Remembering Violence: Field Memories From Lahaul, India

The article explores the relationship between memory and ethnography within the context of Lahaul, India. It weaves together different aspects of ethnographic memory by focusing on the author’s field notes, journal entries, and different relationships of remembering that emerged during her fieldwork. The article emphasizes ethnographic recall of violence as at once dispersed and layered in the complex organization of caste within tribe in the region. This dispersal and layering is illustrated through an analysis of the author’s own memories of fieldwork and the memory of violence shared by one of her interlocutors. In discussing these memories together, the author illustrates how a feminist counter-memory accounts for the process of remembering violence through an attention to everyday aspects of women’s lives over and above the official and state memories of singular events of violence. In conclusion, the author draws on a transnational feminist framework to discuss the politics of location, and the relevance of love and friendship in fieldwork.