Out of Bounds

Chapter 4 considers the ethical-political bounds and responsibilities of ethnographic relation and representation. It considers how embodied forms of knowing, from tears and gendered geographies to forms of intimate distance and filmmaking, offer ways to navigate tensions between opacity and making visible toward an elaboration of how power, knowledge, and ethics intersect. This chapter returns to a scene from chapter 2 to describe what the camera could not capture—years of history, centuries-old prayers, and distant prophecies and discusses the difference between describing a scene with text versus showing the scene as a set of moving images in a particular political, ethical, and affective context.