Dirty Anthropology: Epistemologies of Violence and Ethical Entanglements in Police Ethnography

Abstract

This chapter revisits some intractable questions for the anthropologist who engages violence in the field: How do we understand violence, especially state violence? How do we conduct participant-observation with interlocutors who engage in violence on a routine basis, willfully, or as part of their job description, and still maintain professional ethical standards and the directionality of our moral compass? How do we understand and negotiate the vulnerabilities, responsibilities, and complicities of violent agents, as well as of the ethnographer who aims to understand and analyse their practice? What kinds of knowledge are produced in these ethnographic encounters? And how can—and how should—this knowledge be framed and represented? These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 106 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.