Expert Witness: Notes toward Revisiting

the Politics of Listening

ASALE ANGEL-AJANI
Gallatin School
New York University
715 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

SUMMARY Through an exploration of what it means to conduct fieldwork in a

large European prison, this article explores both the promises and the limitations of the
form of anthropological engagement some have called “witnessing.” I call attention to
the ways anthropological witnessing is written about within the discipline and argue
that the notion of “witnessing” is largely an attempt to establish the authority of the
ethnographer, without ever having to enter into that long-standing debate. Finally, I
attempt to grapple with the necessity—despite the growing silence in the discipline—for
an anthropology that is steadfast in its commitment to what some have called “activist
anthropology” and that recognizes the complex ways in which ethnographic experience
is rendered. [Keywords: activist anthropology, ethnographic authority, women,
prisons, experience]

One confesses—or is forced to confess.

—Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality

A Confession
I am haunted by voices. There is one voice in particular that calls to me day
in and day out and, unlike the loud rambling voices of the others that I hear,
her voice is a distinct whisper that licks at my ears. I try to ignore the voices
but hers sits before me like a starving child. Her bloated stomach repels me. She
cries to me at all hours. I hate to be alone with her, but she sits on my brain,
pounding on my skull for attention. She keeps me up at night, and during the
day her whispers make my skin crawl. I cannot be alone with her and yet I dare
not stray too far away.
Her voice demands to know if I can remember what it was like. She ques-
tions my memory’s ability to return to that horrible place that was the prison.
Can I, she wonders, walk back into my mind’s eye and conjure up the im-
ages of the dark, cold corners, the smells of cat shit, and the noise of heavy
metal doors clanging shut? Can I return to the shouts of the angry guards or
the embattled women? Can I remember the faces that held my deepest re-
spect and affection? Can I return to the women as they once were? Mostly,
she wants to know if I will be able to live with myself for walking away from
them.
She is teaching me that, maybe, for most people who work with “real, live”
flesh and blood, who negotiate the horrors that envelop people, there is no

ANTHROPOLOGY AND HUMANISM, Vol. 29, Issue 2, pp. 133–144, ISSN 0193-5615, electronic ISSN
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134 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 29, Number 2

salvation. It is one thing to do research safely from the archives and quite another
to make a living off the everyday suffering of women.
One thing I know for sure is that I cannot live with the fact that I peddle
the flesh of women’s stories for academic consumption, making them pretty,
because the realities of their lives are too difficult to bear. Through the incorpo-
ration of “theory” I have learned to water down difficult emotional moments so
as not to appear too sentimental. I know also that working with African women
detained in one of Italy’s largest female prisons, Rebibbia Femminile, numbed
many of my emotional sensibilities. I am not certain, despite my commitment
(and my privilege) to struggle with these women for recognition and dignity,
that I have the strength to walk back into that space where the horrors of un-
speakable trauma, institutional and societal violence, and individual suffering
live. But even though the institution shaped every moment, and even small acts
of resistance were bundled in reprisals, there were happy times, even feelings of
utter joy. On very special days, many women were motivated by the promise
of prospects for the future, for friendships and lives lived beyond the walls of
Rebibbia. And on those days, we silently hoped that the world could be a dif-
ferent place for Black women, who, forced by social conditions and their social
positions, lived just beyond the confines of the fluctuating and unequal rules of
dominant society.
I quickly learned that despite its lack of knowledge about how prisons actually
operate, society imagines—and even pleasurably envisions—powerfully vivid
images of crime, criminals, and prison life. Academics and the media feed these
images to people, and because of this, stories of inmates seem familiar, women
inmates in particular. “Incarcerated women” is a story that has already been told;
it is old news. Especially in the United States, both public and academic discourse
about female criminals represents them as poor women of color, single mothers,
and drug addicts. More sophisticated accounts often identify imprisoned women
as survivors of physical violence and sexual abuse, and as less often detained for
violent offenses than men. Whatever truth these theories and ideas might hold—
as imprisoned women, activists, and a few scholars have long argued—the lives
of imprisoned women are so much more complex than these mere “facts.”
I myself am the daughter of parents who have been incarcerated, so that when
I began my research in 1996 I had long understood the quiet respect of not asking
people who had been or were in prison why they were there. So while I was in
Rebibbia I did not ask. As such, I was shocked by some of the women’s willing
admission of what brought them there. I realized that, because the prison officials
introduced me as a researcher, there seemed to be little question of why I was
there or what information I was deemed as “needing to know.” Many of the
women had become very familiar with the rules and routine of being interview
subjects. This unsettled me. Even though I knew I was, by the nature of my
position in the university, part of the machine that produced the often negative
representations of prisoners to the world “outside,” I hoped that I was more than
just a narrator of other Black women’s lives. I hoped I was more than just a mere
anthropologist. I believed that I belonged to a group of activist-scholars who,
through writing, research, and organizing, were working toward the abolition
of prisons as we know them and, through this process, exposing the broader
racist, sexist, and classist social structures that criminalize and demonize poor
Whites and people of color.
Firm in my commitment not to participate in the further criminalization of
African women, I did not mention whenever I shared my research among aca-
demics why the women with whom I worked in Rebibbia were imprisoned. This
frustrated several audiences. I had failed in my first duty as an anthropologist
Angel-Ajani Expert Witness 135

and as an academic. I learned that, as an anthropologist, I had a particular pro-

fessional duty to translate my observations about the lives of women who are
forced to live in cages. But by discussing the toll that imprisonment, violence,
and forced prostitution (among many other traumas) had taken on the lives of
women—without ever having mentioned their crimes or, worse, by not confirm-
ing the veracity of some women’s seemingly “outlandish” stories—I had not met
the demands and expectations of my audience. As much as representation and
the practice of fieldwork have been debated, the anthropologist has not entirely
rid herself of the role of “recovering the truth,” the role of being the one who
assembles evidence and then testifies in a (court)room of her “peers.”

Ethnographic Authority (again)

In the heyday of more reflective treatments about anthropology’s troubled
roots, James Clifford penned the influential article “On Ethnographic Author-
ity” (1983). Though his article encouraged questions about power and represen-
tation, anthropologists and other social scientists continue to be plagued with
the unresolved quandary of ethnographic authority, so much so that, save for a
few recent ethnographies, the work of many anthropologists forgoes the prob-
lem of authority by ignoring the question altogether. Native American, Black,
and Latino anthropologists have argued that it is one thing to speak with au-
thority, it is quite another to speak authoritatively. As Faye Harrison argued
in the groundbreaking publication of the Association of Black Anthropologists,
Decolonizing Anthropology, “to recapture the authority . . . anthropology needs to
confront both discursive and material power” (1991:vii). Although there have
been many instructive monographs, edited volumes, and journal articles that
attend to the issue of authority, representation, and power, I want to explore
ethnographic authority through a discussion of the somewhat undertheorized
notion of activist anthropology. Hale and Gordon argue that activist anthro-
pology is “predicated on the idea that we need not choose between first rate
scholarship, on the one hand, and carefully considered political engagement,
on the other. To the contrary, we contend that activist research can enhance the
empirical breadth and the theoretical sophistication—as well as the practical
usefulness—of the knowledge that we produce as anthropologists” (n.d.).
In this article, I think through the promise and the limitations of engaged ob-
servation, especially the form of anthropological engagement some have called
“witnessing.” I will call attention to the ways in which the act of anthropolog-
ical witnessing is largely a veiled attempt to (re)establish the authority of the
ethnographer, without ever having to enter this long-standing debate. I do not
mean to suggest, however, that all ethnographers who invoke the figure of the
anthropologist/witness are necessarily actively positioning themselves as the
authoritative “authority.” I believe that, especially for ethnographers who work
with and write about survivors of many forms of violence and repression, the
figure of the witness becomes a powerful means through which to authorize and
legitimize the painful and often devastating histories which we anthropologists
are allowed to hear, and which we sometimes see with our own eyes. Never-
theless, despite good intentions, we do not recognize both the responsibility of
the witness and the many ways in which being called to act as a witness is not
always noble. In fully embracing the notion of the anthropologist as witness, we
fail to question the conditions that make our work possible as well as critically
assess the consequences of our ethnographic production.
I also contemplate how we who are critical of the more traditional forms of
social science data gathering and reporting often turn to courtroom metaphors,
136 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 29, Number 2

or worse. The metaphors I will be discussing sit between the anthropologist as

witness and the anthropologist as police officer. I question the political stakes
of this slippage and attempt to grapple with the necessity, despite the growing
silence in the discipline, for an anthropology that is steadfast in its commit-
ment to “creating and consolidating a counter-hegemonic movement through
active political struggle” that has at its roots heartfelt dedication and yes, even
sentimentality (Gordon 1991:155). Of course, this call for socially relevant and
politically engaged anthropology is not new. Black, Latin, and Native American
anthropologists have long challenged the racist foundations that persist in the
discipline, just as feminists have waged their critique of male dominance and
formerly colonized subjects (classic objects of the anthropological gaze) have
poignantly debated the power differential that continues to plague the field and
the academy at large.

Between the Witness and the Police

The notion of the anthropologist as witness is widely used and often ref-
erenced, but not always in the sense of engaged observation. For some, the
anthropologist as witness is what all anthropologists do. For others, the dis-
cipline of anthropology itself is a mode of witnessing. As Ruth Behar writes:
“Anthropology . . . is the most fascinating, bizarre, disturbing, and necessary
form of witnessing left to us at the end of the twentieth century” (1996:5). Clearly
Behar’s sentiment about anthropology as a form of witnessing does not ex-
pressly speak about forms of engagement with the people who are subjected
to the eye of the witness/anthropologist. She elevates the position of witness
as not only necessary, but as seemingly one of the few viable options “left to
us.” Nancy Scheper-Hughes goes even further by positioning the witness as a
noble actor. In the introduction to Death without Weeping, she argues that “the
act of witnessing is what lends our work its moral (and at times its almost the-
ological) character” (1992:xii). Scheper-Hughes’s account of witnessing under-
scores a form of anthropological engagement that by implication is active and
committed.
In similar fashion, the mission statement for the series “Public Anthropology”
published by University of California Press and edited by Robert Borofsky claims
that “the series seeks to affirm ethnography as an important public witness of
today’s world” (n.d.). According to the statement, the goal of the series is to
bring ethnographic analysis to the fore of “the world’s public discussions” and
to “position ethnography as a central way of knowing in public intellectual life”
(n.d.). At the heart of ethnographic witnessing, then, at least for Borofsky, is the
desire to heighten anthropology’s status in the domain of public affairs and to
return anthropology (as an expert witness of culture) to its former valorized
place on the world scene.
Though very different, the articulations of Borofsky, Behar, and Scheper-
Hughes about the witness firmly establish the centrality of the anthropologist
by suggesting that as a witness she not only bears witness (was there), but has
testimony to give. Although this is certainly provocative, it leads to at least
two questions: what and for whom does this form of observation advocate, and
who benefits from this mode of engagement? What is true about both Behar
and Scheper-Hughes is their desire, despite the increasingly scientifically and
“proof”-oriented environment that continues to plague anthropology, to write
in a manner that surrenders “to the intractableness of reality” (Behar 1996:2). Of
course, as Behar herself notes, this is not the stuff from which Ph.D.s in anthro-
pology are made.
Angel-Ajani Expert Witness 137

In keeping with other scholars critical of the role of historians and anthro-
pologists (Clifford 1986; Rosaldo 1987; Visweswaran 1994), Liisa Malkki has
recently explored alternative ways of positioning anthropologists in relation to
the field and the written product of fieldwork. As Malkki (1997:90) writes: “In
our fieldwork, as well as through our writing, we have long been oriented to look
for the repetitive, the persistent, the normative—durable forms.” Through her
work with Hutu refugees from Burundi living in Tanzania, Malkki challenges
the more typical ethnographic norms to which anthropologists are supposed to
adhere. She claims that we “think less in terms of ethnographic description than
of witnessing.” For Malkki, being a witness implies a greater sense of responsi-
bility, presumably to the “subjects” of the ethnography. She writes that “being a
witness implies both a specific positioning and a responsibility of testimony, ‘a
caring form of vigilance’ ” (1997:94). Malkki goes on to argue that being a wit-
ness and giving testimony would be a “workable strategy” against producing
the more typical ethnographic accounts of “cultures, peoples, communities and
ways of life” (1997:95). Although acknowledging that testimony and witnessing
have convoluted and complicated meanings and origins, her notion of bearing
witness is part of an end game for the anthropologist. Being a witness, according
to Malkki, “does not mean speaking for someone else; it is one’s own testimony”
(1997:94). This raises the question, if witnessing is “one’s own testimony” but
still a form of caring vigilance, for whom is the anthropologist being vigilant?
The act of witnessing is not as uncomplicated as it is often represented. It is
not always about the person bearing witness, the anthropologist, or about an
insider’s or outsider’s rendition of events. There are many forms of witness-
ing, from the ecclesiastical to the courtroom, but to cast anthropologists and
their “product,” the ethnography, as a form of witnessing may just confuse the
ethical and the juridical, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) notes in Quel che resta di
Auschwitz. With few exceptions, most anthropologists are third party chroni-
clers of events which they have not experienced from beginning to end. As third
party chroniclers, the act of witnessing anthropologists engage in is ultimately
juridical in nature. Like material witnesses, anthropologists provide informa-
tion about a “case,” about a culture, or a community that significantly affects the
understanding (negatively and positively) of that community.
If the possibility of “anthropological witnessing” exists, then the question
of responsibility and ethnographic authority must be grappled with, and as
Agamben suggests, the act of witnessing must then be cast in the realm of the
juridical. He writes:

The gesture of assuming responsibility is therefore genuinely juridical and not ethical.
It expresses nothing noble or luminous, but rather simply obligation, the act by which
one consigned oneself as a prisoner to guarantee a debt in a context in which the
legal bond was considered to inhere in the body of the person responsible. [Agamben
1998:22]

But is the role of the academic witness to be devoid of what some might call
“ethical obligation” and others might call advocacy or activism? Consider too
how scholars who write about witnesses who survived the Shoah discuss the
problem of witnessing and responsibility. In Suffering Witness: The Quandary of
Responsibility after the Irreparable, James Hatley (2000) calls on those who write
or think about violence and irredeemable wrongs to think about our respon-
sibility “to those who suffer within that moment.” He urges us to think about
responsibility by asking, “How have we been addressed by those who suffer?
In what manner might we be in complicity with he or she who perpetrates this
138 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 29, Number 2

violence?” (2000:2). Ruminating on the question of the ethical role of the witness,
Hatley suggests a path for scholars troubled by violence. He writes:

Burdened by the other’s suffering, we are called upon not only to understand or, at
the very least, to give a historical record of a particular act of violence, but also and
in the first instance to witness it. By witness is meant a mode of responding to the
other’s plight that exceeds an epistemological determination and becomes an ethical
involvement. One must not only utter a truth about the victim but also remain true to
her or him. In this latter mode of response, one is summoned to attentiveness, which
is to say, to a heartfelt concern for and acknowledge of the gravity of violence directed
toward particular others. In this attentiveness, the wounding of the other is registered
in the first place not as an objective fact but as a subjective blow, a persecution, a
trauma. The witness refuses to forget the weight of this blow, or the depth of the
wound it inflicts. [Hatley 2000:2–3]

If anthropologists were to aspire to being the kind of witness Hatley advocates,

what might our practice look like? Would we, for example, feel comfortable
with conflating anthropological methods with the methods of the police or the
inquisitor as Liisa Malkki (1997) has suggested? Her discussion of the seeming
similarities between “police work and fieldwork” invites us to examine our
anthropological intentions. What are the driving forces behind why we study
what we choose to study? What ultimate goals do we hope to achieve when we
write up and make decisions about publishing? Though these are old questions
to anthropologists, they have not outlived their relevance.
I believe that Malkki’s call for anthropologists to consider the connections be-
tween police work and fieldwork signals the need to think more critically about
the choices one makes as an anthropologist. What are the differences between
the anthropologist as investigator/inquisitor/police and the anthropologist as
witness? Are there differences? Is our will to knowledge and our methodolo-
gies (interviews, observations, and the archive, among others) so fatally flawed
that we cannot help but be police? Of course, because I do critical work on
the criminal justice system, terms such as “police” and “witness” are not light-
hearted words to be sure. It goes without saying that police and witnesses can
produce evidence that can both condemn and exonerate. But when one works
in a prison and listens to and observes the sharp contrast between those who
confine and those who are confined, the line between the witness and the police
is not philosophical. Being in and of the world as anthropologists are in and
of the world should only heighten our awareness that although police work
involves police informants who may act as witnesses, evidence, clues, and priv-
ileged information, police also employ suspicion, fed by the larger discourse
of criminalization, labeling or racial profiling, and ideologies of racism, sexism,
homophobia, and classism. Indeed, as reports from global human rights orga-
nizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as well as
local human rights groups and social justice activists from all over the world
have evidenced, much of police work relies on coercive measures that can be
deadly, especially to the mentally ill, women, people of color, poor people, and
immigrants.

Not All Fields Are Created Equal, Neither Are Anthropologists

The moment I crossed the threshold between the “free world” and the world
of confinement, I assumed that I was the one who chose between being an an-
thropologist who witnesses and one who polices. I did not know that the prison
institution and its agents would quickly make that choice for me. Prior to my
Angel-Ajani Expert Witness 139

arrival at Rebibbia, I was a female researcher from a prestigious university in

the United States. Over the phone, a friendly administrator from the prison di-
rector’s office scheduled a morning meeting between us. After the meeting with
the warden, I was to be introduced to the core staff (including social workers,
health professionals, and senior prison guards), followed by a formal tour of
the facility, where I could meet the women prisoners and make arrangements to
interview them according to their work schedules.
On a hot August morning in 1996, armed with a permission letter from Italy’s
Minister of Justice and a rather official looking letter from my university, I an-
nounced myself to the guard manning the reception desk. I knew that he had
seen me approach and could tell that he was eyeing me with curiosity. As I slid
my documents to him through the thick glass partition, I watched as he grew
confused, then suspicious. He eyed my passport and picked up the phone. I
could not hear what he was saying, but I remember hoping that he would hurry
up, because I did not want to be late for my appointment. He was gesturing
rapidly with my passport in his hands.
He hung up the phone and turned back to the window. He called to another
guard whom I had not seen earlier. The two of them stood at the window re-
viewing my documents. I looked past them to the clock.
“So you’re an American?” the first guard asked.
I dragged my eyes from the clock to him and back to the clock, trying to be
obvious. “Yes.”
He leaned forward and I looked him in the eye. “Well, you don’t speak Italian
with an American accent.” He pushed a button to his right and the large blue
doors that separated the prison from the outside slowly opened up. “No,” he
said without missing a beat, “you’ve got an Arabic accent.”
Knowing full well what his comment meant, I thanked him by saying that I
agreed that American accents were awful in any language, including English.
I walked through the prison doors and was greeted by the second guard who
informed me that I was allowed to bring in only a pen and paper. As I went
through the metal detector, the second guard called after me, “You’re here to
speak to the Nigerian girls?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Well, tell your compatriots that they should stop bringing drugs into Italy.”
He added, “Maybe they’ll listen to you.”
By the time the guard and I arrived at the main office, my entire morning
schedule had been revised. I no longer had a meeting with the warden, my staff
introductions were going to be limited to a social worker and a guard who, it
turned out, would be present at every interview and whose main duty would
be to “escort” me everywhere—from the office where I did my interviews to the
bathroom door. As I prepared to leave the prison that afternoon, I was told that
I had to get official verification from the American Embassy stating that I truly
was a U.S. citizen.
It was clear from the start that as an “other” American who had an “other”
name, I was seen as being on the side of the inmates. As a Black woman, I
apparently had nothing in common with those who ran the facility. Not that
I minded or was shocked at how easily my race and apparent difference put
me squarely in the corner of the detained African women in the eyes of the
administration. Although I had convinced myself that any good anthropologist
would be wary of approaching her work with bias (in graduate school I had
been trained to stay away from bias), I knew long before entering the facility,
long before touching down in Italy, that my affinities were and would be with
the inmates. My bias was built on the knowledge that my status as an “other”
140 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 29, Number 2

American (who did not appear to be authentically from the United States) would
greatly affect my experience.
In her article, “The Evidence of Experience,” Joan Scott (1991) writes of the
problems associated with accepting experience as evidence when analyzing so-
cial and historical processes. It seems true, as Begoña Aretxaga suggested, that
by underscoring experience “one runs the risk of leaving unquestioned the con-
ditions that enable it” (1997:8). Like Aretxaga, I heed the warning sounded by
Scott, but I too think there is a political necessity to recognize that experiences are
shaped both discursively and through everydayness. It is important, however,
that these experiences are not evidence of truth but rather of the disruption of
a normative truth. This is an acknowledgment that experiences are one way to
interpret how subjectivities are produced and understood.
Anthropologists are, of course, very big on experience. Whether we are writing
about the experiences facing the communities with which we work or are eval-
uating our own, it is clear that “experience,” particularly that which is gained in
the field, is what makes one an anthropologist. As Gupta and Ferguson (1997:1)
note, “we would suggest that the single most significant factor determining
whether a piece of research will be accepted as . . . ‘anthropological’ is the ex-
tent to which it depends on experience in the field.” Though they are mostly
concerned with the strictures and practices of fieldwork and its valorized place
within the discipline of anthropology, in their article, Gupta and Ferguson are
referring to the widely known (yet unwritten) criterion that one must spend a
significant amount of time in the field (a year or more). Wrapped innocently
in their language is the profound question of who determines what is an an-
thropological experience. Beyond the length of time spent in the field and the
actual location of the field, the issue of experience, it seems, is uncontroversial
here.
The question is “Why?” Why is it that despite numerous critical anthologies
and reflective articles we still reify “experience” as if it is something that can be
replicated and universally understood? Is one a really good anthropologist if one
has spent years in the field, speaks the language fluently, and crafts beautifully
written ethnographies? Perhaps these are the trappings of a good anthropol-
ogist, but I reckon that if all of these traits were bundled in an ethnography
that ran counterintuitive to what the audience thinks one must know (regard-
less of whether one has had any “experience” in the area), the anthropologist
in question may be deemed “un-anthropological.” Is there an assumption in
anthropology that the amorphous space known as the field is necessarily level?
Here I am encouraged to reflect on the experience of France Winddance Twine,
who sought guidance on how to address the murky waters of what her brown
body signified for both Blacks and Whites in Brazil. In thinking about how she
might prepare to deal with being an African American subject in the field, she
turned to anthropology and sociology for help. What she found was little discus-
sion about race and fieldwork. As she puts it: “After decades of self-reflexivity
among ethnographers analyzing the practice of writing and conducting field
research, the lack of sustained attention to racialized dilemmas is particularly
noteworthy, considering the degree to which other axes of power have been
theorized” (Twine 2000:5). For as long as there has been anthropology, the race,
gender, age, and social position of the anthropologist has impacted the ways in
which one is received, not only in the field, but also in the discipline among one’s
peers. What has long been clear but seldom discussed is that where one works
and how one looks when one conducts that work factors significantly. It is an
old story that one’s race, gender, sexuality, and social position can (and does)
determine what kind of information one might receive and, therefore, influence
Angel-Ajani Expert Witness 141

the kind of knowledge one produces. At risk of stating the obvious, and as Donna
Haraway (1991) reminded us, knowledge, like experience, is situated.

The Politics of Listening

The “she” that opens up this article, the one who taught me about the politics
of ethnographic production and challenged my easy ability to name myself and
my work “activist” was an inmate at Rebibbia. Her name, which is not her name,
was given to her by the anthropologist/author who hopes to protect her identity
and her dignity. She, “Esther,” is no longer imprisoned but it does not change
the fact that she will always be considered a condemned woman, an ex-convict.
When telling her story through the transcription of events that combines her
memory, my remembering of our meetings, and an untrustworthy pen and note
pad, I am often pushed by anthropologists and other academics to reveal more
and more about her life. Her story, particularly the story of her arrest is, yes,
a potholed windy road on a foggy night. Hers is like the story of Eros and
Psyche, of love under the cover of darkness, thrilling, naive and full of burning
questions. The contours of her life are an enigma, but the minutiae are as big as
everydayness. The combination of elusiveness and vivid description feeds the
pungent imagination of the listener.
The potholes in Esther’s story, the seeming inconceivability of her experiences,
created dilemmas for all sorts of scholars listening to my rendition of her life
as an African woman imprisoned in Italy. Before she was incarcerated, she had
been a teacher and held three master’s degrees. She was also the sister-in-law
to a rebel leader in a West African country who made international headlines
for his brutality. Four years before her arrest, she witnessed her husband and
many of his aunts, uncles, and cousins get massacred early one morning in the
family compound. Only she and two of her children survived. They left their
country on foot, traveling with many refugees but always forced to go farther
because of her family’s political history. Finally she ended up in Nigeria in a
refugee camp, where she met the man who would promise her security, and she
made the difficult decision to be a sex worker. Later, this same man would involve
her in an international drug trafficking ring that left her imprisoned in Italy and
completely out of touch with her children while he went free. Once, after I shared
these details of Esther’s story with a group of academics, one woman asked me
how I evaluated the veracity of it. “After all,” the anthropologist added, “she is
in prison.”
I am not so naive that I thought that Esther’s story would provoke collective
soul searching in the body politic. I admit that I was hoping that the reason this
woman anthropologist, a fairly progressive individual by many standards, was
moved to disbelief was because Esther had suffered more trauma than it seemed
anyone should endure. I was hoping that she would be enraged at a world that
could accommodate this magnitude of human suffering. But no, for this woman
and several other anthropologists, Esther and all of the women I worked with
were casualties of the contingencies of life (Das et al. 1997). Furthermore, they
were suspected of not telling the truth, simply because they had been confirmed
by the state as criminals, regardless of the circumstances that brought them to
prison. I am reminded here of a similar discussion by Luana Ross who works
with incarcerated Native American women in Montana. She writes: “Because
I was interested in how racism and sexism function inside prison and affected
imprisoned women, I concentrated on the women’s subjective experiences of
prison. Some critics of my work and of other qualitative research argue that
prisoners do not tell ‘the truth’ ” (Ross 1998:5).
142 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 29, Number 2

I often wondered how people would respond to my research if I did not work
in prisons but, say, in a refugee camp or a women’s shelter. Would there be the
same concerns about truth telling? Would it be easier to accept the violence and
the pain that marked the lives of many of the women with whom I worked if they
had been in a shelter and not in a prison? I am struck by the ways that “crime”
still defines the criminal—to crudely paraphrase Foucault. When I choose not to
write about a woman’s particular crime, or if I flatly state that it is not my goal to
confirm the veracity of a woman’s “testimony,” which would require me to go
through their court papers, initial police reports, and lawyers’ notes, I am often
met with sideways glances and questions about my methodology. According to
the unwritten codes of anthropology, how much am I supposed to know? How
much do you need to know? Perhaps the broader problem is, as Wendy Hui
Kyong Chun suggests, that “we assume that we know how to listen” (1999:114).
To be sure, Esther’s “story” is not a story but a testimony, and my story of her
testimony is and was in some ways a small act of witnessing. But I wonder why
my anthropology audience could not see that the listener enters into the contract
of testimony (Laub 1992). The problem is that we have developed “listening
defenses” which, as Dori Laub describes, constitute a

foreclosure through facts, through an obsession with fact finding; an absorbing interest
in the factual details of the account which serve to circumvent the human experience.
Another version of the foreclosure, of this obsession with fact finding, is a listener who
already “knows it all,” ahead of time, leaving little space for the survivor’s story. [Laub
1992:73]

If we think we know it all before a word is uttered then what does that say about
our ability to receive the details of another person’s experience or testimony?
What does this say about the possibilities for ethical engagement (Chun 1999)?
Can we be engaged scholars or activist intellectuals if we do not know how to
listen, or if we seek or even demand knowledge that confirms what we already
think we know?
To be the receiver of testimony, as some anthropologists are, is to be, in part,
a witness. But it is also to assist in that witnessing process. As Laub writes,

To a certain extent, the interviewer-listener takes on the responsibility for bearing

witness that previously the narrator felt he bore alone, and therefore could not carry
out. It is the encounter and the coming together between the survivor and the listener,
which makes possible something like a repossession of the act of witnessing. This joint
responsibility is the source of the reemerging truth. [Laub 1992:85]

When thinking through the act of anthropology, the practice of ethnography,

we have concerned ourselves with the authoritative act of what it means to wit-
ness. That authoritative act is the act of speaking, giving voice, reclaiming and
reconstructing an event. Ironically, however, an anthropologist’s job is suppos-
edly based on the act of listening. Listening does not imply that the listener is
an expert or an authority. I believe there are valuable lessons to be learned if
we opened our ears to experiences that might not fit what we think we know.
Critical reception might just lead to ethical engagement.

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