| Abstract: | Studying violence is likely to put the observer at risk, both physically and psychologically, making it unlike studying kinship, religion, or other topics. Violence fragments experience, making it difficult to construct coherent or effective narratives. To overcome these difficulties, recent works combine experience-near accounts with experience-distant analysis. Experience-near reportage must rely on material that is fragmentary, oblique and restricted, but which is also emotionally intense and involving; experience-distant analysis can achieve objectivity, systematic understanding, and intellectual closure, but at the price of immediacy and expressive power. Experience-near accounts convey trauma and depersonalization; experience-distant ones convey coherence and idealization. The middle range provides a compromise. |
