Armed Robbery and Ethnographic Connection in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

Abstract

Grounded in dialogue, moving through openings between systematicity and serendipity, ethnography is inherently reflexive. Yet for reflexivity to matter, to influence the understanding of human being and action in cross-cultural context, the ethnographer must explicitly analyse and articulate the way that particular people socially interacting in specific settings co-produce both objective and subjective knowledge about the world, and also, how such knowledge (re)shapes culture. Story-telling — presenting criminology as the story of encounter — is a classic method of conveying ethnographic anal- ysis and pulling in theoretical interventions that deepen and expand the meanings entailed in a fieldwork project. An armed robbery on a Brazilian beach, witnessed by the ethnographer and a woman who, by virtue of this shared, albeit indirect, trauma, became her trusted interlocutor, is the point of departure for this discussion of how trust emerges — unplanned yet mobilised in the flow of field experience.¹