Ethnographic Betrayals

What are the ethics and politics of anthropology in a world defined by the global surge of the populist and far right? How do ethnographers navigate the far-right field under conditions of political violence, state surveillance, and authoritarianism? In this article, I offer my fieldwork and postfieldwork experiences with ultranationalist ex-conscripts from Turkey’s Kurdish war as a window into these questions. My experiences demonstrate that anthropology’s professional ethical codes and conventions fail to adequately address the complexities of conducting engaged research with research participants whose political convictions diametrically oppose those of the researcher. Here, I frame these complexities around the multilayered and charged notion of betrayal. Betrayal is good to think with, I argue, because it links the psychic and affective dimensions of ethnographic research with the global political climate of our times while also conveying the moral dilemmas and the senses of drama and urgency that saturate such fraught fieldwork situations. Spelling out the emotional, ethical, and political challenges I encountered in the field, I show that ethnographic ethics cannot be reduced to the dyadic relationship between the researcher and the research participants but must instead be situated within the broader structures of power, violence, and sovereignty.