From April 14 to 17, I participated in Puerto Rico at the annual conference sponsored by The American Ethnological Society and The Society for Urban, National and Transnational Anthropology. On Friday April 16, I served as a discussant to the panel The Category of Perpetrator in Human Rights Discourse. Presenters, among others, were Winifred Tate, Linda Green, and Samuel Martinez.
There is today a small but significant number of anthropologists who have been dedicating their research to "perpetrators." Anthropology came in quite late in studying political violence and its main focus has been the victims of gross human rights violations. And this no doubt has been the right thing to do. In fact, as an expression of engaged anthropology, students of human rights have given a fundamental contribution to the field of human rights by allowing to bring to the fore effects of power and by lending an ear to a truth that speaks to power. Sally Engle Marry, Linda Green, Ricardo Falla, Deborah Poole, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Victoria Sanford and others have been pioneers in the field.
It is ethically, practically and intellectually challenging to turn the gaze from the victims to the perpetrators. One has to take the risk of giving them a forum. And not any forum, but the forum of the field of anthropology. To embrace such a research object, is almost to break a tabu.
Engaging with perpetrators might displace the anthropologist from the margins closer to the center. To be sure, this is of course not totally new. Anthropologists such as Michael Taussig, Jeff Sluka, Jennifer Schirmer, Lesly Gill, Allen Feldman, Kimberly Theidon and Martha K. Huggins and others have turned their gaze onto the powerful. But I think there is something we can learn from anthropologists shuttling between the margins and the centers as part of a methodology and an epistemics to grasp the cultural complexities of political violence and the dynamics of an "unruly order." In other words, to learn about what Taussig called the social being of truth.
