Ethnographies of slow violence: Epistemological alliances in fieldwork and narrating ruins

Abstract

This article explores the nexus of slow violence as a concept, research focus, and problem on the one hand, and the practices and politics of ethnographic fieldwork and writing on the other. I argue that paying more explicit attention to methodological challenges in conducting ethnographies of slow violence is both necessary and worthwhile. Ethnographies can animate the broader debates on slow violence, infuse them with new concepts and political urgencies, and relate them to new sites and problems. Conversely, the problem of slow violence can advance ethnographic debates and practices, even beyond ethnographies of slow violence in a narrower sense. I highlight two aspects. First, I explore epistemological alliances between researchers and research participants which confront forms of violence that at first remain partly elusive to both sides. Second, I argue for multi-temporal ethnographies which work through drawn-out and complex timescapes of violence and loss by tracing cross-temporal connections. Notions of fieldwork are still mainly defined in spatial terms, and so the problem of slow violence is an important reminder to pay more attention to temporal dimensions. I build this argument on ethnographic research conducted in rural Russia, and thus also show how the concept of slow violence helps to make sense of and to make visible those forms of loss and dispossession that often remain elusive in academic and public representations of the Russian countryside.