The chapter began as an attempt to write from a photograph taken in a hospital room in Tehran shortly before the death of a friend. In the process of writing, the text shifted its own orientation, moving toward an address in the second person. What emerged was not a description of scenes, but a way of writing to someone who cannot answer. Beginning from this address raises a question about how an ethnographic book might begin – not with a field, a problem, or an argument, but with the ethical force of a relation that resists response.

Mirco Göpfert is professor for social and cultural anthropology. He received his doctorate in anthropology from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2014 and taught at the University of Konstanz before coming to the Goethe University in 2018.