Linda Green

Erella Grassiani

Nerina Weiss

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.

The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World

Maria Six-Hohenbalken

Violence Expressed explores the diverse expressions and manifestations through which the meaning of violent experiences and events is (re)produced. As language alone does not always suffice for the description of violence, this book focuses not only on the verbal and discursive expressions of violence, but also on the performative acts, material culture and the spaces that constitute these expressions. Such an approach provides a method of more comprehensively registering and understanding the manifestations and long-lasting effects of violence, whilst exploring violence both as an extreme subjective experience, and the ’ultimate truth’, thus overcoming a common epistemological antagonism in researching violence. Offering a variety of analytical approaches and methodological perspectives, Violence Expressed presents the latest empirical studies, ranging from the 'everyday' violence experienced by children, stories of rape, social memory and the discrepancy between private and public narratives, to rumours and silences or the iconography of violence. A compelling contribution to ongoing discussions on anthropological writing, this book will be of interest to anthropologists and social scientists working on violence, gender, collective representations and memory.

Nerina Weiss

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