Bearing Witness: Testimony in Latin American Anthropology and Related Fields. (March 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Stephen, Lynn
• Is Part Of: Journal of Latin American and Caribbean anthropology. Volume 22:Number 1(2017:Mar.)
• Page Start: 85
• Page End: 109
• Publication Date: 2017-03
• Subjects: Centro America -- derechos humanos -- genero -- Mexico -- migracion -- Central America -- gender -- human rights -- Mexico -- migration; Ethnology -- Latin America -- Periodicals; Latin America -- Social life and customs -- Periodicals; Anthropology -- Latin America -- Periodicals
• DOI: 10.1111/jlca.12262
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1935-4932

Abstract

Abstract: Oral narrative and in its narrower form, oral testimony, is an important vehicle for broadening anthropological analysis: it opens up who legitimately speaks and is heard in a given society. Testimony is a crucial component in knowledge production, archiving, and amplification. This article reflects on testimony in relation to how testimony serves to build new knowledge and analytical models: its role in indigenous literacy over time; its trajectory from heroic individual narrative to collaborative/collective narratives; gender, testimony, and resisting the logic of the colonial/modern gender system; archiving, and the power of testimony to influence perceptions of history and events; and anthropology and the mobilization of testimony in expert witnessing. Testimony is a key epistemological tool for alternative knowledge production in the field of Latin American and Caribbean anthropology and in decentering the normative geopolitics of knowledge.