Standing in front of him I thought, oh my god, what do I do? This was totally unexpected, and it’s not like I had my interview planned and my guts were ready to face him. I was young and didn’t have much experience with fieldwork. Things like this happen when you’re in the field. You’re not always in control. Then I saw a cartoon stuck to his wall, so I made a joke and Videla and I both started to laugh.
When I present my research at conferences and recount intimate moments spent with a perpetrator of violence, like with Videla, I often face flak, not so much because people are put off by the fact that I had these encounters with an ‘evil’ person, but because I give these moments a public platform. They say, ‘why don’t you keep your descriptions of such moments for the private sphere’?
What happened to me that day when I was totally unprepared to meet Videla and made a joke, is serendipity. I find sharing moments when you are laughing together with a criminal—or just at stupid things in general—as rich moments to include in my theorizing. ‘Evil’ can be banal. This is what I learnt, and I took it with me; researchers tend to leave such details in the margins. I tend to remove them from there and share them.
The anti-disciplinarian ‘I’
What some perceive as blurring of lines or ‘crossing of barriers’ from the private to the public sphere is not how I see it. I also write about my partner…our fights. I write about my children. And while some wonder if this this professional, others value my approach. Personally, I think this is where my work becomes interesting. I was talking once to a colleague and we said we have the inter-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches, and then we came up with anti-disciplinary; I really like that. It resonates deeply with me. As long as people are moved, even if it’s discomfort or disgust, I feel something is happening in the communication between me, my research and the person receiving it. I think this is also the effect art has on people. I am fascinated by the prospect of merging art and anthropology in my practice, which is why I also write fiction and make films. Recently, I have branched out into theatre as well, but am not sure yet what it may bring.
For quite some time, I have been working on a film about another Argentinian war criminal. Of course, he doesn’t consider himself one; Argentinian courts decided that. I wrote a lot about him. But I felt that the discomfort that was present in our relationship—when you are working with a perpetrator of violence, discomfort is everywhere—could not be fully expressed in the language of academia, so I decided to work with the medium of film. It’s a terrible project because everyone has been judging me for giving him a platform … and what I wanted was to explore the ethical dimension of our relationship, and our silence about the atrocities.
After some years I realized I was stuck and what I was doing wasn’t working, so I went in search of a filmmaker in Argentina. I hadn’t foreseen there would be other ethical dimensions and dilemmas. No one wanted to collaborate with me because I made it clear that I was not going to take a firm stand against the perpetrators. Of course, I realize that there’s no such thing as objectivity, but I think our work as anthropologists is to avoid labelling; to explore the world without making moral judgements.
I understood that for an Argentinian with a conscience, living amongst other Argentinians, to collaborate in a film that didn’t clearly denounce perpetrators outright was a problem. Then, I found someone who had studied sociology and turned to filmmaking. The idea intrigued him, but even he said many times in our conversations, ‘it is impossible…we will never be able to bring this film to a close if you don’t take an ideological stance’. The discomfort lay largely in them not being certain about where I was coming from. Is this the anthropologist in her? Is this someone who wants to justify the actions of a war criminal? Is this the filmmaker speaking…what is it that she wants? I personally don’t need this kind of clarity but audiences do. Then the filmmaker said, ‘Eva, this film is not about Pepe. It’s about the conflict in you – the anthropologist ‘doing stuff’ and this has to be made transparent. The story line should focus on that person and her relationship with a war criminal’. He suggested that I had to become a character in the film as well. Now it became uncomfortable for other reasons. Seeing myself on film? Hearing my own voice? Telling my story to the public? Impossible! But then I thought, ‘I am just a self-made filmmaker, so if the expert is telling me this, then there must be some truth to it’.
I found it humiliating to fictionalize myself; to see myself as a character. But after a while during the editing, I began to allow images, scenes, and incidents that I would rather not have seen, appear before me. I began to see more clearly how narrative arcs work…how he was pointing me in that direction – with me reluctantly agreeing one step at a time…first accepting my voice, then myself in this film. I began incorporating his tools and techniques about what it takes to make a documentary, and through our struggles doing that, it was clear that this anthropologist has problems positioning herself. I underwent a transformation, but so did he because he came to the realization, ‘aah…I can make a film without a clear ideological stand’. I think this is where disciplines merge and you take from both.
