Witnessing: Ethics of Event in Everyday Talks

Abstract

This article is an initial investigation of "witnessing", a genre of narrative that I have documented in the Russian city of Perm in the end of the "noughties". Witnessing is a conversational musing about some event which engages, in a particular way, the ethical and the lived-world's normativity/ normality of the informants. On one hand, witnessing pursues the goal of undermining one's identity and therefore affirming the singularity of one's life and experience. Witnessing allows to test one's personal compliance with society's norms, to go outside this zone of compliance, and to look back at those ethical norms as an observer, whose life's events are extra-ordinary and constitute a personal ethical challenge. The particular mechanics of witnessing, however, allows to re-confirm one's virtues and merits in accordance with cultural norms. In the article, I review several concepts that contemporary anthropologists use in interpretation of everyday narratives, and present "witnessing" in particular vis-à-vis the genre of "laments" made famous by Nancy Ries. In the article, I present several accounts of witnessing made in reference to various aspects of my informants' lives. Then I describe some approaches, derived from Western social philosophy, that may be of help in discerning the ontology of events that are made worthy of witnessing by my informants, and of witnessing itself. As a local phenomenon, it may be argued that witnessing is made possible in places, situations or communities where moral norms are particularly ambiguous or perceived as unstable, and therefore are subject to reflexivity, disagreement or outright critique. Witnessing therefore may be understood as an example of how the eclectic late/ post/soviet ethics works. In the end, I see how the ethical "coordinates" of my informants life-worlds can be vernacular effects of soviet Marxism, and also outline how my analysis of "witnessing" belongs to the "anthropology of experience" school of anthropology.