ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the view from hell. We ask the victims of terror to show their faces. As ethnographers we must witness them. Yet we are aware that bearing witness can itself be illusory, that lying may be
inherent to any confession, and that implicitly apologetic discourses can mask self-righteousness. We can hardly claim to be true witnesses; we live far removed from the horror of the victims' everyday lives. Nor can we pretend that the interpretations we impose on their narratives are the correct ones. Still, despite the silence that overwhelms any
inquiry into human torture and killing, and despite the danger that we might appear to be creating excuses for what is in itself inexcusable, we choose not to hide the pain of the victims-whether of terrorists or counterterrorists. By refusing to stigmatize the activists and their communities, we know that we must be ready to accept the accusation that
we are tainted by personal proximity and sympathy. Experiences of victimization and torture are emblematic in that
they move us, as Taussig puts it, "through that space of death where
reality is up for grabs. And here we but begin to see the magnitude of the task, which calls neither for demystification nor remystification
but for a quite different poetics of destruction and revelation."1 The cases that we will examine have the power to go beyond the rhetorical subversion of a mythical discourse. They reflect embodied terror and are engaged not in moral indignation from the sidelines but in working through the madness of personal experience in the quest for new means of social and political healing. They radically question categorical distinctions between "us" and "them," the saved and the damned.
