Vulnerabilities, dilemmas and pain

fragments of a research of/in the violence

Abstract

This article is centered on one main axis: a reflection on the vulnerabilities of the researcher while conducting fieldwork and what this can tell us about methodological, ethical, and writing issues that we confront when conducting our research and writing our texts. I seek to give an anthropological sense to situations marked by tensions, dilemmas and vulnerabilities that I encountered during the fieldwork of my postdoctoral research. The first part of the text is a reflection on an ethnographic scene: attempted sexual abuse that I suffered in the field. This experience modified all the directions of the research and represented a watershed both on a personal level and for some theoretical reflections. In the second part, I turn again to an ethnographic scene - the revelation of an aggressor of children and adolescents and the chain of reactions that this provoked in me -, which has the potential to help reflect on other adversities encountered when performing an ethnography of the "margins".