This chapter considers the ekphrastic essay in British history, from nineteenth-century art writing to twentieth and early twenty-first-century writing about photography and experimental essay films. If ekphrasis is the attempt to render visual representations in verbal form, the ekphrastic essay can also register the limits of that representation in our inability fully to depict or describe such experiences as strife, pain, and human suffering. Ekphrastic essays, this chapter suggests, take the problem of bearing witness as part of their formal logic, using the doubt and critical force of the essay form to trace the image of suffering. From Walter Pater’s meditations on the quiet despair of Botticelli’s Madonnas, to John Akomfrah’s three-screen examinations of climate change and colonial violence and John Smith’s small-scale films that challenge representations of the ‘War on Terror’, ekphrastic essays compel us to notice what we cannot so easily see.

This chapter engages with the concept of environmental violence to explore how art has witnessed and responded to human-produced pollution and its associated violence on human health and well-being. In this application of the environmental violence framing, this chapter seeks to deepen our understanding of the role of art in drawing our attention to the direct and indirect risks associated with anthropogenic pollution, ecological impacts, and climate change.

Only a portion of the anthropological literature on philanthropy, charity, and humanitarianism explicitly engages with literature on the anthropology of ethics and morality, yet all of it describes a field of practice defined by a commitment to precisely these terms – the ethical, the moral, and the good. The first section of this essay reviews works that describe the moral and practical content and effects of philanthropic giving, focussing on the diversity of giving practices, logics, and outcomes. The second section describes how anthropologists have thought about humanitarian and philanthropic practices as the grounds upon and through which people cultivate and enact forms of ethical subjectivity. The third and final section considers anthropology’s relationship to ideas of moral clarity and moral judgement as these terms are used by anthropologists writing about, and taking part in, a range of social projects.

The conclusion ties together the framing of obscenity in how we evaluate corpse politics. It draws out five key points. First, dead bodies are vital matter, and examining dead bodies can not only shed light on cultural contexts, but it also blurs and complicates previous approaches to visuality and materiality. Second, dead bodies are inscribed with the workings of statecraft. The process of visually manifesting and narrativizing particular dead bodies is a complex social, cultural, and political process that is worth looking at. Third, what counts as obscene is a social construction and graphicness serves particular political ends. Fourth, obscene death is often characterized using the language of the extreme, the exceptional, and at times the unrepresentable. We should be asking ourselves what politics this state of exception serves, particularly about how images can both sustain and resist particular political orders. Lastly, the conclusion examines the idea of ethical witnessing, seeking to complicate the picture often painted of it, and reflect on what it means to write a book on corpse politics and the visceral experiences it often involves.

This chapter examines the dream vision of Walchelin the priest, as retold by Orderic Vitalis in Book VII of his Ecclesiastical History. This episode has been analysed several times as evidence of the growing importance of purgatory in religious life. Utilising the insights of Elisabeth van Houts into the credibility of witness testimonies, gender and how memory can be anchored in material objects, it argues that this excursus in Orderic's work, presented as an oral narrative, functions as both memory of trauma, and a gendered story of reclaiming power and authority through its re-telling. Walchelin's own, apparently scarred, body can be read as a 'peg' for structuring his memory of a supernatural event. The inclusion of Walchelin's brother as one of the nightmarish host seen by Walchelin introduces a family dimension that, it is argued, makes the story relatable to Orderic's own life as well. The chapter will first outline the story, then examine the ways in which Walchelin established his authority as a witness to Orderic, and finally explore how Orderic himself both remembered and 're-membered', that is, literally put flesh on the bones of, the story in his text.

This chapter explores the variety of strategies and ideologies that have been used in campaigning to eliminate the harms that humans do to other animals.

One of the most important recent developments in practices of recording and listening to digital audio has been the documentation of police violence against marginalised communities, especially African Americans. Prior to the digital, audio-visual technologies served to document similar forms of racist violence as in the killing of Emmett Till (photography) or the beating of Rodney King (home video). But the increasing ubiquity of handheld recording devices has intensified and expanded those dynamics of documentary, creating new modes of witnessing race, bodies and power. In turn, these new forms of witnessing, which have played a central role in the Black Lives Matter movement, call for equally new forms of reception – ways of listening, viewing, sharing, and, in turn, recording, that amplify and disseminate that multimedia witnessing. Key examples of such witnessing, including Beyoncé’s Lemonade and recordings of police killing Philando Castile, offer sober reminders of the stakes of digital cinema.

There are things that cannot be said, things that lay waiting to be said but are not, and things that we refuse to say. The literature on trauma emphasizes the difficulty of speaking about terrible events. This seems to be a real phenomenon, and it is a platitude of psychoanalysis that finding ways to put such unspeakable experiences into words is an important and necessary step on the way to psychic healing. We might add that it is a necessary step on the way to social healing too, as the silencing of social wrongs perpetuates suffering and oppression, and finding a voice is a way of challenging these continuities. But hard as speaking out may be, it is the failures of listening that really count: the difficulty that witnesses have when faced with the demand to listen to a testimony that implicates them directly or indirectly, or requires some kind of painful action in response, or possibly simply shows how emotionally challenging it is to witness a suffering that cannot be remedied. This chapter draws on psychoanalysis to explore the haunting effects of such unrecognized experiences. A key question is how to respond to these in ways that allow silenced voices to be heard.