ABSTRACT
Can a global discourse craft scattered and marginal subjectivities, piercing their cultural belongings? This chapter is a sensorial creative-critical reflection stemming from a research project on ‘worlds’ involved in human trafficking. Adopting a hyperlink cinema narrative, the reader-viewer is presented with multiple scenarios subjectively depicting moments, words, interactions, and situations that partially make up three cultural contexts where the research was conducted (Northern Vietnam, Central-West Brazil, the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal). Detailed close-ups of an anti-trafficking shelter's kitchen: the taste of the friction between norms and desires; the sandy, thirsty soil hit by the sun in front of the house of a survivor: the drought of poverty and pride; the constant oscillating in that van on the way back after the repatriation operation, the feeling of the wind on the face, the evangelical music in the ears: the silence of patience, shame, fear, and the noise of joy. Its non-linear structure aims to let connections emerge from and with the young women and men I encountered, often in relation to/despite an oppressive, hetero-defined, global identity as ‘survivors’. Reflexive stances included here glimpse commonalities and differences in subject-making when sharing the same opportunities for discursive productivity; they also think on creating worldly knowledge via a multi-country research aiming to capture those moments of ‘being made’ and ‘self-making’ in human trafficking. The chapter leaves us larger questions about ethnographic practice: to what extent does the author-director ever determine any object of investigation? Is a hyperfictive structure actually a ‘fairer’ representation of the research process and its textualisation than others for both the ‘author’ and the ‘authored’?
