Vultures: Ethnographic poetry

The presence of family during fieldwork is often an under-ignored theme in anthropology. My experiences of doing ethnographic fieldwork in Argentina and Venezuela on violence and crisis are no exception. Only recently have I explicitly included the role of my partner Matías Cordiviola, who is a political scientist and skilled analyst, in my theorizing on suffering and psychoanalysis in Argentina (van Roekel 2023). In this poem, we take it a step further. Upon arrival after fieldwork with our children who attended a privileged private school in Caracas, we were both unsettled by the experiences of the complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. We decided to put our shared quandaries into words by writing poetry. We fused parts of it into the poem titled ‘Vultures’. The number of vultures (zamuros) in Caracas has heavily increased because of their changing habitat due to the crisis in recent years and simultaneously interweaves local ambiguities surrounding the survival and resourcefulness of a species and unethical opportunism during a crisis.