Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 40

material objects such as diaries can be witnesses: they were on location
when something happened; they testify from own experience; they do so for
future use; and they are social agents. None of the above devalues Margalit’s
understanding of a moral witness. It shows, however, that extending our
understanding of what it means to be a witness and decoupling it from
co-presence and contemporaneity will enlarge “the scope of observational
knowledge” (Margalit) and thus help better understand such highly complex
and ambivalent forms of social interaction as independence wars.
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