Deep ethnography
Violence and words in Argentina
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2261603 |
|---|---|
| Authors | E Van Roekel (0000-0001-5180-666X, Social and Cultural Anthropology Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 223-235 |
| Publication date | 2023-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Ethnologist (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/amet.13141 |
| OpenAlex | W4327930847 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 39 |
Studying atrocities poses many challenges for ethnographers, not least of which is how to represent violent experiences, which often exceed articulation. The atrocities perpetrated during the military dictatorship in Argentina are no exception. Yet, during my fieldwork in Buenos Aires, I found that the violence forcefully surfaced in many ethnographic encounters, as a result of my having accidentally absorbed my interlocutors' psychoanalytic reasoning into my ethnographic praxis. Everyday psychoanalytic practices used among survivors and the relatives of the disappeared, such as catharsis and working through guilt, filtered through ongoing self-reflections and served a crucial role in my emerging understanding of an Argentine "ethics of feelings." I couple this shared psychoanalytic praxis with creative prose as one integral way of practicing an ethnography of violence. Communicating through words that instill rather than explain the vexed feelings engages readers with the indeterminateness of violence and psychic "depths" in Argentina. This way of doing anthropology is what I call deep ethnography-an emergent form of sensing, talking, thinking, and writing about feelings
Aesthetics · Articulation (sociology · Catharsis · Dictatorship · Epistemology · Ethnography · Feeling · Political science · Politics · Praxis · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Psychology · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics · Social Psychology
Disappearing Acts
Never in anger
A lexicon of terror
Culture & truth
Emotions in the Field
Mental Opacity
A Different Kind of Ethnography
Engaging Violence
The Anthropology of Intentions
Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina
The language of psychoanalysis
Tuhami
Landscapes of devils tensions of place and memory in the Argentinean Chaco
Speaking of the Unspeakable
When Life Becomes a Burden at the Urban Margins of Buenos Aires
The new anthropology of dreaming
Nibtidi mnin il-hikaya [Where are we to start the tale]
Emotional Worlds
Basque Violence
In Exile from the Self
Ethnographie Seduction, Transference, and Resistance in Dialogues about Terror and Violence in Argentina
The Emotionality of Participation
Traumatic Home
Does the Unconscious Influence Our Ethnography? Psychoanalysis during Fieldwork in Argentina
Repetitions Towards an End
On the Dangers of Empathy with the Military in Argentina
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |