Burning trash: An essay on fieldwork, disappearance, and hunting for mushrooms

This essay contemplates the emotional and intellectual experience of conducting fieldwork on violence. It explores the cognitive dissonance that ethnographers must navigate as they exist in a field site, which can also be a global tourist destination. Focusing on the horror of witnessing contemporary femicide in the Buenos Aires urban margins, it weaves in and out of the past and present, wealthy and poor, periphery to the center, to ultimately land on a chance encounter with a taxi driver who survived forced disappearance during Argentina's military dictatorship. Taking place during the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic, “disappearance” and “reappearance” also serve as ways for thinking about the ephemeral nature of fieldwork and how our research can vanish and reappear over the course of years or overnight.