist engagement. How can I write about my interlocutors without deeply engaging with the corporeal, spiritual, and affective dimensions of the harms and exclusions they face? C:  But by taking on their pain, you are taking away something from them; it hampers their ability to experience that pain fully. O:  Wait, isn’t that a good thing? C:  No! If you take on the pain of others, you take away from their experience; it taints your ability to see them and listen. O:  What kind of seeing and listening is this? Which won’t haunt me, interrupt my sleep, discombobulate me? C: You should understand that allowing people to speak and voice their experiences to you provides incredible therapeutic possibilities for them. O:  Then I am sure I must have changed many lives (sarcastically). C:  I advise you to develop strategies to minimize your emotional investment. You need to clinically remove yourself so that you can see impartially.

172  Omer Aijazi O: But

listening is an embodied experience. It is meant to be exhausting and depleting. That is why it prompts you to work. Otherwise, it isn’t listening, is it?

Should one consider care work only in self-​directional and self-​serving ways, such as how the counselor is advising it? Through an inward gaze of care and an almost closing off to the existential burdens of others, the ethnographer is slowly guided back to a make-​believe world where rules hold, and guarantees exist. This, I believe, is very much aligned with the neoliberal university’s priority of “frontier research,” where “the solo author ‘breaks new ground’ and plants a flag bearing their name on the terrain they have discovered” (Medak-​Saltzman et al., 2019). And that too while writing clearly, speaking confidently, but never choking or crying. Care work is positioned only in response to trauma, and trauma in itself is used as an umbrella term to dismiss any experience that deviates from the prescribed path. Care work can be reimagined as a collaborative undertaking, less a project of closing oneself off (bubble wrap) though sometimes that may be needed, but as opening oneself up further to radical forms of relating and entanglement. Being open to vulnerability can be burdensome with little or no validation from our institutions and even from our peers. But this is part and parcel of the risks of entering the lives of others, and then attempting to write about them. Why should we hold so dearly the expectation that the ethnographer must always be put together and that any other state is inherently faulty? Care work can also be considered as an ethical form of witnessing, as collaborative and community seeking, not always self-​ referential and individual. It can perhaps lead to forms of writing, thinking, and acting that are porous, profuse, excessive but also transparent, textured, and above all, sensitive to the breath of life.

Bringing oneself to write I am a violent being, full of fiery storms and other catastrophic phenomena. And yet I can’t do more than begin this and begin again because I have to eat myself, as if my body is food, in order to write. (Acker, 1995, p.66) This quote from the late experimental novelist Kathy Acker points to the investment needed to write as if one must eat themselves. The evocative phrase gestures that writing is not only painful and self-​destructive, but also that we give a bit of ourselves away every time we put words to paper. When I returned home from fieldwork after my first trip, I could not bring myself to open my suitcase full of “data.” My field notes in notepads

Getting closer to the skin  173 and loose paper rested in my bag for at least six months before I felt ready to go through them. Even the thought of touching them sent me in a frenzy as if tactile touch could transmit dread and unease from unprocessed words spewed on paper. Without looking too much at the contents of my suitcase, I kept a journal to record what I remembered feeling during engagements with interlocutors. (Interestingly, these vivid journals constituted much of my “empirical data” in subsequent writings.) For me, this was necessary preparation, a journey in its own right. Here, I am not talking about coding and analysis but developing the muscle, courage, and affective tools to thoughtfully engage with the material. This percolation is a kind of affective labor where stories are circulated and recirculated in one’s heart, mind, and soul to work through and achieve what Manulani Aluli Meyer (2008) calls a triangulation of the body, mind, and spirit. Resisting the urge to write immediately can be thought of as a necessary gesture of waiting to allow “the knowledge of the other to mark me [us]” (Das, 2007, p.17). The wait, which may appear as “doing nothing,” also urges us to think carefully about what is meant by scholarly productivity, and what is meant by the “doing” of research and writing. In this vein, Jasmin Ulmer (2017) encourages us to think about the wait not as unproductive, but as differently productive. Here, I am not so much interested in recognizing the wait as intellectual labor, which it is, but asserting its necessity for writing in ways that do not end up in theoretical foreclosure. After several weeks of being “differently productive,” when I finally did develop the nerve to pull out my notebooks, audio recorders, cameras, and transcripts, I spent the next several months meticulously organizing the material. I used colored-​coded binders, labels, tabs –​anything to help me achieve some order and delay further the dreaded task of engaging with what I had collected. Handling data in this way; “touching” it as manifested in ink, pixels, and decibel, had an unexpected collaging effect that allowed me to come to terms with the uncontainability of experience. Such an opaque engagement gave me the freedom to think more generously about what constitutes “data” and “writing”: is data only what is contained by ink, pixels, and decibels? Is writing, hence, merely their logical organization? And by that reasoning, is life only what is containable? Or are the contingencies of life emergent in the unexpected ways decibels, pixels, and ink can be arranged or collapsed together or sometimes shrugged aside? It was as if “moving” the data physically, crunching it up as a ball of paper, tearing it, listening to it, deleting it, allowed me to understand data itself as an artifact –​something that I had created and given shape to. The realization was key to freeing me from the burdens of data as immutable and life as containable. This also allowed me to finally breathe and, dare I say: write.

174  Omer Aijazi

In Acker’s novel Empire of the Senseless, through the “construct” Abhor and the would-​be pirate Thivia, Acker writes (or yells): ‘‘GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.” Eventually, the characters conclude: “The demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless.” Acker’s work helps me think through the labor it takes to bring oneself to write and the behind-​the-​scenes slow percolation, which cannot be rushed and should not be rushed. This also takes me back to the earlier days of my work, when I was still a doctoral student. At some point, the university started chasing me for progress reports. What shall I write to them? I thought. That for the last year, I have been “percolating in data”? How can I demonstrate “thinking” as progress? In an interview, Margarethe von Trotta, the director of the biopic on Hanna Arendt, admits the challenges of depicting “thinking” as both an intense emotional investment and an exhausting one (Harris, 2013). In the film, thinking takes the visual form of smoking cigarettes, lying down on a daybed, and staring at the ceiling. I also considered posing in photographs smoking cigarettes, lying down on a daybed, and staring at the ceiling –​and submitting them to the university clerk. McQueeney and Lavelle (2017) insist that emotional labor is necessary for any critical methodology and cannot be disentangled from ­knowledge production (also see Delaine, 2000; Harris and Huntington, 2000). I have

Getting closer to the skin  175 learned to appreciate the value of percolation: a gradual, unmediated seepage in the cacophony and chaotic lingering of fieldwork well after one’s formal exit from the field. Trusting this process and duration, even though it may seem counterintuitive to the task of “actual writing” or getting the work done, is necessary to bring oneself to a place where getting closer to the skin can even be possible.

Conclusion: figuring out feeling Novelist, poet, and playwright Gertrude Stein reminds us in Tender Buttons: Act so that there is no use in a center. A wide action is not a width. A preparation is given to the ones preparing. They do not eat who mention silver and sweet. There was an occupation. (1914, republished 2002, p.63) In this intervention, I have attempted a conversation on the profuse emotionality of witnessing in the ethical sense. I have advocated for getting closer to the skin, your own, and that of the Other, that is, writing, acting, and thinking in ways that acknowledge the risks, uncertainties, and excitements of colliding with difference while seeking to bring back to life the lingering intensities that devoured the ethnographer in the first place. By this, I mean the various velocities and palpitations of ethnography, which may have caused our heart to rise to our throat or sink deeply, revealing cracks in how one thinks the world ought to be put together. Getting closer to the skin refers to work and labor, which intentionally moves beyond the language of “theoretical contributions” or “gaps in the literature,” honoring the joy, satisfaction, risks, and dangers of researching and writing. It is an insistence, albeit a risky one, to welcome back the unwieldiness of lived and felt intensities into sterile academic spaces, to insist that the intensities of others need not be subsumed by intellectual contribution alone, nor be imprisoned in any one theoretical home, if at all. Getting closer to the skin is an expression of solidarity and ­ethical witnessing. And of sharing vulnerability and learning the world anew. While there is no correct way to get closer, there is value in the journey itself. After all, a word is not a word, a sentence is not a sentence, but a dance between paralysis and enablement. It is this choreography of sorts that we should pay attention to.

Acknowledgments This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [SSHRC Insight Development Grant 430-​2020-​00025].

176  Omer Aijazi

Note 1 I write about Niaz and others in more detail in my book Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in the Borderlands, forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press.

References Abbas, Asma (2010). Liberalism and human suffering: materialist reflections on politics, ethics, and aesthetics. New York: Springer. Acker, Kathy (1995). The end of the world of white men. In Posthuman Bodies, edited by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, 57–​72. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Aijazi, Omer (2020). What about Insaniyat? Morality and ethics in the pahars of Kashmir. Himalaya, 40(1), 30–​48. Aijazi, Omer (2019). How to be an ally with Kashmir? War stories from the kitchen. The Conversation. Available from https://​thec​onve​rsat​ion.com/​how-​to-​be-​an-​ ally-​with-​kash​mir-​war-​stor​ies-​from-​the-​kitc​hen-​121​801 Aijazi, Omer (2018). Kashmir as movement and multitude. Journal of Narrative Politics, 4(2), 88–​118. Aijazi, Omer (2016). Who is Chandni bibi?: survival as embodiment in disaster disrupted Northern Pakistan. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 44(1), 95–​110. Benson, P. and O’Neill, K. L. (2007). Facing risk: Levinas, ethnography, and ethics. Anthropology of Consciousness, 18(2), 29–​55. Butler, Judith (2006). Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. New York: Verso. Butler, Judith (2009). Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Das, Veena (2007). Life and words: violence and the descent into the ordinary. Oakland: University of California Press. Davies, James and Stodulka, Thomas (2019). Foreword: pathways of affective scholarship. In Affective dimensions of fieldwork and ethnography, edited by Thomas Stodulka, Samia Dinkelaker, and Ferdiansyah Thajib, 1–6. New York: Springer. DeLaine, Marlene F. (2000). Participation and practice: ethics and dilemmas in qualitative research. London: Sage Publications. Dewsbury, John-David (2003). Witnessing space: ‘knowledge without contemplation’. Environment and Planning A, 35(11), 1907–​1932. Hare, Kathleen A. (2019). Affective small stories–​Witnessing an ‘ideal’ instance of knowl­edge mobilization. Emotion, Space and Society, 32, 100579. Harris, J. and Huntington, A. (2000). The emotional nature of qualitative research. Boca Raton: CRC Publishers. Harris, Brandon (2013). Margarethe Vin Trotta on Hannah Arendt. Film Maker Magazine. Available from http://​filmma​kerm​agaz​ine.com/​71699-​mar​gare​the-​ von-​tro​tta-​on-​han​nah-​are​ndt/​#.WnfQ​pIJG​3dd Hume, Mo (2007). Unpicking the threads: emotion as central to the theory and practice of researching violence. Women’s Studies International Forum, 30(2), 147–​157.

Getting closer to the skin  177 McQueeney, Krista and Kristen M. Lavelle (2017). Emotional labor in critical ethnographic work: in the field and behind the desk. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 46(1), 81–​107. Medak-​Saltzman, Danika, Deepti Misri and Beverly Weber (2019). Disability and decolonizing time/​knowledge of the tenure clock. Digital Feminism Collective. Available from https://​bit.ly/​3U9b​bqC Meyer, Manulali Aluli (2008). Indigenous and authentic: Hawaiian epistemology and the triangulation of meaning. In Handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies, edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith. London: Sage. 217–​232. Michaeli, Inna (2017). Self-​care: an act of political warfare or a neoliberal trap? Development, 60(1–​2), 50–​56. Million, Dian (2014). There is a river in me: theory from life. In Theorizing native studies, edited by Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith 31–​ 42. Durham: Duke University Press. Nagar, Richa (2014). Muddying the waters: coauthoring feminisms across scholarship and activism. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Oliver, Kelly (2015). Witnessing, recognition, and response ethics. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 48(4), 473–​493. Rottenberg, Catherine (2014). The rise of neoliberal feminism. Cultural Studies, 28(3), 418–​437. Simpson, A. and Smith, A. (2014). Introduction. In Theorizing native studies, eds. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (1–30). Duke University Press. Spicer, Andrè (2019). ‘Self-​care’: how a radical feminist idea was stripped of politics for the mass market. The Guardian. Available from www.theg​uard​ian.com/​ commen​tisf​ree/​2019/​aug/​21/​self-​care-​radi​cal-​femin​ist-​idea-​mass-​mar​ket Stein, Gertrude (2002). Tender buttons: objects, food, rooms. Los Angeles: Green Integer Print. Thajib, Ferdiansyah, Samia Dinkelaker and Thomas Stodulka (2019). Introduction: affective dimensions of fieldwork and ethnography. In Thomas Stodulka, Samia Dinkelaker, and Ferdiansyah Thajib (eds.) Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography (7–​20). New York: Springer. Ulmer, Jasmine B. (2017). Writing slow ontology. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(3), 201–​211. Woon, Chih Yuan (2013). For ‘emotional fieldwork’ in critical geopolitical research on violence and terrorism. Political Geography, 33, 31–​41.

15 Cherry blossoms and grilled lamb An ethnographic short story Eva van Roekel Cordiviola

The dashboard clock blinked 00:00. Almost mechanically, I glanced at my cell phone. It was 11:13 in the morning. After about a forty-​minute drive in silence, we stepped out of the car. Gabriel had driven distractedly, glowering, and without words. I felt a bit nauseous. There had been cars everywhere, creating a sense of ordinary chaos. Earlier that morning, Gabriel had invited me to join him for lunch with his family in the countryside. I had never been to the infamous white house. So I agreed. When I saw the white walls looming up, I had an odd feeling that the lunch would be a puzzling one. In passing, Gabriel mumbled that his father had invited his brother and sister too. He gently pushed me into an unknown garden located behind a cluster of carefully cut hedges. Gabriel stopped in front of a pool and stared into it for a second. I was feeling somewhat confused. A man with a protruding, round belly walked toward us. His eyes twinkled while giving Gabriel a big wet kiss on the cheek. “Papa” Gabriel said. “This is the Dutch anthropologist I was telling you about. She is here to examine the meaning of justice in Argentina.” Standing next to the pool, I smiled, feeling a bit ridiculous, which seemed appropriate hearing Gabriel’s explanation about my pursuit to study the revived trials for torture and disappearance of the 1970s. The man lowered his knife and introduced himself as “Jorge” and gave me a wet kiss on the cheek. Then he rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. He laughed out loud after saying, “Good luck with that impossible task. I wouldn’t get too involved, if I were you.” I looked up into his plump face covered in deep wrinkles with expressive, yet somewhat naughty lips. Gabriel had always spoken about his father as if he was a walking time bomb. There seemed nothing wrong with this man. I saw no trace of deep depression or wished-​for suicide. I swallowed my sudden, inappropriate question about his health. “What a delight for me to be here today,” I said instead. “What a lovely garden you have.” “You have a funny accent. Where did you learn Spanish?” I shifted my weight from one leg to the other as I used to do when I felt awkward. “Venezuela, but that’s a long story.” DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-15

Cherry blossoms and grilled lamb  179 “Ah Venezuela, nice. I used to go there for business when I was young.” I was happy that the conversation had turned to another direction because, there, talking about Venezuela seemed silly. Jorge turned around to look at the burning fire. He laughed once more ending the conversation abruptly, while mumbling the word “justice” several times. He picked up the knife that had fallen into grass and walked back toward the barbecue set. Stoically, he started poking the meat on the grill. Gabriel did not seem surprised that the conversation had ended although he did let out a muffled groan. We walked toward the enormous white house in silence. In the living room, he kneeled for a moment in reverence. His nose almost touched the white tiles as he held this pose, which felt to me to be subservient, sad and defeated simultaneously. I looked around—​feeling both curious and uncomfortable. The room was decorated with great care. The creamy, white doors hung straight from their hinges. Powder pink roses were tenderly put in crystal vases. Polished silver shown on a glass table. I looked a bit longer at a large painting hanging over the fireplace, capturing the depth of a woman through her penetrating eyes. Abruptly, Gabriel stood up. He nervously dusted his jeans and then opened the door. I joined him in the kitchen. “Mama has been so busy in preparing the house. She always works day and night to reach near perfection.” I frowned and looked at Gabriel and asked if the house was still the same. He laughed a bit, exclaiming, “Every inch and every corner are exactly how it was before. Otherwise the spirits would get lost!” He cracked his knuckles and looked at his nails. “I need to cut them,” he said. I could tell that he was being serious. We walked toward the garden again and his voice changed. “Her favorite place is the small wooden bench, right below this Japanese cherry tree. She planted the cherry in loving memory of her mama years ago.” The tree had delicate white flowers that only blossom for a few days. His eyes turned glassy and he sat down on the bench and looked around without much interest. It suddenly smelled of a penetrating, sweet cologne. “Every afternoon she drinks a half a glass of Chardonnay with a small wafer and imported Brie, here, on this bench.” Gabriel did not say anything else. I thought I detected a longing for French pretentiousness. Had his memories and the present morphed into a constant rhythm of sorrow and comfort? I sat next to him and reflected upon this woman I had never met. She was palpably present. As I briefly placed my hand on Gabriel’s shoulder, a desire to be with her had nestled deep within me. My hand grew wet with his sweat while I patted his naked arm. Why had Gabriel always painted a very different picture of the white house? I pictured doors falling off their hinges and empty bottles piled up in the kitchen. I expected to find yellowed borders revealing spaces where paintings once hung on the walls. I was picturing a pool filled with slimy

180  Eva van Roekel Cordiviola water with a layer of autumn leaves, while wild, uncared for branches obscured the entire garden. Gabriel had always given the impression of it being an old hovel in remote countryside. Only his crisp memories of garden-​fresh roses kept the fast-​advancing decay at bay. I now noticed a strange nostalgia in his recollections of the white house. Gabriel stretched his legs and walked toward his father to help out with lunch. He started ­slicing the lettuce in perfect julienne or French cut strips. My heart was pounding. The past and the present held one another in a bizarre stranglehold. Yet, somehow it felt like a comfortable straightjacket. Ease and unease were one in this place. I walked into the garden and sat on a chaise. Was I going crazy? I was not sure if the madness would make me ecstatic or even more desperate. Gabriel always said that despair and confusion were simply facts of life. The pool sparkled in the late morning sun. Each Sunday afternoon, the family gathered like this. A straddle-​legged lamb lay above glowing coals. Jorge was still poking patiently into the meat. Gabriel was energetic as usual. He did some frantic cleaning of the square meter of the tiled floor where he had just kneeled. No one said anything. The crackling of the flames was all there was. Then someone bashed the wooden door. Malena, dressed for work as if it was not Sunday morning, had entered the garden. “It is so complicated today.” Dark strands of black hair stuck on her forehead. The humidity was terrible that day. Malena continued babbling to no one in particular. “It all began with the rising temperature. The air-​conditioning broke down last week. And bills keep appearing on the doormat.” She smiled. Gabriel walked toward his older sister with open arms. They hugged and kissed as if they had not seen each other for years. She snorted twice and then shouted. “The bus was late too!” Gabriel shouted in return “Learn to drive, you idiot!” They laughed. “Look,” she said and scooped a newspaper under Gabriel’s eyes. “Power cuts are everywhere now. It is all so extremely complicated. In three weeks my salary just evaporated.” Again, she smiled faintly. Malena gave an air kiss to Jorge and she dropped down into the sun lounger next to the pool. “You look just like your mother in this blue dress.” A satisfied smile opened up Jorge’s plump face. They completely ignored me as if I had become invisible. It somehow felt better this way. Their babbling conversation carried on effortlessly. Complications had disappeared and for a moment life was simple. Time lapsed and I had not opened my mouth since Malena arrived, so I cleared my throat. “How is work?” I asked. “Elections are coming up,” Malena said. Her rounded eyes looked suddenly afraid. “I work my ass off at the municipality, you know. But people are gossiping.” “What are they saying then?”

Cherry blossoms and grilled lamb  181 “That everyone who voted in favor will get fired. And that I am the last one in, so I will be the first one out.” Jorge interfered brusquely into the conversation. “Your mother would not agree. The future is as uncertain as the past.” Jorge served her another generous diet coke. Then he cracked his knuckles. He seemed almost indifferent to her worries. Malena turned her fingers around and around. “Well, if uncertainty rules, I most certainly will lose my job then.” I noticed a strange twist of reasoning. “You know, everything is indeterminate. They say these motherfuckers will be behind bars forever, but who knows.” She lifted her shoulders. “They disappeared thousands and they still don’t say shit about it.” Malena shook her head and looked down. Gabriel joined the conversation. “It is just better to forget about it.” He frowned knowing that he had just said something despicable. “These life sentences will not change their fate. The disappeared will just remain forever in a shadow between life and death.” His tone of voice then abruptly changed. “Justice is never a fact. It is a purpose,” he sighed as he looked at his nails again. “Justice is never straightforward, Gabriel, I know that.” Malena took a long breath and looked fiercely at her older brother. She suddenly resembled the woman in the painting. Was it the color of her hair or her way of looking back at him? The resemblance was pleasantly uncomfortable. Then we heard a thunderous sound. It approached quickly. Malena and I covered our ears. A dark green Subaru drove with remarkable speed and honking horns into the garden. The car stopped just before the swimming pool. Jorge did not look up from the barbecue set as if it was the most normal thing that someone had almost parked a car in his pool. A beaming young man in yellow shorts stepped out of the car. He almost fell in the pool. Gabriel walked wide-​armed toward him. “Juan, you finally arrived!” Gabriel gave him an enormous hug. Juan also kissed Malena. Then he looked at me. Without hesitation he gave me a hug. “Who are you?” “Gabriel invited me for lunch. I am visiting Buenos Aires for work.” Gabriel joined in rapidly. “She is here to study us,” he said while laughing. Juan widened his eyes and laughed too. Jorge looked up from the fire. “Juan, come over here!” He smiled and walked toward the barbecue. They started turning the lamb with care. I joined them to have a look. “Papa, I was thinking. Mama’s painting, can I have it?” “What painting, son?” Jorge pressed his eyes. “You mean her portrait?” “Yes.” “I am considering selling it to an auction house. You know I am short of money.” Jorge cracked his knuckles again.

182  Eva van Roekel Cordiviola “What, selling it?!” Juan threw the lamb back on the grill. It cracked in the middle. Flashes of fire from the burning fat turned his face red. “You can’t pawn mama! It’s all your fault!” he shouted. “Keeping up appearances with fancy words and spending all your money on wines. She is dead! Do you hear me? She is dead!” Juan gasped for air again. “She is DEAD!” Jorge did not reply. Neither Malena nor Gabriel reacted to the sudden explosion. Juan looked around for support. But Gabriel did not look up to see him rage. A while ago, Gabriel had said, a bit dryly, that he could not stand his little brother. Now, he even laughed in a forced manner. Juan shook his head and looked back to Jorge. “You should have joined her a long time ago, you know. Next time I won’t come to pick you up from the tile floor. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?!” There was no dialogue. Juan just stood there, yelling. Gabriel went back cleaning the floor as if nothing had happened. He pushed the cotton swab back and forth with a vexing rhythm. Malena had disappeared behind a fashion magazine. Their indifference or categorical denial infuriated Juan even more. Often during this season of the year, Zonda, a hot wind from the North, started gusting. Ancient stories speak of a young indigenous boy who had killed all the Andes’ animals just for pleasure. Pachamama had punished him for such vanity. A swirl of wind lifted the aboriginal boy through the air, and a steamy, tropical storm removed everything from the earth. Since then, it is said, the wind only blows when someone ignores Pachamama. It also recounts that the hot winds make young men go mad. Juan walked wide-​legged toward the wine that was placed on the table. He opened the first fine bottle and started pouring it around. His hands turned immediately dark red. Then he knocked the remaining bottles from the table. The wine seeped into the ground. Jorge frowned and he narrowed his eyes. His tone of voice was now threatening. “Juan … first you manage to get your own life back on track,” he gasped for air. “Then start worrying about ours.” Juan became silent. I could tell it was serious matter. He walked again wide-​legged toward the house. He came outside holding the woman with the penetrating eyes in his arms. He got in the Subaru and tore off. Jorge threw his knife away. His eyes were hardly visible anymore and he grumbled immeasurable curses. He pulled his arms, back and forth, and his veins had swollen. They looked thicker than this morning. And then, as if nothing had happened, he announced lunchtime and served impeccably sliced grilled lamb with a chunk of white bread. He poured a glass of wine from the only bottle left. After gulping it all, he grimaced with his mischievous smile, “The wind’s gone down.” Malena looked up from her

Cherry blossoms and grilled lamb  183 magazine. She had not touched her second diet coke. On the back of her glass, Evita looked at us with a faint smile. Malena took a large bite of lamb. She licked her lips and smiled too. Gabriel tossed the swab aside. “Let’s eat.” He passed along a plate full of pink meat and perfectly sliced lettuce. I crammed a piece of bread in my mouth and almost choked. Then I cracked my knuckles and conjured up a phony smile. “Delicious lamb it is.” Instantaneously a bubble of innocence burst. Life as it was had evaporated. Twenty minutes later, the Subaru was parked next to the pool again. Juan sat down next to Jorge and ate his lamb. Mama’s portrait rested between us on the table. We stayed all afternoon eating and drinking as if nothing had happened. Time once more morphed into eternity. The new secrets were safely tucked away behind the white walls. The smell of grilled lamb was the only thing that kept reminding us of its truth. As an anthropologist I have written about the lived experiences of violence, death, disappearance, trauma, grief, morality, and personhood in Argentina in theoretical jargon and thick description. I have written, for instance, about how the disappeared in Argentina (e.g., secretly killed by an authoritarian regime) can be very much alive and explained how in the everyday life of many relatives and survivors the “living dead” smoothly fuse the past and present into one temporality-​as-​lived. I claimed that these lived experiences and local understandings of life, death, and time arrange to a great extent the way people live with deep wrongs, impunity, and loss. I also explained how emotional transformation and the tangibility of grief in everyday life are culturally different, and how the emotional experience of guilt and shame can be a significant moral virtue and not, per definition, a burden that must be resolved. Instead of determining a fixed frontier between life and death and a pathway to clearing, I argued that there was a more open-​ended way of being and suffering in Argentina (van Roekel 2020). I must say that these words clarified a lot but did not always convey the emotional intensity and bewilderment of the actual field encounter. In the ongoing stream of life, lived experiences are frequently confusing and lack in-​depth clarification. Moments of obfuscation and puzzlement are often in line with how we experience the field. In our writing we tend to become anxious about such uncertainty: explain, contextualize and justify! Yet, writing thick description about emotion can feel like an uncomfortable straitjacket. I sometimes furtively wondered if writing fiction would do more justice to my portrayal of the lived experiences of vexed emotions related to political and structural violence such as guilt, indifference, shame, but also the seconds of joy and affection one feels when remembering loved ones that have been abruptly and unjustly robbed from their lives, because of state repression, car hijacks by a local criminal gang, social negligence in hospitals, or lethal car accidents in Argentina and Venezuela. Experimenting now and then with words and imagination in my free time in the past six

184  Eva van Roekel Cordiviola years proved to be an emancipating experience that –​by accident–​allowed me to investigate and hence stretch the limits of conventional ethnographic description. Particularly in describing local emotional worlds, thick description frequently misses the idiosyncrasy, temperament and character, and the invisible branching of the past and imagination that all infiltrate the emotional encounter (Beatty 2019, 124). I share Beatty’s hesitance to express emotional encounters that shake our taken for grantedness and open up space for the possibility of alternative emotional worlds through conventional ethnography. I even think it is arrogant to assume that one genre would be able to capture the plenitude of life. We definitely need different genres to convey the multiple truths from the field (Rapport 2016; Rosaldo 2014). Sometimes it can be very productive to purposely leave space for speculation in ethnographic writing. Fictionalizing fieldwork, for instance, allows one to evoke social facts through an imagined protagonist that arises out of a thousand and one details observed in everyday life, and it is up to the reader to imagine its imagined totality (Augé 2018, vii). The actual boundaries between fact and imagination become irrelevant as there is simply never one truth to be read in a short story. Fiction is not designed to convey one interpretation to be convinced of (or not). The deliberate uncertainty and receptive openness of fiction have great creative strength that allows anthropologists to explore new ways of storytelling. The short story about cherry blossoms, grilled lamb, and a family fight, therefore, does not clarify much nor does it provide vital background information about the characters. It leaves loose ends intentionally. This uncertainty and mystery fit better in an everyday lifeworld of magical realism, which is more frequently articulated in Latin American literature. My gradual and somehow accidental shift toward ethnofiction, however, has not sprung only from an individual creative desire. Writing fiction about grief and guilt has emerged from a shared wonder for fantasy and imagination (van Roekel Cordiviola 2014). As life is full of irony, I will now elaborate in thick description about this everyday marvel for fiction. In 2019, I was in Buenos Aires for a short field trip. The Saturday night before I left, my sister-​in-​law, her two grown-​up children, and I finally found the time to have dinner. We first babbled about how our children in the Netherlands were doing, about her new work at the local union for psychologists, the recent leftwing shift in public administration in Argentina, the soaring inflation and bankruptcy of many local enterprises, and how to keep her small family (Mariana is a single mom) going in this increasing uncertainty. Despite the danger of a new economic meltdown and ongoing challenges at work, present life seemed a bit boring and repetitive. As usual we soon plunged into memories. Since childhood, family life in Buenos Aires has been chaotic and unpredictable. Bonanzas and economic meltdowns had created intense moments of harmony and conflict in her parents’ marriage. Her memories of the temporal family collapses, dark and lonely nights at home, abundant beach

Cherry blossoms and grilled lamb  185 holidays in Uruguay, fights and luxurious dinner parties were bittersweet, but at the same time extremely funny. Mariana mused that the well-​known Spanish cinematographer Pedro Almodóvar would make great fiction out of their bizarre family episodes. I could hear pleasure in her tone of voice by the potential novelizing of her life. That same week I also met a good friend in Buenos Aires. Beatriz separated long ago from her husband. In mixed tone she told me how he passed away recently because of an aneurysm in his stomach. Her story of death and mourning took an unexpected turn. Her ex-​husband was about to move into their son’s apartment, because he was to be evicted due to the most recent economic crisis. His sudden death turned the get-​to-​together with his son into a reunion of ashes. Beatriz laughed and said that the events were too morbid to be real. She thought it should be in a novel. I sensed a similar spark of pleasure with this idea of fictionalizing tragedy and the absurd. We tend to forget that such imaginative practices fuse our social relations in the field and (un)consciously constitute a particular focus in our work (Culhane 2017, 12). Marvel for fiction further pushed me to explore other ways to convey lifeworlds in Buenos Aires. Experiences in the field indeed not only revise our understandings of a cultural context but also mold the genre, convention, and style in which we write (Crapanzano 2010, 62). Time and again, Matías, my Argentinian life-​companion, keeps telling me that imagining a novel would be a much greater effort than writing meticulous ethnographic descriptions. Although we disagree on authors, I share his deep admiration for fiction. My first encounters with Latin American lifeworlds were through reading translations of great novelists from the Latin American boom that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. After living numerous years in Caracas and Buenos Aires, I realized that the magical realism from, for instance, Como agua para chocolate (Esquivel 1989) (Like Water for Chocolate) or Cien años de soledad (Garcí­a Márquez 1968) (One Hundred Years of Solitude) were more than a fabulous literary genre. The presence of dead relatives and unknown ghosts, the significance of food, and unexpected heavy rains in dry seasons or vice versa, effortlessly transpired and gave meaning to uncertainties in everyday life and soothed existential concerns about life and death. Fiction continues to fuse into my emerging and established relations in Buenos Aires. Besides overnight musing or straightforward preference of fiction, other friends also share deep deference for short stories. One friend is an established writer, and another friend has been exploring ways to document memories of exile into creative writing. At one point, both even wrote stories about an imaginary Dutch anthropologist in Buenos Aires. Fieldwork, facts, and fiction have become one comfortable totality in our relationships. Experimenting with writing fiction in my free time seemed thus a logical thing to do. Fiction slowly found its way in teaching anthropology and writing about violence and emotion in academic fashion.

186  Eva van Roekel Cordiviola Not so long ago, after giving a lecture about emotion, phenomenology, and fiction, a young anthropology student warned that you should stick to what you know. She wisely thought we must stick to our writing conventions and leave fiction to the novelist. I agree that anthropologists are (most of the time) not novelists. It would even be outrageous to claim similar creative excellence by novelists that dedicate years of training and practice in writing fiction. Modesty is always key in what we aim to accomplish with our achievements, in writing fiction, or in any other expressive form for that matter.1 The student’s comment kept me thinking though. Why do I write fiction? I see writing fiction rather as an ongoing experiment to what extent these imaginary engagements with the field resemble experiences and imagi­nations from social worlds that appear different from the world that I belong to (writing this short story has been a terrible, yet inspiring exercise, ­changing more than three times from perspective and tense). As an anthropologist, practicing with a genre of blending magic into the flow of everyday life has been of great source for learning about the possibility of alternative lifeworlds. The fortuitous genre of what I now like to call “magical ethnofiction” has been greatly influenced by external impulses like Latin American literature and unexpected musings on fiction in everyday talk in Buenos Aires and at home in the Netherlands. Writing fiction about fieldwork is the outcome of these (un)conscious negotiations with friends and family about what and how to write about life episodes and persons that matter most to us.

Acknowledgments This short story developed with many pauses has been commented upon by many bright individuals. In particular, I want to thank Matías Cordiviola for helping out to prune an embryonic draft and for introducing me to Raymond Carver. Horacio Esber, a novelist and anthropologist himself, gave magical comments to attenuate earlier prose. I also want to thank my editor Darlene Slagle and her fine reading group of literary critics. Their joint comments and Darlene’s editing really made the story shine. Finally, I want to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers in the final part of this creative endeavor. It has been really enjoyable and inspirational.

Note 1 To convey the Latin American lifeworlds I have come to know since my adolescence, I consider a bricolage of ethnography, fiction, and film promising. The last decade I have, therefore, also been involved in (collaborative) film projects in and about Latin America and different forms of violence. Although discussions about the possibilities and limitations of sound and image in conveying emotions are relevant, they transcend the current argument about fiction and emotion.

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References Augé, Marc (2018). No Fixed Abode: Ethnofiction. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Seagull Books. Beatty, Andrew (2019). Emotional Worlds. Beyond an Anthropology of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crapanzano, Vincent (2010). “‘At the Heart of the Discipline’: Critical Reflections on Fieldwork.” In Emotions in the Field. The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience, edited by James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 55–​78. Culhane, Dara (2017). “Imagining: An Introduction.” In A Different Kind of Ethnography. Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies, edited by Denielle Elliott and Dara Culhane. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1–​22. Esquivel, Laura (1989). Como agua para chocolate. Ciudad de Mexico: Planeta. Garcí­a Márquez, Gabriel (1968). Cien años de soledad. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. Rapport, Nigel (2016). “Fiction and Anthropological Understanding: A Cosmopolitan Vision.” In The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-​first Century, edited by Helena Wulff. Oxford: Berghahn, 215–​229. Rosaldo, Renato (2014). The Day of Shelly’s Death. The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief. Durham: Duke University Press. van Roekel, Eva (2020). Phenomenal Justice. Violence and Morality in Argentina. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. van Roekel Cordiviola, Eva (2014). “The Watermelon.” Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology 5 (2): 7–​18.

16 Making common cause: Ethics as politics, anthropology as praxis An afterword Linda Green

Entanglements The writings in this volume, essays and poems, fiction and nonfiction alike, suggest what Jas Kaur describes as the imbrications of fieldwork evident in both profession and personal life. As these stories demonstrate quite clearly the “loose ends of fieldwork” may linger and perhaps even fester without proper attention. Yet, the poignancy of the stories told is where their power lies. And it is from here where spaces of possibilities and hope may emerge; offering a way forward to translate private misery into public concerns and considerations (Mills 1959). In what follows I situate the personal and political legacies of my initial fieldwork in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Mayan communities in rural Guatemala within a context of biography, history and impunity that set the stage for not only my subsequent anthropological work but also influenced who I am today. Nicolas Argenti in his trenchant book, The Intestines of the State, (2007:23) writes: “one of the most inescapable features of violent pasts is that they will not be left behind because they exist in the perpetual present of the struggles and cleavages they spawned”. Here I want to index one crucial component of this “inescapable past” –​impunity. Impunity in this context is something more than simply a lack of accountability in the legal sense, but also a social process that is enabled in part by a characteristic mixture of silence and shame among its victims and historical amnesia and widespread indifference on the part of the dominant society. By the early 1990s the brutality against the civilian population that had marked the previous two decades had subsided to a great extent. The scorched earth strategy of counterinsurgency with its genocidal massacres left hundreds of thousands of people dead, untoward numbers disappeared, a million displaced within the country’s borders. Hundreds of thousands more fled to Mexico, the United States and Europe.1 Over 600+​rural villages were razed, others partially destroyed. Hunger was widespread as many rural people went several years without cultivating their milpas –​plots of corn and beans –​alongside of the social and psychological devastation DOI: 10.4324/9781003333418-16

Making common cause  189 wrought by rape, torture and trauma for those who survived. The population had been subdued. Selective repression would now suffice. All the while the Guatemalan military had transformed itself into a mafia-​run institution as drug and human trafficking increasingly became a lucrative business model, alongside of the illegality of selling off rights to indigenous lands for resource extraction by multinational corporations. The signing of the Peace Accords in Guatemala in 1996 ended a 36-​ year internal war. The Accords by design did little to redress the marked social inequalities that permeate Guatemalan society and the virulent racism directed against the Mayan people, the two central underpinnings of both the insurgency and popular movements demand for social justice. The Peace Accords were an arrangement among the business elite, the military and the leaders of the guerrilla group, known by their Spanish acronym as the URNG. Ordinary people were mostly excluded from the benefits of “peace”. The negotiated settlement put into effect two conditions favorable to the continuation of war against the poor, mostly Mayan population: (1) impunity for those responsible for the orchestration of a brutal counterinsurgency, which years later has facilitated an ongoing de facto militarized state in civilian guise and (2) a neo-​liberal economic model of “free-​market” capitalism that has devastated their ability to live with dignity. One of the grave social consequences of the counterinsurgency war in rural Guatemala (1970s–​1990s) was that the violence and attendant impunity further divided Mayan people from one another, as some people were complicit in human rights violations against their neighbors and kin. Fear divided communities by creating suspicion and apprehension not only of strangers, but also of each other. These processes continue today. Impunity, in new guises, has permeated the social fabric in the rural countryside, as gangs, drugs and guns have become a way of life.

Mixed emotions Fear, distrust, suspicions circumscribed my fieldwork as I lived and worked among Mayan people in the Guatemalan highlands. The worst of the violence and repression had mostly subsided. What remained was a militarized countryside where surveillance, spies and silence enforced an ostensible compliance. For many people, alongside the hideous forms of brutality they experienced and the deaths they witnessed, their communities and kin relations were also in tatters. The shadowy world of betrayals and counter-​betrayals –​the blood on people’s hands and the knowledge of who had done what to whom –​lay just below the surface of everyday life. Within this context and experiences over subsequent decades I have come to understand how the legacies of fear and violence have in part (re)shaped my own life. Not surprisingly, after living within the confines of a repressive state for even a relatively short period and when I was not a target per se, measurable

190  Linda Green doses of fear and distrust became habits of everyday life. My experiences of fear, however, were attenuated by my privilege. Although the chronic ­anxiety that accompanies living under such conditions was certainly present and persistent, when I felt most vulnerable I comforted myself with the knowledge that I was free to leave. After all I had an airline ticket, money and a U.S. passport. But with this realization also came an overwhelming sense of discomfort. I could leave anytime but the people around me had no such escape. Fear joined me to the people and yet separated me from them as well. Perhaps most insidious of all is that I learned to distrust not only other people but to doubt my own instincts; an uncertainty about what I see and experience. Over the decades I have had several ambiguous incidents while in Guatemala and each time those doubts resurface leaving me unsure if I can trust myself. Yet, simultaneously, palpable threads of hope and shared dignity existed that fostered an abiding attachment to people and place. George Lovell’s characterization of Guatemala as a “beauty that hurts” captures well for me this central contradiction of living and working in Guatemala (2010). By dignity I mean a presence in the world that asserts the boundaries of humanness, of fortitude, compassion and hope that emanate from our vital connections with each other, thus facilitating the ability to do the right thing even in the face of adversity. Dignity is the sense that you indeed count for something. Hope emerges from small acts of kindness and from shared spaces for conceptualizing a future based on collective justice and individual autonomy. In this way hope can stand against pitilessness by forging a humanity that is defiant, that defeats despair.

Taking leave It took me a long time to leave the field. Until then I had never really thought about what it might mean emotionally. How does one take leave while leaving others behind especially under conditions of violence and repression? When I finally did return to Berkeley I was haunted. I had abandoned the people with whom I lived and worked. Guilt and shame accompanied me. Guilt because, with my fieldwork data in tow, I was free to resume my doctoral studies and career as an anthropologist. A deep shame resonated in me for U.S. complicity in crimes against humanity in Guatemala. Intermittently, over the course of my fieldwork, I would ask the women I worked with why they continued to share their lives and stories with me. Mostly their answers were predictable; the visits were a pleasant diversion from their daily routine. One often repeated answer however, both surprised me initially and has remained with me since: “If people knew what was happening to us, they would do something about it”. Each time I would nod uneasily; skeptical of anything worthwhile that I might be able to do.

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Ethics as politics Simon Critchley (2007) poses a persistent dilemma for many of us: “How do we begin to grapple with the political situation in which we are now living?” More than a decade later, as the United States emerges from under the brutal, ruthless regime of Donald J. Trump (2016–​2020) and a COVID pandemic of epic proportions, the question of “what is to be done” takes on a renewed urgency, particularly for those of us who live in the United States. John Berger’s understanding of the interplay between experience and knowledge in relation to historical processes is insightful. For Berger, a ­political praxis entails a dynamic between experience and knowledge –​ one in which experience informs knowledge that then (re)informs experience –​and thus provides the entry point into explicit political struggles (see Sperling (2018). In drawing on Berger’s insights, how might we begin to advance a militancy and optimism through a politics that requires us to act and to struggle alongside the nameless, the powerless and the vulnerable –​most often the subjects of our anthropological analysis? How might the tools of anthropology be utilized in ways that makes visible how power operates as common sense,2 “the natural order of things”? And even for those who have doubts, these very practices and discourses increasingly lull many into a stupor of helplessness and despair. Perhaps their acquiescence is most starkly rendered by the seeming inevitability of the twin epidemics of opioid addiction and gun violence, alongside the highest incarceration rate in the world, particularly for people of color charged with nonviolent offenses. While research and writing have been the traditional forums in which we share our anthropological insights, more recently, what began as an invocation for translating our research findings for the public domain has become a clarion call. Pedagogy, too, has been another sphere that is clearly essential as we seek to help our students see what is around them and to analyze why the world looks like it does. Yet, more often than not education acts as an instrument of domination. Even as a liberal humanism may help explain the world, it neither informs nor provides the tools necessary for the next crucial step: that is, one that leads to action. Critchley argues for a more radical model, one in which a political/​ e­thical praxis attempts to articulate the possibility of Marx’s notion of “true de­mocracy”. Such a politics arises out of situations of injustice and derives its potency in concrete situations that involve local, practical and largely mundane work.

Making common cause The question “what do we owe each other” aptly captures for me the dilemmas of constructing an anthropological praxis. Over the decades

192  Linda Green I have searched for ways in which I could pay forward my ongoing debt to the Mayan women with whom I worked. In the hopes of forging a radical perspective based on the ethical imperatives of justice, dignity and hope, I have tried to cultivate Johnnetta Cole’s (1996/​2010)3 notion of an anthropological double sightedness that invokes the double consciousness of WEB Dubois (1910:47) of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” and then to translate those insights into building a radical pedagogy. The challenge, as Ignacio Martin-​Baro (1996:23) notes “…is reflect back to people their knowledge and experience, their history and their suffering. An account that takes into consideration not only what was done, but what needs to be done”. Recently, and quite unexpectedly, two opportunities have emerged that provide me, at least in part, with a way forward. In both cases I attempt to utilize the knowledge and experiences garnered from my time in Guatemala in ways that I had not foreseen earlier. In the first instance I testify as an expert witness to country conditions in U.S. Immigration court for Guatemalan Mayan women seeking asylum.4 Since 2011 there have been repeated “surges” of young women, their children and unaccompanied minors from the Northern Triangle region that includes Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, seeking refuge in the United States. The Mayan women who flee are young and vulnerable, mostly between 19 and 35 years old and have little or no kin or community protections. Few have had any schooling; their lingua franca is one of the 22 Mayan indigenous languages particular to Guatemala. Most speak Spanish haltingly, if at all. They are regularly assaulted, abused and exploited with near total impunity by partners, kin, neighbors, gang members and local authorities. As indigenous women they exist on the very bottom rung of an enforced hierarchy of social worth. Many of these women come from rural Mayan villages that were the sites of documented massacres. It was ruled genocide. They are the daughters and granddaughters of counterinsurgency.5 Secondly, over the past several years I have had the privilege to teach anthropology to men who are incarcerated in an Arizona State Prison complex. Perhaps at first glance the connections to my work with the Mayan women and this pedagogical collaboration are not obvious. Yet, parallels exist. Like the Mayan women in Guatemala these incarcerated students too lead precarious lives; denied both their humanity and a public voice. Within the confines of the carceral system, this educational project, like the base communities Mayan women participated in decades ago, offer spaces for a critical reading of the world in which one can begin to make good sense6 of our experiences within the larger context of lived histories. As such we explore not only the pressing question of “what needs to be done”, but the imperative of “what shall we do”. Some days in my mind’s eye I see the Mayan women who taught me about dignity and hope, about compassion, kindness and justice. I honor them now by making common cause with others. I know they would like that.

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Notes 80% of those killed between 1980 and 1984 were Mayan unarmed civilians. 1 2 Gramsci’s notion of common sense is constituted from the norms, values and taken for granted attitudes of the dominant society. 3 As cited in Faye Harrison (2010) “Ethnography as Politics”. 4 Since 2011 I have testified in over 100 asylum cases. 5 Guatemala consistently ranks in the top five countries in the world not at war for both homicide and femicide. Yet, only 4–​5% of the women who have a hearing before an immigration judge are actually granted asylum. 6 Good sense is constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day.

References Argenti, Nicolas (2007) The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence and Belated Histories of the Cameroon Grassfields. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cole, Johnnetta (as cited in Faye V. Harrison) (2010) “Ethnography as Politics” In: Harrison, Faye V. (ed). Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology of Liberation. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association (3rd edition). Critchley, Simon (2007) Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso Books Dubois, William Edward Burghardt (1910) The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: AC McClug & Co. Lovell, George (2010) A Beauty that Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala. Austin: University of Texas Press. Martin-​Baro, Ignacio; ed, Adrianne Aron (1996) Writings for Liberation Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mills, C. Wright (1959) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperling Joshua (2018) A Writer of Our Time: the Life and Work of John Berger. London and New York: Verso Press.

Index

access 7, 48–​57, 59, 79–​80, 82, 85, 89, 93, 99, 110 affective: dimension 168, 171; intensities 168; labor 173; ties 56 alliance: anthropological 22; therapeutic 20, 21 anger 9, 43, 45, 103, 126–​129, 134, 141–​145; angry 11, 128, 142, 146, 156 assumption 42, 49, 53, 60–​62, 103, 111, 145 betrayal 61, 82, 169 burnout 20, 77, 90 care 3–​5, 12, 13, 38, 50, 55–​57, 100, 145, 147, 160, 161; care labor 155; care-​taking 54; care work 12, 171, 172; of the self 5, 6; of ourselves 20, 21; pastoral care 34; relational care 53–​54; relations of care 49–​50, 53; self-​care 170, 171 conflict 6, 7, 36, 43, 45, 66, 71, 77, 79, 98, 110, 124, 134; area 6, 7, 99; boundaries of 78; Colombian 65, 66; complex 86; conflict-​affected 82, 90; environments 79; ethnic 35, 36, 41; intractable 37; Israel-​Gaza 77; landscape 35, 38; parties of 86; polarized 85; political 79, 85; post-​ conflict 125; research in 90; settings of 94; Syrian 153; understanding of 97; zones 96, 97 containing 27–​28 contract 21 counterinsurgency 188, 189, 192 countertransference 23–​25, 27 curiosity 22, 41, 84, 101, 122

data 4, 11, 94, 99, 101, 105, 139, 164, 172–​174; dangerous 6; empirical 174; ethnographic 100, 110; fieldwork 190; good 6, 7, 96, 100, 110, 138, 144, 145; valuable 11, 151 death 139, 140, 183, 185; life and 27, 181, 183, 185 debriefing 20, 150; debrief 90, 147 depression 20, 22, 126–​128, 131, 132, 144, 178 dilemma 81, 94, 99, 101, 110, 111, 191; emotional 4, 94, 111; ethical 4, 61, 97, 99, 110, 111; existential 94 distance 4, 6, 9–​11, 61, 77, 95, 98, 110, 139, 140, 142, 171; distance learning 110, 111; emotional 2, 77, 90 101; intentional 77; intimacy and 96; professional 90; proximity and 95, 111 distrust 3, 9, 10, 189, 190; see also mistrust embarrassing 23, 26 embodied: experience 146, 169, 172; fieldwork 53; knowledge 45 embodiment 169 emotion/​emotions: 2–​6, 8–​12, 34, 35, 38, 42, 44, 45, 59, 61, 78, 93–​96, 98, 101, 105, 128, 142, 143, 145, 147, 161, 168, 169, 183, 185, 186; conflation of 44; delusional 102; destructive 145; difficult 151; expression of 148; fieldwork 35, 38, 43, 44; lack of 96; language of 142; long-​subdued 11, 42; negative 5, 7, 64; of caring 145; outbursts of 147; political 5, 34, 36, 42; researcher 44, 143; shared 2, 10; useful 145; violent 41, 141

Index  195 emotional 40, 44, 46, 77, 79, 91, 95, 106, 145; ambivalence 64, 94; baggage 77; burden 86; care 5; challenge 76, 93; connection 141; consequence 91; cost 59, 147; dilemma 4, 94, 111; discombulation 38; distance 2, 77, 90, 101, 111; effect 110; encounter 184; engagement 93; experience 93, 183; hardships 27; implication 78; investment 173, 174; labour 34, 155, 174; landscape 41; lens 43; management 11, 93, 95, 110, 111; proximity 93, 94; reaction 147, 148; reflexivity 5; repercussion 77, 78; stress 8; struggle 144; support 63, 74, 134; toll 63, 69, 147; transformation 183; wellbeing 63; world 35 empathy 2, 3, 12, 45, 93, 140, 147 entanglement 4, 66, 168, 169, 172 ethical 12, 21, 122, 154; challenge 79, 97; compulsion 20; concern 167, 168; difficulty 97; dilemmas 4, 61, 97, 99, 110, 111; engagement 44, 151, 171; experience 169; form of witnessing 172, 175; geography 163; imperative 192; issues 3; necessity 161; praxis 191; project 168; responsibility 156, 163; standpoint 101 ethics 44, 79, 86, 98, 116, 141, 156; as politics 188; ethnographic 3; humanitarian 163; of fieldwork 156; research 96 ethnofiction 12, 184, 186 ethnography 3, 11, 42–​46, 49, 53, 84, 88, 94, 95, 101, 103, 111, 116, 161–​162; as care work 12, 147; classical 28; conventional 184; in conflict-​affected field sites 90; macho 5; and theory 35; of violence and conflict 29 exclusion 4, 36–​37, 42, 48–​54, 56–​57, 171 exhaustion 8, 141, 142, 171 expectations 51, 59, 126, 152; navigating 160; normative 145; reciprocate the 170; unmet 151

157, 158, 162, 189, 190; state of 66; and suspicion 99; of violence 22, 99 fiction 12, 116, 120, 183, 184, 185, 186, 188 foreclosure 168, 173 frames 19, 20, 21, 95, 169 free associations 25, 26, 27 friendship 3, 4, 8, 38, 43, 45, 85, 94, 129, 130, 131, 134, 153, 157, 159, 165, 169

failure 11, 53, 139, 140, 141, 144, 169 fear 3, 7, 9, 10, 38, 43, 45, 46, 64–​66, 68, 69, 74, 76, 93, 98, 100, 102, 107, 109–​111, 124–​127, 130, 144, 146,

language: of depression 128; of emotions 142; native 155; of self-​care 171; of trauma 12, 142; shared 157

gender 4, 50–​53, 57, 95, 130, 141, 159; gender-​based violence 150, 153 genocide 7, 19, 29, 51, 97, 100, 192 grief 139, 183, 184 guilt 4, 10, 20, 96, 111, 141, 142, 143, 145, 183, 184, 190 habitus 148; academic 6; anthropological 143, 144 helplessness 20, 191; helpless 19, 159 holding 21, 22 hospitality 3, 150–​152, 154–​155, 157, 165 hubris 144 identification 80; projective 25 imagination 36, 39, 116, 120, 183, 184, 186 immersion 3, 6, 63, 159 impunity 183, 188, 189, 192 incomplete stories 2, 167 intersubjectivity 3, 5, 21; intersubjective 3, 4, 25, 28, 95 jealousy 53–​55, 57, 102 justice 11, 89, 100, 140, 164, 178, 179, 181, 183, 189, 190, 192 knowledge 3, 9, 20, 43, 49, 57, 84, 99, 103, 156, 159, 170, 173, 189–​192; academic 150; anthropological 46, 52; embodied 45; empathic 94; encounters 12, 167; mobilization 168; poisonous 38; production 43, 45, 53, 57, 95, 157, 158, 168, 169, 174; situated 141; strategic 103

196 Index listening 123, 129, 131, 139, 144, 171–​173; active 46; analytic 25 loss 2, 21, 28, 127, 139, 143, 145, 158, 162, 183 magical realism 184, 185 meditation 20, 25, 171 memory/​memories 2, 9, 28, 35, 38, 42, 77, 146, 179, 184; of exile 185; traumatic 10, 66; of violence 10, 27 mistrust 7, 84–​86 moral world 12, 115, 120 morality 44, 142, 143, 145, 154, 183 national: animosities 22; character 64; identity 22, 28; other 22; security 61 non-​events 6–​8 observation: non-​judgmental 25; participant 18, 45; self-​observation 26; target of 103 pachamama 182 pain 1, 2, 4, 128, 134, 171 paranoia 4, 9, 10, 68, 69, 72, 74, 96, 102, 106, 109, 110 percolation 173–​175 perpetrators 61, 96, 97, 99–​101, 128 poetry 12, 16 politics 43, 61, 100, 131, 132, 156, 168; ethics as 188, 191; humanitarian 160; micro-​politics 143, 148 positionality 4, 11, 35, 49, 57, 59, 62, 78, 141, 143, 148, 156, 157 powerlessness 20, 141, 143 practices: violent 110, 138, 143–​145 proximity 4, 94, 95, 110, 111, 152, 155 psychodynamic: practice 18; theory 19, 23, 24, 31; therapy 18, 19; tools 25 psychotherapy 19, 21 rage 141, 142, 144, 145, 148 reciprocity 10 reflection 35, 76, 79, 150; self-​ reflection 24, 95 relationships 20, 21, 35, 45, 52, 56, 57, 61, 108, 111, 130, 150, 154, 164, 167, 169, 170; fieldwork 4, 45; gendered 49; intimate 116; long-​ term 96; of care 3, 48–​50, 53, 56; of emotions 44; of friendship 4; of responsibility 3, 54; ongoing 140; risky 157; secure 20; sexual 53

relief 59, 61, 77, 97, 160 reverie 25–​27 risk 11, 50, 52, 53, 57, 63–​65, 67, 68, 74, 83–​85, 89, 90, 95, 109, 168, 175; assessment 98; for foreign researchers 76; of denied entry 82; of disease 16; physical 49; risk-​taking 49; security 86; shared 170; risky relationship 157 rite of passage 3, 7, 51 sadness 4, 6, 142 secret police 93, 96, 102–​106, 108, 109 security 10, 59–​62; 68–​70, 78, 79, 81, 82, 86–​89, 99, 103, 105, 107, 159 self-​care 170, 171 self-​reflection 24, 95 shame 4, 9, 10, 48, 57, 134, 141, 143, 145, 146, 151, 183, 188, 190 silence 44, 56, 114, 116, 120, 138, 141, 148, 156, 188, 189 solidarity 4, 83–​85, 93–​96, 110, 130, 148, 165, 168, 175 stigma 144, 147 storied lives 167 storytelling 43, 164, 184 sublimation 29 suffering 1–​3, 6, 7, 10, 13, 38, 45, 46, 89, 100–​102, 144, 145, 154, 164, 168, 169, 183, 192; hierarchy of 10; social 4, 7, 138 suicide 7, 108, 109, 132, 139, 178 support 43, 44, 141; emotional 63, 74, 134; financial 64; peer 4; professional 78, 89; post-​fieldwork 90; programme 90; psychological 20 temporality 38, 183 thick description 183, 184 transference 23–​25 trauma 96, 138, 140–​142, 148, 172, 183, 189; fieldwork 146; language of 12, 142; psychologist 20, 29; secondary 144, 146; trauma-​sensitive 147; vicarious 147 trust 4, 41, 53, 65, 71, 72, 74, 79, 84, 85, 96, 99, 129, 143, 152 uncertainty 41, 49, 70, 83, 89, 93, 167, 168, 184, 185 uncomfortable 59–​62

Index  197 unspeakable 16, 27 vulnerability/​vulnerabilities 5, 11, 50 90, 111, 169, 170, 175 weapons 7, 60, 65 witness 2, 98, 158, 192; witnessing 11, 77, 128, 129, 132, 144, 148, 150, 154, 168, 170, 172, 175

writing 12, 18, 27–​29, 42 57, 77, 90, 122, 123, 125, 128, 129, 141, 146–​148, 151, 167, 168, 173, 175, 191; about violence 64; academic 9; creative 29, 30, 185; ethnographic 143, 184; fiction 120, 183–​186; inability of 140; journalistic 79, 82; process 11; style 11; to regain control 99; writing-​up 19, 25, 49