Anthropological impostures and possible pathways: ethical, political, and epistemological dilemmas from a research on transitional justice in Peru

Abstract

This article is outlined as an exercise of critical revision of the process and results of an ethnographic research on transitional justice and the moral and socio legal construction of the figure of the victim of political violence in the Peruvian context. Drawing from this revision, the author situates her different research positionalities in her direct relationship with the field, proposing a more specific debate on the politics of knowledge production about suffering and violence, discussing the multiple ways in which power dynamics and hierarchies are sometimes constructed and reinforced through institutional, academic and research interventions in so called post-conflict settings, naming multiples forms of discomforts and ethical, epistemological and political tensions and contradictions.