Awful Anthropology: On the Pains of Doing Anthropology that Breaks your Heart

This presentation reflects on the affective and ethical burdens of conducting fieldwork in a government-run shelter for girls in Cairo, where survivors of abuse and social condemnation are simultaneously subjected to confinement and violence. Confronted with repeated acts of self-harm, suicide attempts and the normalization of violent discipline as “love” and "care", the author grapples with the impossibility of remaining a detached observer. Instead, the author's ethnographic practice became an embodied, painful immersion in the girls’ everyday struggles and the structural conditions that produced their confinement.

Drawing on Ruth Behar’s notion of the “vulnerable observer” and João Biehl’s reflections on stories of “human becomings”, the author explores how anthropology that breaks one’s heart can also generate transformative knowledge. The essay situates fieldwork not only as an encounter with suffering but also as a process of co-producing meaning, where moments of despair are interwoven with fleeting practices of care, resistance, and solidarity. Ultimately, the author argues that anthropology’s revolutionary potential lies in its willingness to bear witness to the awful and the heartbreaking—not to stop the horror, but to refuse moments of silence and to insist on the urgency of telling these stories.

Speaker: Maryam Fouad, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology, SEA, and PhD Candidate in Anthropology, University of Manchester.

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