Deep ethnography: Violence and words in Argentina

Studying atrocities poses many challenges for ethnographers, not least of which is how to represent violent experiences, which often exceed articulation. The atrocities perpetrated during the military dictatorship in Argentina are no exception. Yet, during my fieldwork in Buenos Aires, I found that the violence forcefully surfaced in many ethnographic encounters, as a result of my having accidentally absorbed my interlocutors’ psychoanalytic reasoning into my ethnographic praxis. Everyday psychoanalytic practices used among survivors and the relatives of the disappeared, such as catharsis and working through guilt, filtered through ongoing self-reflections and served a crucial role in my emerging understanding of an Argentine “ethics of feelings.” I couple this shared psychoanalytic praxis with creative prose as one integral way of practicing an ethnography of violence. Communicating through words that instill rather than explain the vexed feelings engages readers with the indeterminateness of violence and psychic “depths” in Argentina. This way of doing anthropology is what I call deep ethnography—an emergent form of sensing, talking, thinking, and writing about feelings.