Witnessing vulnerability and the vulnerable witness

In this chapter I use the concepts of shadows (Leibing and McLean 2007) and prisms (Richardson 2000), in an attempt to render an honest and personal account of the topography of suffering, with its contours of grief, loss, and anguish in the context of doing fieldwork and writing about marital violence in India. I reflect on my own shadows in relation to my multiple identities as a woman, a migrant, a native anthropologist, a feminist, and also as someone who has intimately experienced loss. Rather than maintaining distance and ‘objectivity’, I make these central to my understanding of love, desire, and violence in marital relationships. I share my reflections on the emotive aspects of doing fieldwork by contrasting and comparing my affective state while employing ethnographic methods versus statistical analysis, given that my research used both methodologies. I argue that rather than writing ourselves out of the text, it may be more productive to reflect on how our subjectivities as anthropologists are intertwined with those of our informants, as it interpenetrates our multiple identities. While research is fraught with power asymmetries, a faithful and more equitable narration of our informants’ lives demand that we take the risk of making ourselves vulnerable, even as we bear witness to their vulnerabilities.