Excessive killing and excessive pain: ethnographic dilemmas based on a narrative of violence, death and mourning

Abstract

The goal of this article is to reflect on the ethnographic dilemmas involved in narratives of pain, death, and violence. Based on a case of the public lynching of Gabriel, a young black man from a favela, who was followed during field research, I propose reflecting on some dilemmas raised by research dealing with violence. Thus, the aim of this article is both ethical and methodological, as it draws on the challenges encountered in the creation and writing of ethnography, during moments when we are confronted with violence, excess, terror, and death. The starting point for the argument is the narrative of Auxiliadora, Gabriel's mother, who talks about the successive deaths—both physical and symbolic—that he goes through. As it concerns contexts marked by the overlap of various forms of violence, how can we capture and express invisible, hidden experiences that access pain and memories, making them intelligible in the ethnographic text? How can we give anthropological meaning to silences and other languages used by the subjects of this research, in order to understand the everyday and ordinary nature of this violence? How can we express—beyond the vocabulary of trauma—the experiences of suffering and horrors, in which every word seems insufficient? What mechanisms construct the peripheral Black body as the enemy to be eliminated? In this sense, usingmy own fieldwork insertion as a starting point, I seek to discuss issues such as vulnerability, invisibility, research methodology, and the very construction of the ethnographic text, especially in moments that seem inexpressible, where my own feelings infiltrate the ethnography.