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?
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Policing inherently operates with dirty hands.
Robert Reiner (2010, xiii)
To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness
John Leonard (1979, 140)
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© 2013 William Garriott
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Jauregui, B. (2013). Dirty Anthropology: Epistemologies of Violence and Ethical Entanglements in Police Ethnography. In: Garriott, W. (eds) Policing and Contemporary Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137309679_6
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