Methodological reflections around anthropological fieldwork in the area of recent history

Abstract

This article exposes some methodological problems that arose in the development of my dissertation, in which I carry out an ethnographic work about the practices and proceedings of penal justice during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. The research was structured around the analysis of a judicial trial. This led, on the one hand, to the question about what these documents say and which are the possibilities that anthropology offer for its analysis. The research implied, at the same time, the carrying out of interviews to the social actors that officiated as witnesses and protagonists of the story recounted. T hus, written records and testimonies of the period were available for carrying out this research work, both elements that constitute an important part of the fieldwork on the specific area of the penal justice in the 1970s.