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Ethnographic fieldwork is an emotional research practice because of its intersubjective nature and empathic embrace of the actor's perspective. This intersubjectivity also involves the fieldworker's unconscious, which influences ethnographic encounters and anthropological interpretations. Two years of psychoanalysis in Argentina revealed the influence of the unconscious on my fieldwork about political violence and trauma through dream analyses and the analyst's interventions. This understanding improved the rapport with research participants and opened an alternative road to reflexivity.

In conducting fieldwork among perpetrators of state violence, it is a major methodological problem to gain access to competing factions within the research population. Ethnographers often succeed in finding access to at least one faction but this successful rapport might then immediately close off other factions that mistrust the ethnographer's politics, intentions, or alleged sympathies. The ethnographic challenge is to find intermediaries or switchboard operators, as they are called in this article, who have established informal channels of communication between hostile factions. Switchboard operators have the following characteristics: discretion, neutrality, lack of formal power, disinterestedness, trustworthiness, and they act as a conduit of communication. This article describes how switchboard operators were located in Argentina, and how they played a crucial role in my fieldwork among a broad spectrum of military perpetrators who had terrorized the Argentine people between 1976 and 1983 with enforced disappearances and state repression.

From the 15th century onwards, up until at least the end of the 18th century, scholars and scientists in Europe often referred to the concept of a Respublica literaria ('Republic of Letters' or 'Commonwealth of learning') to denote the world they inhabited: an intellectual world in which scholars, printers, teachers and often patrons were tied together into huge correspondence networks, constituting a pan-European social network. The Republic of Letters is often characterized as an imagined community, but it may also be seen as civil society or even a knowledge commons. As a community that transgressed geographical boundaries and stimulated the sharing of knowledge, its members were forced to accept many differences in religion and politics. The Republic of Letters has therefore often been seen as fostering 'tolerance'. Yet, the Republic of Letters was also exclusive: only highly educated people could participate, and these were usually white, male and heterosexual. Citizenship of this imagined community was defined by culture: by practices, and increasingly by codes of conduct. In this article, we will examine to what extent theories of citizenship help to gain a clearer picture of the structural impediments for women to be accepted as participants in this community.

In the summer of 2008 I sent out a call to thirty former students from three
semesters between 2000 and 2005, to reflect on what they learned from the
"ride-alongs" with police, whether the project has changed their views on
social order and the state, on the practice of law enforcement, and on the
process of gathering knowledge about social life in general. Ten responded,
and their ideas show that the experience of police ethnography had a
considerable impact.

Periods of transition are often symbolically associated with death, making the latter the paradigm of liminality. Yet, many volumes on death in the social sciences and humanities do not specifically address liminality. This book investigates these "ultimate ambiguities," assuming they can pose a threat to social relationships because of the disintegrating forces of death, but they are also crucial periods of creativity, change, and emergent aspects of social and religious life. Contributors explore death and liminality from an interdisciplinary perspective and present a global range of historical and contemporary case studies outlining emotional, cognitive, artistic, social, and political implications