The Weight of Witnessing: Commitment, Expectation, and Responsibility in Child Protection Ethnography

Abstract

Abstract The practice of witnessing holds particular power regarding the question of how best to assure children’s wellbeing. This is especially true for the field of internationally initiated attempts at child protection, often against corporal punishment, as I have explored them in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Acts of witnessing are imbued with a sense of commitment, with a variety of expectations, and with a certain obligation, or responsibility, to act upon what one comes to see or know. In order to understand witnessing as a relational and collaborative process first, rather than as an anthropological self-identification, I propose to think with witnessing as having a weight, and of potential ways to reconsider how this weight of witnessing may be distributed differently, in child protection ethnography specifically, and anthropology more generally.