To write or not to write?

Abstract

AbstractIt is of critical importance for anthropologists to consider the ethical and representational stakes of writing violence, especially when the values and uses of anthropology are increasingly disputed, both within and beyond the discipline. As suggested by Indigenous Papuan women's contrasting views on the promise and perils of ethnographic writing, the good of anthropology is a question best approached in conversation with the people upon whose cultures anthropologists build our careers and capital. Engaging upfront with our interlocutors’ divergent desires and demands in turn invites a practice of hesitant anthropology that productively avows—rather than disavows—the dilemmas of disclosure faced by the people whose stories we are entrusted with and become responsible for. Such a practice centers the realities of noninnocence and compromise that animate or preempt the ethnographic craft, including the diverse perspectives, obligations, and betrayals shaping the experience of being there and of (not) writing it.