State violence and the ethnographic encounter: feminist research and racial embodiment

This article explores the idea that black urban communities in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, particularly women, are currently under siege. This article examines the confinement and silencing of the anthropologist within the overall context of State policing of black communities and black women-led grassroots movements in Salvador. I argue that engaged research methods should be analyzed within the context of the violence of recent urbanization practices and systemic, as well as everyday practices of police abuse. This analysis illuminates the extent to which racial and gendered dimensions of State-sponsored urban violence in Brazil poses political challenges for ethnography aimed at social change. Furthermore, in a methodology based on the experiential, as well as the feminist position that the ‘personal as political’, in this article I draw upon my own experiences and subject position as a black woman to explicate how anthropologists’ bodies are marked by race, gender, and class – thereby mediating how they access the material resources of social movement activists. I suggest that feminist research, while urgent for black social movements, necessitates the anthropologist working with social movement actors, in solidarity, to negotiate ‘dangerous fields’.