‘The violence we live in’: reading and experiencing violence in the field

ABSTRACT

Anthropological literature on ethnographic experiences of violence, like Ethnographies under Fire (Nordstrom & Robben, 1995. Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press) and Violence: Ethnographic Encounters (Ghassem-Fachandi, 2009. Violence: Ethnographic Encounters. Oxford: Berg), has mostly approached violence as either a force of destruction and rupture located at the end of politics and the social, or as a thing encountered during fieldwork that alienates the researcher from her object of study. Rarely does this fieldwork literature speak of how we can ethnographically capture violence not only as destructive, but also as a social life force (Thiranagama, 2011. In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press) that transforms and reconfigures subjectivities, suffering and place. How can ethnographies investigate the social and political possibilities that emerge from violence, while also accounting for its detrimental effects?

Based on my research on the humanitarian knowledge practices of violence, trauma and the politics of suffering in Lebanon, the author explores in this article what an ethnography of living-in-violence can offer to our understanding and conceptualization of violence. The author shows the need to theorize critically the experience of living-in-violence in relation to dominant portrayals of violence as an experience of encounter. Reading violence in conflict sites is the work of experts who encounter violence ‘in the field’ (like humanitarian workers, ethnographers, psychologists and military personnel/fighters) and communities who live in violence. However, the work of reading violence in the everyday serves to delineate the conditions of possibility for liveability and precariousness. It also serves to normalize experiences of certain kinds of violence while others are produced as traumatic. Drawing from several ethnographic moments and writings on violence, the author asks in this article: How can ethnography capture the experience of living-in-violence? And what is its analytical importance? How can an ethnography of reading violence help us make sense of different experiences of violence as distinct forms of knowledge production?

KEYWORDS:

• violence
• war ethnography
• Lebanon
• living-in
• encountering
• expert knowledge
• trauma

Acknowledgements

This paper was made possible (in part) through the support of the Arab Council of the Social Sciences by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author. The statements and views expressed in this production are those of its makers and interviewees and do not necessarily represent those of the ACSS or the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While the name and boundaries of the region constitute an old conversation (see for example Bonnie 2012), the debate re-emerged in recent conferences and workshops such as a symposium on the ‘Middle of Where, East of What: New Geographies of Conflict’ organized by Saima Akhtar and Walid El Houri at the Berlin Institute of Cultural Inquiry (2016); workshop on ‘Theorizing Methodology in the MENA,’ organized by Helena Nassif at Philipps-Universitat Marburg (2016) and a roundtable on ‘Accessing and Defining the Field in today's Middle East,’ organized by the Middle East section of the American Anthropological Association (2016).