How do anthropologists navigate the personal, political and ethical complexities of conducting long-term fieldwork in ‘dangerous’ settings? In Ethnography as Risky Business: Field Research in Violent and Sensitive Contexts, 16 anthropologists trained by Dirk Kruijt in collaboration with Kees Koonings at Utrecht University (The Netherlands) reflect on the challenges and opportunities presented when doing ethnography in politically turbulent and violent settings. Unlike other methodologies of the social sciences, ethnographic research is based upon personal relationships between the anthropologist and their informants that are built upon trust and ‘good rapport’. Anthropologists – most commonly community outsiders – must immerse themselves into the everyday lives of those whom they study. Known as ‘participant observation’, this somewhat elusive methodology can be messy even under the most peaceful of circumstances, and incredibly complex in violent/post-violence contexts. In these 16 chapters, readers will be taken to a variety of ‘risky’ fieldwork sites such as post-genocide Guatemala, gang-controlled neighbourhoods of Managua, Nicaragua and Guadalajara, Mexico to explore the ways in which anthropologists manage the risks they take in relationship to their own safety and the safety of their informants as a means of creating knowledge about the reproduction of violence and social inequality.
Taken together, the research profiled in Ethnography as Risky Business spans well over 25 years (from Cold War Latin American revolutionary movements to 2010s South Africa and Kenya) of ethnographic inquiry that focuses on questions of violence and social order. Under the advisory direction of Kruijt and Koonings, the research is oriented towards the urban environment with special attention paid to Latin America. Theoretically, the analysis is grounded in the Marxian tradition of political economy and most commonly takes place in settings with magnified inequalities between the very rich and very poor. Other theoretical influences include German and Dutch sociography and the Chicago School of Ethnography; both traditions utilised a variety of qualitative and quantitative data (such as life histories, periodicals and census reports) to capture a comprehensive picture of urban life in diverse settings.
The 16 chapters that make up Ethnography as Risky Business are not organised into any specific sections, although several chapters take up similar themes, the two most common being: (i) navigating one's identity as an anthropologist and an involved actor such as a diplomat (Chapter 2), consultant (Chapter 5) and international organisation worker (Chapter 15); and (ii) the complexities of embedding oneself into communities of perpetrators and victims (Chapters 4, 8, 9, 10 and 11). The remaining chapters examine topics such as the politics of international aid in a post-conflict scenario (Chapter 1); the ‘objectivity’ of studying former revolutionaries (Chapter 6); the ethics of representation of crime, violence and law in Indigenous communities (Chapter 12); and the challenges of gaining and maintaining trust with former guerrillas/combatants (Chapters 14 and 16).
While all chapters present rich accounts of the ethical and personal dilemmas faced by anthropologists navigating risks in their fieldwork, the reflections of researchers who embedded themselves into settings in which they studied both victims and perpetrators of violence were especially memorable. In Chapter 8, for example, Simone Remijnse reflects on the cognitive dissonance she experienced while investigating post-genocide Guatemala, writing that: ‘[…] conducting an interview in the morning with six Indigenous widows who all lost family members during the civil war, then conducting an interview with one of the most notorious patrol commanders in the area, sometimes stretched my chameleon capabilities to their limits’ (p. 115). Similarly, Eva van Roekel describes the uncomfortably intimate interactions she had with perpetrators of torture, sexual assault, and forced disappearance in Argentina (p. 143). In Chapter 13, Monique Sonnevelt analyses the difficulties that she faced after being assaulted in her gang-controlled field site (a popular neighbourhood in Guadalajara, Mexico). While the neighbours had initially considered calling the police, they ultimately decided that the protection of a local gang member would provide Sonnevelt with better security. These chapters (and others) also include analysis of the gender dynamics that presented both challenges and opportunities for studying violence as foreign, female researchers. On the one hand, their informants found them to be less threatening as women, therefore leading to increased access and trust, while on the other, they oftentimes were taken less seriously and endured relentless sexual harassment (p. 48, p. 63). These chapters are especially engaging because they illustrate the complex ways in which anthropologists (especially women) must strategically negotiate their identity(ies), sometimes forgoing their personal safety, as a means of obtaining information.
In the book's introduction, Koonings, Kruijt and Dennis Rodgers write that ‘we argue that the protection of participants and data takes precedence over the protection of the ethnographer-self because the latter has consciously taken the decision to engage in risky research, even in the case of involuntary anthropology’ (p. 15). While it is certain that research participants’ lives and wellbeing must be protected and prioritised, I wonder if this stance truly necessitates compromising the safety and wellbeing of the researcher. Although anthropology PhD students willingly ‘choose’ to enter violent fieldwork scenarios, they are rarely, if ever, trained on how to deal with the emotional and physical trauma that they will likely experience while conducting research. Recent conversations in cultural anthropology and archaeology have challenged the long-held assumption that violence (including sexual violence) against researchers is permissible or simply ‘to be expected’ while conducting field research (see blog series Trauma and Resilience at https://anthrodendum.org/author/trauma-and-resilience/). Certainly, some of the researchers featured here did experience physical and psychological trauma while conducting their fieldwork. In Chapter 3, for example, Tessa Diphoorn describes experiencing symptoms of PTSD following the (presumably preventable) death of an informant's family member during her research in South Africa. While Diphoorn ultimately chose to put herself into ‘risky’ situations for the sake of her research, I hope that future PhD students can be better prepared and emotionally supported to handle the trauma that they may endure because of this choice.
Ultimately, Ethnography as Risky Business highlights the complex personal and political challenges that anthropologists face when conducting fieldwork in contexts of extreme violence and social inequality. It is an ideal text for any ethnographic methods class but is also accessible to a wider audience that may not be familiar with anthropology and ethnography. In a time when physical distancing and other Covid-19 restrictions have necessitated that traditional ethnographic research be put on hold, Ethnography as Risky Business reminds us of that ‘magical, ephemeral quality called “rapport”: the trust-based set of relationships and interactions between the ethnographer and informants […] deemed fundamental for obtaining “valid” and “reliable data”’ (p. 5). When good rapport can be established between an anthropologist and informant – sometimes over many years – it is indeed a risk worth taking.
