Sharing vulnerabilities: Rethinking privilege and solidarities in anthropology from the perspective of ordinary ethics

While engaged anthropology foregrounds the privilege and ethical responsibility of researchers toward interlocutors suffering all forms of oppression, anthropologists' own vulnerabilities and troubling experiences of violence tend to be ignored and silenced. This silencing is due to the prevailing heroic image of the politically engaged anthropologist, despite longstanding critiques from feminist and decolonial scholarship. In this article, I discuss my witnessing of the violent death of an interlocutor in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. I propose to think of vulnerabilities as diverse yet shared human experiences to explore the epistemological and political potential of researchers' vulnerabilities for understanding and practicing solidarities in ethnographic fieldwork. Building on the perspective of “ordinary ethics,” I focus on the everyday exchanges of care and support that can emerge from the intricate entanglements of anthropologists' exposure to violence with the vulnerabilities and struggles of the people with whom they work.