The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World

Nerina Weiss, Erella Grassiani, Linda Green, Nerina Weiss, Erella Grassiani, Linda Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781032333816
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000812589
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Entanglements of fieldwork: An introduction
• 2 Unspeakable: Silences and silencing around fieldwork amid violence
• 3 Drawing on your inner anthropologist: Some tools for violent and difficult ethnographic fields
• 4 A cautionary and hopeful tale about experiencing, thinking with, writing through, reflecting on, and teaching the emotional in ethnographic fieldwork
• 5 The fieldwork of never alone: Reframing access as relationships of care
• 6 ‘You are one of us’, but I wasn’t: Managing expectations and emotions when studying powerful security actors
• 7 Conversations about violence during fieldwork in Colombia
• 8 Staying sane and safe in Israel/Palestine: A foreign researcher’s reflections on fieldwork across boundaries
• 9 Involved and detached: Emotional management in fieldwork
• 10 On Catalina’s silence and the things about her I still do not know how to say
• 11 Side effects: How fieldwork and ethnography helped me reclaim my life
• 12 Violent experiences, violent practices: Caring and silence in anthropology
• 13 Hospitality and violence: Writing for irresolution
• 14 Getting closer to the skin: Writing as intensity, writing as feeling
• 15 Cherry blossoms and grilled lamb: An ethnographic short story
• 16 Making common cause: Ethics as politics, anthropology as praxis: An afterword
• Index