Panel 37: Anthropologists and War in the Field. A Problematic Undertaking
Panel organiser: Francesca Declich (Univ. of Urbino, Italy) and Marjia De Brujin (Centre of African Studies, The Netherlands)
Contact: francesca.declich@uniurb.it
| In the last twenty years in many countries of Africa new armed conflicts and civil wars have blown up, have started and sometimes, finished. Anthropologists, therefore, found themselves involved in studying countries where the war had become a daily life concern. Some did carry out field work in such countries before the war blew up and find themselves researching in countries badly affected by the war and/or in continuous contact with refugees while others started their research work in such conditions. Doing fieldwork and/or keeping on carrying out research work with people involved or afflicted by civil strives is not an issue without consequences both for the research aims as well as for the researchers involved in such process of knowledge production. A number of ethical problems are embedded in the very fact of spending time with people in countries troubled by the war, where living or dying is linked to chances and fortuitous events, just for the sake of producing knowledge, books or some articles. All the more this is an issue relevant for anthropologists for whom the personal involvement and participant method is an unavoidable aspect of the epistemology of the knowledge they seek. The inevitable reflexive aspects of the very fact of researching in context of war is something a number of researchers consider a difficult personal undertaking so that they prefer, if they live in countries not at war, to distance themselves from such kinds of field. This panel aims at fostering reflections on such and other aspects related to carrying out research work in countries badly affected by the war and at, may be, unrevealing reasons for the uneasiness anthropologists and other scholars experience in such contexts. |