Engaged Observer
Anthropology, Advocacy, and Activism
Anthropology has long been associated with an ethos of “engagement.” The field’s core methods and practices involve long-term interpersonal contact between researchers and their study participants, giving major research topics in the field a distinctively human face. Can research findings be authentic and objective? Are anthropologists able to use their data to aid the participants of their study, and is that aid always welcome?
In Engaged Observer, Victoria Sanford and Asale Angel-Ajani bring together an international array of scholars who have been embedded in some of the most conflict-ridden and dangerous zones in the world to reflect on the role and responsibility of anthropological inquiry. They explore issues of truth and objectivity, the role of the academic, the politics of memory, and the impact of race, gender, and social position on the research process. Through ethnographic case studies, they offer models for conducting engaged research and illustrate the contradictions and challenges of doing so.
ASALE ANGEL-AJANI is an assistant professor in the Gallatin School at New York University.
Foreword
Introduction
Part One. The Politics of Witnessing in War and Pain
1. Excavations of the Heart: Reflections on Truth, Memory, and Structures of Understanding
2. Scholarship, Advocacy, and the Politics of Engagement in Burma (Myanmar)
3. War and the Nature of Ultimate Things: An Essay on the Study of Postwar Cultures
4. Expert Witness: Notes toward Revisiting the Politics of Listening
Part Two. Lessons from Agents of Change
5. Moral Chronologies: Generation and Popular Memory in a Palestinian Refugee Camp
6. "In Our Beds and Our Graves": Revealing the Politics of Pleasure and Pain in the Time of AIDS
7. Portrait of a Paramilitary: Putting a Human Face on the Colombian Conflict
Part Three. Trauma, Violence, and Women's Resistance in Everyday Life
8. Fratricidal War or Ethnocidal Strategy? Women's Experience with Political Violence in Chiapas
9. Indigenous Women and Gendered Resistance in the Wake of Acteal: A Feminist Activist Research Perspective
10. It's a Hard Place to be a Revolutionary Woman: Finding Peace and Justice in Postwar El Salvador
Part Four. The Engaged Observer, Inside and Outside the Academy
11. Perils and Promises of Engaged Anthropology: Historical Transitions and Ethnographic Dilemmas
12. Knowledge in the Service of a Vision: Politically Engaged Anthropology
Notes on Contributors
Index
