“Thank God it was not the belly!”: revisiting an ethnographic scene of violence against women

Abstract

In this article, I look back at an ethnographic scene of violence against women that I observed in 2003, during ethnographic research on gender relations in the Family Health Program, in Recife (Brazil), to discuss the ethical dilemmas of anthropological research and, specifically, the affective dimensions and emotional aspects of ethnographic work in sensitive fields. To that end, I reproduce the excerpts from my fieldnotes comprising the scene of violence and analyze in detail the series of events that took place after the aggression, based on two emotions: “fear of men” and “impotence,” which help to understand the reactions of health team and the anthropologist herself. Reencountering the scene, 20 years later, in the context of the presentation of a contemporary research on violence against women allows me to discuss changes and continuities in the ways we do ethnographic research on health issues in sensitive fields.