%0 Journal Article
%T The ethnographer as accomplice¡ªEdifying qualms of bureaucratic fieldwork in Kafka¡¯s penal colony
%A Tomas Max Martin
%J Critique of Anthropology
%@ 1460-3721
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0308275X19842916
%X This article explores the ethnographer¡¯s equivocal role as an accomplice of bureaucratic power through a reading of Kafka¡¯s short story ¡°In the Penal Colony.¡± The researcher¡¯s position when enrolled and affined in the bureaucratic field, which Kafka so uncannily animates, is illustrated via four ethically charged fieldwork experiences in Ugandan, Indian, and Myanmar prisons. I argue that these experiences were telling situations of ¡°edifying qualms,¡± which were both morally ambiguous and analytically generative. The article concludes by suggesting that methodological attention to these edifying qualms enables ethnographers to use their deep-set complicity with bureaucratic violence as an antenna for picking up the impure pragmatics of doing ¡°less harm,¡± and for imagining a better world altogether
%K Bureaucracy
%K edifying qualms
%K fieldwork
%K Kafka
%K reflexivity
%K violence
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308275X19842916