‘I have danced over my father’s body’: The anthropology of incestuous violence

In this creative-critical visual ethnographic essay, as in my work in general, I am interested in understanding traces – what we leave behind. It is an archaeological work of sorts, an excavation into the depths of everyday life, into the dimensions that remain unarticulated. In anthropological writing, the messiness of fieldwork is often obscured. How, then, does one navigate anthropological research on a topic that requires precisely diving into what is messy, what lacks an unequivocal verbal language to be named? The visual ethnographic approach I share here responds to this question. I studied the discursive practices surrounding incestuous violence against Indigenous and peasant women at Bolivia’s National Psychiatric Hospital, at the intersection of psychiatry and traditional Indigenous medicine. The creative-critical narratives developed in this visual ethnography – grounded in photography, dance and drawing – articulate my interpretation of Tatsumi Hijikata’s thinking on body and language. The images I share here, including the pieces of dance and drawings and the creative narratives they reference, were created by my friends and fellow survivors of violence(s) at Bolivia’s National Psychiatric Hospital; my partner-photographer, who assisted me with my research; and me. Photos, dance and drawing – aside from making visible a trace of multiple forms of victimisation, including sexual, institutional and ethnic violence – allow for their resignification and even the exploration of the aesthetics of violence and suffering from the perspectives of survivors, thereby challenging any attempt at simplification of this social reality in academic literature.