The unspoken and motivated omission as data: Methodological and ethical challenges in the ethnography of Kurdish women combatants

Subjective forms of the unspoken

While first-person narratives are now recognized as legitimate instruments of reflexivity in postmodern anthropology (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Beatty, 2010), militant discourse in the PKK guerrilla camps is distinguished by the near-systematic effacement of the pronoun “I.” In this context, speech assumes primarily a collective, impersonal, or ideologically framed form. This rejection of individual expression constitutes a political gesture: it seeks to dissolve the ego into the group, to subordinate the intimate to political commitment, and to forestall any interpretation of the speaking subject through the prism of vulnerability (Olivier de Sardan, 2000). As a consequence, enunciation itself generates a discursive economy in which affects, personal dilemmas, and subjective fragilities are reformulated into shared, and at times mythified, categories within a codified lexicon of resistance. In this context, silence becomes an active mechanism for cohesion and a form of resistance to the assignment of identity. As Michel Foucault (1971) has shown, silence is a modality of power, a tool of control, invisibilization, or, conversely, protection, depending on the regimes of enunciation in which it operates. The effacement of the “I” thus shapes a fragmentary, elliptical, and often indirect mode of narration, marked by the constraints of clandestinity, war, and revolutionary ideology.

Certain family narratives therefore come to fill what women combatants do not themselves articulate in the first person. Şûkran’s account of her sister Bêrîvan – who, at the age of thirteen, after witnessing the army’s violence against her father and the deaths of close comrades, swore that she would not “let Chiya’s and Baran’s weapons fall” – constitutes a paradigmatic example of this oblique mode of speech. It is often relatives who, through a narrative saturated with affect, render visible the political and emotional conditions of commitment precisely where the actors themselves remain silent, or speak only through the prism of a collective “we.” Bêrîvan’s voice thus appears only in an audio recording, reactivated by her sister. This displacement within the testimony reveals not only an economy of silence – in which direct narration is avoided – but also the manner in which fieldwork produces deferred, and at times delegated, forms of narration. These peripheral narratives thereby become key sites for understanding the dynamics of self-effacement, the transfiguration of pain, and the collective management of speech within worlds of armed struggle. Silence here becomes a discursive structure in its own right, shaped as much by ideological imperatives as by intergenerational mechanisms of trauma transmission. The result is a specific discursive regime in which ethnography cannot dispense with a reflection on the conditions of the sayable. Following Veena Das (2006), silences must therefore be understood as alternative forms of presence and memory at the very heart of the narrative act.

These logics of silence sometimes manifest themselves with particular intensity, especially in informal moments, when speech is freed beyond the constrained framework of the interview. One evening, apart from the others, as we were preparing a meal, Dilan, a 22-year-old fighter, spontaneously began to speak about her childhood. While peeling potatoes, focused, yet calm, she lowered her voice to evoke the hasty departures during incursions by the Turkish army, the nights spent in hiding with her mother at her grandparents’ house in order to flee the violence of her father, himself a militant in the movement. She also spoke of the day she had to leave high school without being able to say goodbye. Several times, she interrupted herself, pausing for long moments, returning to certain details, then hesitating to continue. Her speech unfolded in fragments, between modesty, painful memories, and a diffuse need to transmit. She seemed not to have spoken of these matters for a long time, as though this moment offered a rare opportunity to speak not only about her commitment within the PKK and the hardships of guerrilla life, but also about herself, her childhood, and her intimate trajectory. It was as though something were emerging from the shadows, those of the collective and of the party. At one point, she lifted her sleeve to reveal a scar, which she immediately covered again, merely mentioning an “accident” caused by her father. A fleeting smile seemed to minimize her words. This scene, saturated with vulnerability (Bracken-Roche et al., 2017), revealed a memory that more structured frameworks had been unable to reach: neither a discourse of assertion nor a heroicized narrative, but a subtle form of speech woven from silences, losses, and fears.

Other narratives likewise bring to light forms of narrative management of silence that are equally significant. Heval Leyla, aged 32 and from a conservative village, recounts her flight from a forced marriage after seeing her sister subjected to the same fate. Her departure to the mountains is initially presented as an escape from patriarchal violence: “It was my parents who forced me… especially my father, because my mother had nothing to do with it,” she says. Just as she begins to justify her understanding toward her mother, she suddenly interrupts her narrative and reformulates: “But that is not the only reason I came. I wanted to be a strong woman, an example for my little sister and my cousins.” This omission is not an matter of forgetfulness; it reflects a conscious management of the sayable, one that remains respectful of affective ties that persist despite rupture. Silence here is twofold: it protects the narrator from vulnerability while also preserving the memory of a relationship that has been interrupted but not erased.

In war zones, this dynamic is intensified. Speech is monitored, filtered, and calibrated. It produces dense yet meaningful silences. To speak in such a context is also to choose what can be narrated without betraying others or oneself. The mountains thus become a space for the recomposition of the self as much as a site of struggle. The concept of motivated omission, which I propose here, designates this conscious, at times painful, choice to remain silent. It is produced at the intersection of militant commitment, personal history, and the position of the researcher. To remain silent in order to protect oneself. To remain silent so as not to weaken a memory. To remain silent in order to remain loyal. These omissions traverse not only the narratives of women fighters, but also the work of the researcher: at times, one must refrain from writing everything down, so as not to wound or betray. One fighter once told me: “It is not for me to say that.” Then she fell silent. That silence, dense and prolonged, became a testimony. Another confided: “We had to leave a body behind us. But I will not speak of it.” Then she stood up and went to fetch tea. These silences are not empty. They are full of pain, loyalty, and memory. To listen to what is not said is to recognize that the heart of the narrative often lies at its margins. The unsaid thus becomes an ethical methodology, a way of inhabiting war without betraying that which constitutes connection, memory, and dignity.

This narrative agency, which consists in choosing what one says, to whom, and at what moment, recurs across many testimonies. Silence may take the form of fidelity to the group (as in the case of Gulistan), a strategy of protection (as in the case of Avîn), or a reconfiguration of identity (as in the case of Leyla). Avîn, an experienced militant, captures this tension succinctly: “We are taught to speak, but not in every situation. You have to know your place.” Thus, accounting for the fieldwork cannot be undertaken without recognizing that what one hears is never the entirety of what is known: representation is not transparency, but an ongoing negotiation among knowledges, contexts, and loyalties.

Within this configuration, the management of emotions – fear, admiration, fatigue, empathy – becomes a central component of ethnographic work (Moser & Korstjens, 2018; Ahmed, 2013; Marcus, 2000; Nussbaum, 2001). Far from obscuring analysis, these affects make it possible to apprehend the implicit tensions of militant worlds (Sluka, 2015). They nevertheless require constant regulation and critical reflexivity, in order to avoid any confusion between immersion and commitment (Olivier de Sardan, 2000; Genard & Roca i Escoda, 2010). These implicit dynamics also manifest themselves in collective spaces, such as ideological seminars. After lengthy readings of political texts, speaking turns were ostensibly open, yet an implicit hierarchy prevailed: the first to speak were almost always male cadres, who spoke at length and in a didactic tone. During a break, Rêzan, a newly integrated young fighter, quietly confided to me: “Sometimes I have things to say, but I am afraid of saying something stupid. And besides, they talk like books. I do not have their words” (she added with a soft laugh)

However, the narratives collected from former women combatants exiled in Europe, outside organizational control, enabled a further displacement of perspective. Freed from the immediate ideological constraint, they were able to share intimate confidences, making the researcher less a mere interlocutor than a custodian of their words (Zempléni, 1976: 424). This shift in social space revealed the extent to which context conditions the economy of the sayable: what was silenced in the guerrilla camps became sayable elsewhere, thereby illuminating the deep tensions between commitment, memory, and subjectivity.

Militant and organizational silences

Within the ranks of the PKK, speech is never neutral: it is framed, regulated, and politically invested (Rostampour, 2024). The revolutionary organization produces a discursive space in which strict norms govern what may be possible, desirable, or permissible to say. The prohibition of intimate relationships, continuous ideological discipline, the subordination of the individual to the collective, and the centrality of political formation together establish a regime of linguistic control in which every word is a political act, filtered and potentially strategic. Language here does not denote a sphere of individual freedom of expression, but rather a codified economy of the sayable.

For women engaged in the guerrilla, this economy is compounded by gendered tensions: militant expectations intersect with social ascriptions, generating forms of silence in which self-protection, loyalty, and resistance are simultaneously at stake. Applied to this context, Daniel Gaxie’s (1978) concept of “hidden censorship (cens caché)” fully comes into its own. It makes it possible to grasp the unequal distribution of the symbolic resources required to speak legitimately. Speech becomes a form of capital, and silence, a mode of adaptation. Some women guerrillas, despite their seniority or their responsibilities, choose to withdraw from official speech not out of submission, but strategically: to preserve a position, avoid stigmatization, or protect affective ties. What these women do not say is a choice, a tactic, a way of inhabiting speech in other ways: through ellipsis, metaphor, or silence.

A recurrent tension runs through the narratives collected: that between the revolutionary imaginary, often presented as a promise of intellectual emancipation, and the harsh, hierarchical, and gendered reality of life in the mountains. One former urban militant described it in these terms: “I wanted to read during the winter; I had brought books with me… But very quickly, that desire seemed misplaced, almost incongruous in such an intense context. Reading, in that tense universe saturated with immediate demands, seemed to some as a useless luxury. Many comrades, especially the men, saw no value in it. People used to say: ‘It’s winter, the stove is warm, the tongue is supple.’ That meant: if you prove nothing in the field, speaking is useless.” This adage, voiced as though it were self-evident, crystallizes an implicit logic regulating speech within the guerrilla movement, strongly present among the first generations of fighters: in a space where armed action constitutes the principal form of symbolic capital, speech – and even more so reflective, intellectual, or feminine speech – becomes suspect unless grounded in a physically proven legitimacy. Women from urban backgrounds, sometimes perceived as more “intellectual,” often find themselves constrained to a form of silence, less through explicit censorship than through a tacit hierarchy of competencies in which endurance, resistance to pain, and conformity to the rhythms imposed by mountain life condition the right to speak. Silence here is a socially situated form of restraint, a mode of self-regulation within a system in which “the body speaks louder than words.” It is not imposed from the outside, but internalized as a socially situated form of reserve that structures access to narrative and status within the group.

Manal, for example, oscillates between the revolutionary gender norms and subjectivities marked by war. In her case, silence becomes a living memory, a way of inhabiting speech without betraying others or herself. It acts as a threshold, an invisible line that must not be crossed in order to continue belonging. For the ethnographer, these thresholds of the sayable reveal disjunctions between the proclaimed ideal of equality and the asymmetries lived on a daily basis. Ordinary interactions – averting one’s gaze, avoiding a topic, refusing a greeting – become signs of disagreement or discomfort, inscribed at the margins of language. Such forms of discreet resistance (Scott, 2009) – minor gestures, dense silences – are politically meaningful. They make it possible to exist within the group without openly challenging the ideological order. Fricker (2007) sees in this a form of epistemic injustice: minoritized voices are not merely unheard; they are constructed as lacking credibility.

This economy of the unsaid emerges with particular force when the wave of militant departures following Abdullah Öcalan’s arrest in 1999 is addressed. Although thousands of people left the movement, narratives on this subject remain unclear: eyes are lowered, gestures replace words, sentences become elliptical. “It’s normal; in every party there are tensions,” people often murmur, before quickly shifting the subject. The testimony of Agir, a fighter encountered in the mountains, illustrates this indirect mode of narration. Not especially inclined toward theoretical discourse, she described life in the mountains as “a distancing from the oppressive system, whether familial, statist, or capitalist,” but also as a form of emotional, even spiritual, experience. She preferred to speak about chamomile and hyra, that wild flower. Yet that day, when she evoked the winter of 2000 and the departure of several comrades – following a prompt from me – her voice cracked slightly, betraying a contained emotion: “It was a silent winter […] Everything was slippery, like ice on stone. Many stayed, but some […] left. They did not say where. Only that they no longer wanted to continue. And they left.” The silence that follows is broken by a discreet laugh. She looks at the ground, tracing lines with a twig. Then she confides, as though she were no longer really speaking to me but to a memory: “You know […] I still sometimes hear the voice of our former commander in my dreams. I loved her very much. I wanted to be like her. But that year, she left the party.” A long silence follows, then she resumes: “Well, there were others after her. Other strong women. Perhaps as strong as she was.” It is at this moment that a metaphor charged with implicit emotional density emerges: “Hyra only grows on untouched soil. If a human being has already walked over it, it does not grow. It is fragile. Like certain friendships.” This kind of poetic displacement, as Veena Das (2006) understands it, constitutes an ethical unsaid: silence as a form of fidelity, of preserving a bond, of impossible forgetting.

This poetic displacement is not a matter of simple muteness, but of speech rendered structurally “unhearable” (Spivak, 1988), under the weight of the collective, by that which cannot or must not be said without disturbing the balance. Agir herself summarizes this tension: “At first, I did not understand [the new paradigm]. Then I saw that it meant […] that everything had to be rebuilt. Even our way of thinking, our habits. Even our dreams.” Silence thus becomes a controlled form of withdrawal from critical discours, a strategy of avoidance intended to preserve group unity, to contain fractures without exposing them. Agir’s silences resemble those soils hyra refuses to colonize: not because they are hostile, but because they have been marked by steps that were too heavy. They are fertile silences, carrying invisible conflicts, discreet loyalties, and enduring grief. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) writes, some silences are “historical,” not because they erase, but because they preserve what is unbearable.

Sexuality constitutes another major domain of silence. During interviews, questions related to intimate relationships, particularly non-heterosexual ones, elicit embarrassment, muteness, or standardized formulas. Abstinence is integrated as a militant norm: “Armed commitment does not allow for an affective or reproductive life,” as one of them put it. This silence is not an instance of authoritarian censorship; it functions as a symbolic rampart that sustains collective discipline. Paradoxically, discourse opens only among certain former fighters. Bêrîvan recounts: “I came down from the mountain because I wanted to become a mother, start a family, and even fall in love. […] But [and she insisted on that but] I am not sure I made the right choice. […] I miss the mountain terribly.” This ambivalence is frequent. A former commander, who left the guerrilla to live a love relationship, declares: “I have fought enough; I spent nearly twenty years in the mountains, I trained thousands of women […] Now I have the right to another life.” Yet even in the assertion of this freedom, partisan loyalty endures. When this same woman evokes the party’s decision to persuade her companion to return to the mountains, leaving her alone in Europe, her critique remains restrained: “Why did they allow themselves to erase me completely, to convince him to go back there, when they know there is no longer any possibility of return for me? […] Anyway… I know this is necessary for any party. […] Perhaps if I were still a commander, I would have made the same decision.” This militant “we,” still mobilized after rupture, reveals a deep ideological attachment, difficult to sever even in a situation of disengagement.

The speech of these women is thus traversed by contradictory fidelities. One of them denounces the persistence of gender hierarchies within the movement: “Even today, it is often the same male figures who make the important decisions within the party.” But she immediately qualifies the statement: “I do not like insisting too much on this kind of thing, because it serves no purpose in a context where our Kurdistan is under military pressure from all sides.” These narratives reveal the tension between individual desire and collective loyalty, between the aspiration to emancipation and the weight of a militant inheritance. Within this framework, war acts as a matrix of silence: it imposes an emotional discipline, transforms narratives, and channels affects. As Peteet (1994) has shown, armed conflict crushes subjectivities in order to bring forth an ethics of sacrifice. This discursive repression affects non-normative sexualities in particular. Their invisibilization persists even in exile, signaling the gap between ideals of liberation and an implicit heteronormativity.

Certain women cadres articulate this militant framing with particular clarity. Gulistan, for example, claims physical hardship as proof of devotion: “We, as individuals, are nothing beside all these martyrs.” Such discourse transforms personal suffering into ideological duty. It constantly recenters speech on the collective. Emotion is always reabsorbed into a shared, standardized, scripted structure. During interviews, certain phrases recur almost unchanged: “We, the women of the PKK, fight for our people and for freedom. […] Our martyrs are our example.” This homogeneity requires the researcher to adopt other modes of listening. As Bourdieu (1993: 909) suggest, the point is not so much to “make people speak” as to open a space in which speech may, even briefly, depart from the expected narrative.

At times, such departures appear in more hesitant narratives. Jiyan, twenty-six years old and a former student, recounts having left her family at nineteen without warning them. But when it comes to detailing this rupture, she stops. Her silence lasts several minutes. When she speaks of her aunt killed in combat, she confines herself to general expressions: “They left… but we continue for them.” Speaking becomes a way of avoiding detail, of evacuating emotion without diminishing it. As Das (2006) suggests, this is a matter of “living with violence” without necessarily verbalizing it. Another powerful example is that of Zilan, a respected commander, shaped by clandestinity and rigorous in her narrative discipline: “Certain things must not be said.” Her name, associated with the Kurdish resistance of Dersim, carried both honor and symbolic burden: that of preserving the family legacy within a movement that politicizes every individual trajectory. This responsibility was expressed in every detail, staged through rigorous militant discipline: measured gestures, a composed voice, impeccable appearance. She does not lie. She filters. Her language is a commitment. Everything in her posture, her uniform, her tone, signals fidelity to a symbolic order.

In such a context, the ethnographer is accepted, but never fully included. To speak is perhaps to betray. Thus, signs become clues: an evasive glance, an interrupted sentence, a joke about pain. One day Berfîn told me: “We all have a cave inside us.” Then she changed the subject. This is not evasion. It is a form of ethics. A respect for what must remain sheltered. What these women do not say – ruptures, humiliations, stifled loves – is often more revealing than what they articulate. These silences must be recognized as sites of experience, memory, and knowledge. Silence is not an absence to be filled. It is a material to be taken seriously: as archive, as method, and as politics.

The unspoken of war and violence

In the narratives of Kurdish women combatants, silences surrounding war, loss, and violence reflect a discursive choice, a strategy of protection, and a militant ethic. They express what words alone cannot bear. Thus, Jîwar evokes the maternal figure not directly, but through a recollection: as a child, she questioned her mother about the tears she shed for passing guerrillas. It was these cryptic responses that awakened her own sense of patriotism, later reinforced by the songs of Şivan Perwer and Ahmet Kaya. She later recounts the discovery of the body of someone close to her: “After that, I saw many bodies. But the first one was something else. That kind of cold gets into your bones.” The bodily metaphor conveys what words alone cannot. She then goes on to speak of a kerosene stove, the “Alaeddin,” before falling silent, as though the magical image contained in the word risked opening a space of emotion that was too vulnerable. This suspended silence recalls what Kidron (2009) terms “silent legacies”: forms of affective transmission that escape enunciation yet durably shape memory. In such a framework, the ethnographer must neither fill in nor force these silences, but rather learn to hear them as bearers of meaning.

Another combatant briefly recounts her hearing loss following an explosion: “There was a huge noise […] I saw a Heval fall next to me.” Then she stops: “Let’s leave that […]” This is not a failure of memory, but a deliberate limit, a barrier against reliving the experience. War itself thus governs what can be said: it erases subjectivities, imposes silence, and renders certain forms of pain inaccessible to narration. Kidron (2009) speaks in this regard of an excess of experience: a reality that exceeds the capacities of language. These silences often stop at the threshold of the body: torture, mutilation, brutal death. One combatant simply told me: “I cannot tell you what happened to her body […] but since that day, I have not been the same.” What she leaves unsaid is saturated with emotion, loyalty, and ethics. Silence here becomes a dense mode of transmission, unsayable, yet operative. The unspoken thus emerges as a narrative strategy shaped by the experience of war and militant commitment. Andrew Beatty (2009) insists that emotions are not merely additions to ethnographic narratives, but its very substance, structuring narration and signaling its turning points. The ethnographer must therefore attend closely to what is not said and reflect on the deeper meanings concealed behind such absences.

Among the figures evoked with the greatest respect and restraint is that of Nûjîn. Born in exile, formed in student movements, a poet, commander, and educator within the ranks of YJA Star, she embodies a silent collective memory. When she speaks of her presence in Şengal during the attack of the Islamic State, it is not the fighting that she foregrounds, but rather the empty gazes of Yazidi women, the silence of families whose wives, sisters, or daughters had been abducted by Daesh, and the corridor of survival traced between Iraq and Rojava. She spoke of cries and anxious looks, scattered like so many traces of a diffuse and enduring terror. She also described her military responsibilities, the long marches, the training of young Yazidi recruits, and the foundation of the defense academy. Then she insisted: “Daesh looked upon women with profound contempt […] It was in this spirit that we trained the Yazidi women of Şengal in self-defense.” She then recites a verse: “Xwîn, xwêdan, hesirê çavan. Bû derya her sê dilop.” (“Blood, sweat, and tears. These three drops became an ocean.”) And adds: “I do not want our pain to be turned into a consumable story […] What I saw there […] cannot be recounted in detail […] For Şengal, the images speak for themselves.” Even when the topic turned to abductions or unbearable scenes, her sentences became vague: “We walked. We endured. We were there.” She then told me about a stone against which she had leaned one day, in the midst of the offensive. This was the fragment she left me: not the cries, nor the numbers, but a silent rock, the memory of a moment I would never know. What she did not say – her fears, her doubts, her solitude – seemed to me more eloquent than anything she articulated. In what she left unsaid, there was war itself. As Spivak (1988) suggests, certain subaltern voices “cannot speak,” not because of incapacity, but because speaking would risk collapsing an ethical equilibrium.

Another combatant told me that, in the midst of an exchange of gunfire with Daesh, the stories of massacres transmitted by her grandmother returned to her “like a film in a second.” She felt herself becoming her own grandmother: “I was adding a massacre to the one she had lived through.” What she does not say – the moral tension of being at once protector and agent of violence – speaks volumes about internal conflict, unspeakable guilt, and the weight of traumatic transmission. These forms of restraint are modalities saturated with meaning, gestures of affective preservation. They protect a memory too vivid to be delivered unfiltered. Under such conditions, ethnography does not consist in extracting data, but in receiving it. The ethnographer becomes witness to these fragments, these gaps, these contained emotions as “constitutive of ethnographic knowledge” (Rosaldo,1993).

This economy of silence is not confined to explicit narratives of war or loss. It also extends to the vocal and artistic forms through which Kurdish women have inhabited collective memory, particularly through dengbêjî, the art of sung storytelling. In Kurdish societies, marked both by patriarchal domination and by the constrained orality of a people without a standardized written language in twentieth-century Turkey, women’s speech has long unfolded at the margins. Dengbêjî, the art of sung storytelling, and kilam, a form of poetic lament, have constituted powerful vehicles of collective memory, especially through women’s voices. This field of orality, although often reappropriated by male figures, historically draws on invisibilized female practices (Schäfers, 2016). In this context, female dengbêjî appears as a coded mode of expression, at once aesthetic and political, that makes it possible to say without exposing, to archive without betraying, and to preserve intimacy without relinquishing memory.

This singing is not a mere narrative ornament; it constitutes a protective modality for articulating trauma and loss. “When I sing of my sister’s death, it is not her death that I sing,” says Rûbar, a former militant who became a dengbêj. For her, “truth must be wrapped in something beautiful, otherwise people will not listen to it.” This “aesthetic veil” acts as an emotional filter, making it possible to narrate the unspeakable without brutalizing it, to voice pain without being overwhelmed by it. Song thus becomes a space of subjective elaboration, an intermediate language between strategic silence and raw speech, a specific “language game” (Wittgenstein, 1953) in which context, form, and listening condition the very possibility of saying.

Many of the women combatants I interviewed therefore preferred song to direct speech. Some saw in it a space of resilience; others, a means of articulating tensions that could not be confessed within ordinary militant frameworks. “One cannot simply throw grief in someone’s face; it must be wrapped in a kilam,” explained another dengbêj. Within these sung narratives, critiques of war, regrets, and non-conforming desires emerge in subtle ways. Far removed from the expected narrative heroism, these sung voices weave counter-narratives marked by ambiguity, emotion, and restraint.

Far from being marginal, these vocal practices constitute a distinctive political archive. They express a feminine agency that refuses the transparency and frontal directness imposed by the dominant revolutionary narrative. As one interlocutor suggested: “To sing is like speaking a language that only Kurds understand.” This is not a matter of circumvention born of weakness, but of affirming a distinct mode of loyalty and transmission: song preserves what militant discourse tends to erase: rough edges, ambivalent desires, intimate wounds. These strans and kilams, do not oppose offensively but rather displace, encode, and distill. They require an ethical mode of listening, attentive to silences, metaphors, and inflections.

In a universe where silence is often a tacit injunction, song acts as an alternative mode of enunciation through which pain may circulate without undermining the group’s ethic. As several studies have shown (Çelik, 2016; Öztürk, 2012), women’s sung voices constitute a counter-narrative, carrying unavowable aspirations, non-conforming sexual desires, and critiques of war, at times even transgressing the norms established by society. What revolutionary discipline prevents from being explicitly enunciated, song makes possible otherwise. Female dengbêjî thus becomes a dispositif of narrative survival, at once an affective archive, a muted form of dissent, and an embodied collective memory. In this singing, the economy of the unsaid acquires its full density: to say without saying, to remember without exposing, to transmit without extricating oneself from the collective.

The stakes of the researcher’s positionality

My ethnographic approach is grounded in a positionality that is at once personal, political, and epistemic, situated at the intersection of several regimes of belonging. As a Kurd from Rojhilat (in Iran), born in a border region regularly traversed by PKK fighters, I grew up in a space saturated with narratives of war and collective mourning. This affective landscape shaped my memory as much as it shaped my gaze. Yet I am not a fighter. I have not lived in the guerrilla camps, nor have I borne arms. My commitment unfolds elsewhere – in writing, research, critical reflexivity, and civic engagement – but it is nonetheless traversed by shared affects, loyalties, and inheritances.

This liminal positionality, which might be described as that of an “insider-outsider” (Allen, 2004), generates constant methodological and ethical tensions. I belong to the world I study, while also being partially distanced from it by my European academic training, my experience of exile, and the analytical tools I have acquired. This dual belonging carries with it an implicit expectation of loyalty: to lived suffering, to celebrated martyrs, and to the cause being defended. In the field, analyzing internal tensions, addressing gender hierarchies, or pointing to ideological contradictions may therefore be perceived as a form of betrayal. Conversely, within the academic sphere, there is an injunction toward critical reflexivity, complexity, and the unveiling of structures of power.

Navigating between these demands requires accepting contradiction as method. Gender, far from being a mere contextual variable, profoundly structured my interactions (Clair, 2016; Le Renard, 2010). Being a Kurdish woman opened spaces for speech inaccessible to others. Yet this position also carried an implicit demand for discretion, reserve, and respect for the unsaid. Some confidences were entrusted to me only in private, within protected spaces. These narratives, at times fragmentary and often painful, confronted me with an ethics of restraint: not everything that is said is necessarily meant to be transmitted. As Abu-Lughod (1990, 1993) and Behar (1996) have shown, ethnographic writing should not operate as an extractive practice, but as an exercise in narrative loyalty, in which silences possess their own density.

My insertion within a Western academic institution adds a further layer to this tension. While it affords me a certain degree of intellectual freedom, it also exposes me to a form of discursive insecurity: what can I say from this protected position, when others in the field pay with their freedom, or even their lives, for what I analyze in languages inaccessible to my interlocutors? This fracture is not merely linguistic. It is also epistemic and moral. Between the Kurdish of the interviews and the French or English of publication, part of what is said is lost, distorted, or rendered inaudible.

Some women fighters entrusted me with narratives they would not have shared with a “foreigner.” Yet they also knew that I was not entirely “one of them.” On several occasions, I was asked directly: “Why did you not stay here, in Kurdistan?” One young militant even said to me, half-seriously: “And what are you going to write? That we are oppressed, or that we are strong?” These questions, recorded in my fieldnotes, crystallize the dilemmas that any researcher in an intermediate position must confront: what do I represent for those who speak? What is the purpose of their narratives? And to whom are they addressed? This “we” that I inhabit is constantly being redefined: I am from here, but also from elsewhere; shaped by a memory of struggle, yet also the bearer of an academic capital perceived as a privilege. Exile is not only a geographical displacement; it is also an analytical one.

The narrative choices made in this research are therefore not neutral. Writing entails selection, shaping, and responsibility. Some of my interlocutors’ silences were preserved in the text not out of censorship, but out of respect. Others were interpreted as data in their own right, within an approach that treats the unspoken as a modality of situated knowledge. As Donna Haraway (1988) suggests, all knowledge is embodied: it emerges from a place, a body, and a history. It is from this perspective, too, that I sought to assume the tensions of my own positionality without smoothing them over. The analysis here aspires neither to mastery nor to exhaustiveness, but to attentiveness, to the thresholds of the sayable, to broken voices, and to gestures of self-protection.

Ruth Behar (1996) speaks of “vulnerable writing”: a mode of writing that recognizes objectivity as a useful fiction, while acknowledging that it is sometimes more honest – and more just – to state where one speaks from, with whom, and under what conditions. It is this methodological honesty that I sought to construct in this work: to say what can be said, to withhold what must be withheld, without yielding either to the temptation of effacement or to that of total disclosure. The knowledge produced here is not cold knowledge: it is traversed by affects, shared pain, and contradictory loyalties. This ethics of restraint is not a renunciation of analysis. On the contrary, it constitutes an exacting form of rigor, one that recognizes that every ethnography, in contexts of struggle, war, and exile, is also a political act.

Situated ethics and regimes of publication: Representing without betrayal, listening without coercion

Within the framework of an ethnography conducted in a context of war and political clandestinity, the ethics of representation cannot be reduced to a fixed protocol. It is rooted in a situated practice, shaped by relationships of trust, power relations, the risks incurred by participants, and the dilemmas faced by the researcher herself. The principle of “representing without betrayal” cannot simply be proclaimed; it must be continually negotiated through every word chosen, every quotation retained or withheld, every decision regarding anonymization. It is in this context that the question of “motivated omission” emerges with particular acuity, as an ethical and methodological gesture in its own right.

One of the most revealing moments of this dynamic occurred during an interview with Nûjîn, a former combatant who had become a cadre within the movement. At the end of our conversation, she handed me a small closed notebook, simply saying: “Everything I have lived is in here. But this is for the mountains.” This gesture, at once simple and radical, marks a clear boundary between what may be said here, within the relatively secure space of an interview, and what belongs to a geopolitical, symbolic, and affective elsewhere: the mountains. The object, both material and metaphorical, becomes a deferred archive, a sealed memory. It does not signify a refusal to transmit, but rather a way of postponing, of reserving certain narratives for another space-time in which they may be heard without danger, without distortion, and without betrayal.

This kind of active, chosen, and assumed silence is observable in many interviews. A former guerrilla fighter, recalling the explosion that severely injured her, recounted: “That day, I thought I was dead. The explosion swept everything away. My friend was next to me… (silence). I do not want to go into the details; she fell as a martyr, and her body… (she falls silent). Let us simply say that everything changed that day. But I am still here. Alive, despite everything.” The silence does not fill an absence; it prevents an excess: that of a reliving too painful to bear, that of a narrative impossible to tell without betraying emotion, loyalty, or the fallen comrade. As Carol Kidron (2009) notes, certain forms of suffering are expressed through what she calls an “exhaustion of listening”: not an inability to speak, but an affective saturation, a mode of protection for both self and other. Within such a framework, the ethnographer can neither force nor fill these silences. She must learn to hear them as data. Speech is a conditional opening. Access to narrative is asymmetrical, temporary, and often incomplete. This asymmetry cannot be resolved through greater methodological insistence, but through an ethics of listening that accepts incompleteness as a form of rigor. Here, ethics must not be reduced to an “ethical bureaucracy” (Fassin, 2008) but must instead be lived as a permanent choice, dictated by the relationship, the moment, and the risk. This takes shape in practices of regulating silence which, far from constituting lacunae, are ethical and heuristic objects in their own right (Wood, 2006).

In such a context, choices of publication become major stakes. What should be retained? What should be reformulated? What can be anonymized without betraying the density of lived experience? These decisions are never neutral. As Petitat (2013) reminds us, the researcher may be tempted to assume the role of whistleblower, of denouncer, in the name of scientific truth. Yet this heroic posture becomes untenable when the inquiry is grounded in relations of trust forged in spaces of extreme vulnerability. There is no absolute rule: “Remain silent? Denounce? We are confronted here with moral dilemmas between which it is impossible to choose in any absolute way. Only the context makes it possible to decide” (Petitat, 2013: 38).

These dilemmas led me to adopt “situated representation” (Jacobs et al., 2021). A former activist, living in exile after a painful affective rupture with the PKK, entrusted me with an intimate account that she had shared with no other researcher. I chose neither to quote it nor to paraphrase it in a recognizable form. This narrative was incorporated through a composite vignette that preserves its emotional substance while respecting the implicit pact of confidentiality. Similarly, a combatant confided in me the pain linked to the loss of her brother, who had fallen at the front, explaining that she was thereafter perceived as “the martyr’s sister” before being recognized for her own commitment. At her request, this account was incorporated anonymously into a broader reflection on the gendered symbolism of mourning and the logics of heroization in militant narratives.

These writing choices are at once political and methodological. They express a form of loyalty that does not consist in reproducing speech faithfully word for word, but in preserving its integrity. To represent without betrayal is not merely to report what has been said, but also to acknowledge what has been left unspoken, and why. Michael Jackson (1998) speaks of the “irreducibility of experience”: the ethnographer works with silences and fragmentary narratives, with active forms of speech management shaped by the tension between lived experience and its potential for political expression. The ethics of publication must incorporate this dimension of silence as a critical tool, one that makes it possible to convey a filtered and situated truth. It also entails accepting that certain data do not belong to us, that they were entrusted to us conditionally, under tension, and at times in suspension.

The interview conducted with Jîwar, a former combatant in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), now exiled in Europe, sheds light on the complex, ambivalent, and often discontinuous trajectories of commitment that characterize militant experience within politico-military organizations. Through her account, not only do the explicit motivations for her engagement emerge, but also the shadow zones, hesitations, and narrative resistances inherent in all ethnographic speech (Behar, 1996). From the outset of the interview, Jîwar described her entry into the movement in the following terms: “When I joined the party, I was very young. I was searching for something to hold on to. To say that I was fully conscious would be a lie.” This statement, lucid and retrospective in appearance, reveals a fundamental tension between agency and vulnerability, between conscious political choice and endured social condition. It situates her commitment in an intermediate space: a search for meaning and emancipation, but also a strategy of survival in the face of an oppressive environment. The family context she describes illustrates this ambivalence: on the one hand, a religious and conservative family; on the other, a father and brothers involved in socialist activism, thereby opening a contradictory space of ideological transmission. Added to this, implicitly but decisively, was the constraining horizon of early marriage, from which she sought to escape. She thus confided: “I saw women who had married for love. Two months later, they were destroyed. I told myself: what if I end up like that too?” This testimony does not merely express a refusal of a conventional gendered trajectory. It also bears witness to a visceral fear, nourished by the observation of romantic disillusionment and domestic violence to which the women around her were exposed. Political commitment thus appears as an escape from a socially assigned destiny, if not as an act of silent resistance. When I asked her about her first encounter with the PKK, she spontaneously evoked the figure of her mother. My reflex as a researcher would have been to pursue this biographical thread, to ask her, for instance, when she had last seen her mother. But I stopped myself. A form of restraint imposed itself, dictated both by the fear of introducing a melodramatic dimension into the interview and by my own intimate history: I myself, marked by the loss of a mother and exiled for many years because of political constraints, still experience any evocation of the maternal figure as an intensely emotional, at times irrepressible, moment. This shared instant gave rise to a particular and reciprocal silence, one that escaped the conventional codes of the ethnographic interview.

This scene illustrates the extent to which the researcher’s subjective experience inevitably interferes with the field, transforming the inquiry into a space of affect and reflexivity. As Renato Rosaldo and Ruth Behar have argued, it is essential to recognize that “to know is also to feel” (Rosaldo, 1993: 207; Behar, 1996). Emotion, far from constituting an obstacle to scientific rigor, forms a legitimate avenue toward understanding subjectivities and the complexity of lived trajectories. Taking this affective dimension into account restores the full density of the ethnographic act, revealing the relational, historical, and emotional conditions of knowledge production.

From this perspective, silence becomes a form of writing in negative. What one does not publish, what one reformulates, what one anonymizes, these are all ethical acts. The ethnographer does not seek to efface herself, but rather to assume responsibility for her choices and make her position visible. As Donna Haraway (1988) underscores, it is within this reflexive transparency that one form of scientificity resides: in acknowledging one’s limits, biases, and loyalties. This is not a renunciation of analysis. On the contrary, it is a way of inscribing analysis within a relation of responsibility: listening without constraining, writing without betraying. Ethnography, in this context, does not aim at exhaustiveness. It seeks to render fragments traversed by silence, pain, and loyalty, while accepting that ethnographic truth is always situated, partial, and vulnerable. Writing thus becomes a space of vigilance: a way of saying without unveiling, an attempt to preserve, if not to understand everything.