It All Depends on the Beholder

Abstract

This article arose out of the interests and concerns of a group of Chilean social science researchers (psychology, social work, and philosophy) who wanted to reflect upon and analyze the phenomenon of gender-based domestic violence among urban Aymara women residents in northern Chile in a critical and interdisciplinary manner. After working on two research projects funded by a Spanish state agency, whose objective was the diagnosis of indexes and forms of domestic violence among these women, the authors begin to reflect after recognizing their initial Westernized and colonized vision of the concept of violence and how this view changed during the course of the research. At the same time, we focused our thinking on clarifying ethical issues that emerged after we conducted the research, mainly concerning the question of whether “the act of investigation” could have been a way of perpetuating patterns of violence among local Andean communities, due to the Westernized approach we used as researchers.