Hacia una contrahistoria de antropología

Abstract

I consider two ethnographic projects examplary in the treatment of violence that point the way towards the reconstruction of ethnography. Karen Wenzel has written a document on strategies of resistance of a battered woman. Sholom Ansky documented the progrms against the shtetl Jews in the Russian Pale. I take from their work methodological guidelines that imply a careful deliberation on how to place oneself, one’s language, one’s description of violence, sense of audience, evolving sense of self, amidst horrendous violence: – The subaltern voice and the subaltern vantage point has special weight in naming and describing violence. – The political uses of the description of violence come to be an important criteria in developing the analysis. – The researchers see an important relation between the researcher and her subject, a relation that forms quite explicitly part of the context of the production of knowledge. Ansky and Wenzel elaborate an ethnographic praxis. I focus on how they come to occupy that inbetween position beyond the confines of disciplinary knowledge production to the standpoint of the subject of oppression. I conclude with my own application of the methdological framework in doing research in collaboration with convicted felons to stem the growth of prisons as a form of institutionalized violence int he U.S.