Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Alexander Laban Hinton, 2023, Perpetrators Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side

Abstract

In Perpetrators Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side, two veteran anthropologists provide the discipline with a set of practical lessons for conducting fieldwork with interlocutors who have participated in mass atrocities. These lessons are based on the “practical wisdom” – what the authors also term as phronesis by borrowing from ancient Greek (p. 5) - that they have developed through their decades of research in Argentina and Cambodia, where two politically different kinds of authoritarian regimes unleashed programmes of mass violence on their populations in the 1970s. The book begins with a desire to address “anthropology’s lack of methodological reflection on encounters with perpetrators of mass violence in the field,” but is far more than a methods guide. The book is in part ethnographic self-analysis and in part a Socratic dialogue involving the authors. It begins with theoretical reflections on what perpetration means (Introduction), and continues to examine the problems that ethnographers face when conducting research with agents of violence (Part I including Chapters 1 and 2), the marks that these violent interlocutors leave on the researchers (Part II including Chapters 3 and 4), and the problem of ethnographically writing about difficult and violent subjects (Part III including Chapters 5 and 6). Each part is introduced by interludes which set out the themes examined in the subsequent chapters.