Taking Sides: Ethics, Politics, and Fieldwork in Anthropology

Concerns with research ethics have intensified over recent years, in large part as a symptom of "audit cultures" (M. Strathern) but also as a serious matter of engagement with the ethical complexities in contemporary research fields. This volume, written by a new generation of scholars engaged with contemporary global movements for social justice and peace, reflects their efforts in trying to integrate their scholarly pursuits with their understanding of social science, politics and ethics, and what political commitment means in practice and in fieldwork. This is a book of argument and analysis, written with passion, clarity and intellectual sophistication, which touches on issues of vital significance to social scientists and activists in general.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9780857454089

Book preview

PREFACE

This book is for Nancy Lindisfarne. Her sixtieth birthday was an occasion we had to step up to. Dr Lindisfarne (formerly Nancy Starr Self Tapper), ethnographer of the Middle East and anthropologist of gender, has been an inspiration to all contributors to this volume. She has done fieldwork in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey and Syria, taught anthropology for many years, and has been a political activist within and outside academe. She has published widely on the topics of gender, the Middle East, and anthropological theory. As Reader at the Department of Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies, she supervised the doctoral work of several of the contributors. An artist at heart, Nancy has published a collection of short stories (Dancing in Damascus, State University of New York Press, 2000) and exhibited paintings, prints, collages, and photography.

Nancy is one of those rare people who seem able to embrace whatever happens to cross her path. That is why she is such a good teacher. We know Nancy as a demanding and exceptionally inspiring supervisor, a fiercely intelligent discussant, and, above all, as a lovely friend.

Heidi Armbruster and Anna Lærke

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We owe thanks to Jonathan Neale for his support at the early stages of this book project. His experience and clear-headedness as an author have been very helpful.

The Berghahn copy editor Jaime Taber meticulously worked through the manuscript, and her invaluable professionalism made our own editing far easier than it would have been otherwise. Carsten Agger and Nicky Robbins provided essential help with our computer problems at several critical moments.

Finally, special thanks go to Sif and Magnus Lærke-Hall who left us to work in peace for hours on end in their kitchen.

Introduction

THE ETHICS OF TAKING SIDES

Heidi Armbruster

This is a book about the impossibility of removing the anthropologist and her mode of learning from the composite site of ethics and politics. The ethical¹ is not meant here as a prescription of some universal value scheme, but rather as an invitation to consider questions about the value orientations of a discipline and its practitioners in the contemporary historical moment. Ethical questions about what one should do or how one should act towards others impose themselves within the practice of a science whose primary object is cross-cultural understanding. Anthropology seeks this understanding on the scene of politics, that is across and within structures of power and domination and on the shoulders of the particular political history of the discipline. Ethics questions are not new in anthropology, and have periodically resurfaced. Currently they are important again, not only to anthropologists and their professional bodies but also to contemporary neoliberal governments that tout policies of disciplinarian ethics in response to political crises (cf. Caplan 2003: 1–3).

Ethics in anthropology generally means both research ethics, as a concern with the conduct of inquiry and utilization of data, and what might be called committal ethics, a concern with the role of values in research. These have often been divorced from each other.

Research ethics have been codified by professional associations such as the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA), and have become standard questions to attend to on any funding application for research. Concerns with research ethics have clearly intensified over recent years, in large part as a symptom of ‘audit cultures’ (Shore and Wright 1999; Strathern 2000) now ubiquitous in higher education and beyond. Some would argue that ethics formulas now increasingly emerge as legalistic nods towards employers and funders and as a formal appendix to research, rather than as a serious matter of engagement with the ethical complexities in contemporary research fields (Pels 2005: 82; Silverman 2003: 127).

Both the AAA and the ASA revised their ethics guidelines in the late 1990s. The authors of both statements wish their guides to be understood not as fixed prescriptions for action, but as documents that serve to ‘promote discussion’ (AAA 1998: Epilogue) or ‘help(ing) anthropologists to reach an equitable and satisfactory resolution of their dilemmas’ (ASA 1999: Epilogue). However, it is instructive to see which relationships they define as ethically relevant in anthropological work, as both sets of guidelines come from within the mainstream of the discipline. I will briefly examine them for what they say that is useful, and for what they fail to say.

The AAA document represents ethics mostly in terms of obligations; the ASA document differentiates to some extent between obligations anthropologists owe and rights they are entitled to. Both documents agree that a primary ethical responsibility binds the anthropologist to the people studied. They highlight trust, respect, informed consent, confidentiality and reciprocity as major moral principles.² The British document identifies ‘sponsors, funders and employers’ as the next relevant group with whom anthropologists should seek ethical relationships that are balanced against the rights and interests of researched subjects and ‘professional colleagues’ (ASA 1999: II). AAA guidelines allude to similar potential conflicts of interest. However, they pay more attention to the anthropologist’s obligation to be honest to her funders than to any expectation of honesty from the funders. ‘The discipline’ is the third party anthropologists should be on an ethical footing with, its ‘good reputation’ (ASA 1999: III.1) to be promoted through, for instance, courtesy and collaborative spirit towards colleagues (ASA), and the dissemination and preservation of data (both).

Further, both documents are in agreement on the specific ethical responsibility owed to the wider public, which is largely defined as ‘responsible’, harm-preempting and harm-avoiding communication of findings. While the AAA includes the relationship to ‘students and trainees’ (ASA 1998: IV) as another crunch point for ethics, the ASA largely ignores this group, perhaps because it emphasizes anthropologists as researchers and neglects them as teachers. In further interesting contrast the British document specifies ‘relations with own and host governments’ (ASA 1999: IV) that matter in ethical terms. This is understood as adherence to legal constraints and to the principle of open research. In addition it stipulates that ethical conduct can be complicated by the structures of power and politics within which anthropologists work and by wider structural inequalities that may separate researcher from researched. The American document makes no obvious reference to the link between ethics, politics and power in anthropological research.

Pels observes that the rhetoric of ethics guides largely obscures the wider ethical and political complexities that impinge on any ethnographic research. Turning ethics into the personal responsibility of the individual is mystifying, given that the work of anthropology takes place within specific political contexts and across asymmetries of power (Pels 2005: 82; cf. Nugent 2003: 91). Questions of ethical conflict between the personal, professional and political remain indeed a silent subtext in these guidelines.

Despite some interestingly nuanced differences, a close reading of these documents reveals that both (perhaps inadvertently) testify to the fact that the ethics of conducting research are hardly detachable from the question of values in research. In the first instance this is because the imperative to study people in ethically guided, that is, empathic and respectful, ways is a form of valuing and validating how someone is to be known and what types of knowledge should merit the label ‘anthropological’. On further levels, and this is what these guidelines clearly also imply but make no attempt to scrutinize, ethics dimensions in anthropology stand in complex, ambivalent tension with one another and go far beyond the individual researcher’s good or bad intentions. The working anthropologist may indeed wish to steer through the multiple loyalties these documents identify – with people studied, employers, funders, the discipline, colleagues, students and governments. But she will also have to contend with the different moral and political contexts she is operating in and the pressures, expectations and failures they engender. To remain capable of acting, she has to make some value judgements along the way. Most likely these will be judgements about preferential loyalties, situated partly in her own moral and political convictions, partly in the commitments she owes to the people she works with, partly in the career commitments she makes. In the course of research these values and commitments can change, conflict with one another or come under pressure. Their effects are hardly always predictable.

Nevertheless, the question of moral commitment in anthropology has given rise to more intensely negotiated anxieties than ethics codes. Thus, for instance, advocates of anthropology as ‘science’ (D’Andrade 1995) and ‘scholarship’ (Hastrup and Elsass 1990) have stood opposed to advocates of anthropology as ‘advocacy’ (Paine 1985), ‘cultural critique’ (Marcus and Fischer 1986; Ahmed and Shore 1995a) or as ‘militancy’ (Scheper-Hughes 1995). Some claim that ‘science’ cannot be moral lest it lose its neutrality and autonomy as a distinct realm of knowledge (Hammersley 2005). This has stood against the claim that science is always already culturally and historically situated, and that disinterested knowledge is neither possible nor desirable.

The hunch that anthropologists’ work involved ethics and conflicts on all levels of engagement received its most vocal expressions in consequence of the political moment of the 1960s. The specific interest of anthropology to work across culture(s) implied (and still often implies) working across the boundaries between Western and non-Western, (ex)colonisers and (ex)colonised, white and black, rich and poor, powerful and powerless. Crossing these boundaries raised questions about the positioning, context, purpose and aim of what one was doing – both ethically and politically. Human diversity and shared humanity were clearly part of the answer – but what again had been (or should be) the questions? One of the ethical principles the discipline’s canon and its practitioners shared before the 1960s was that cultural diversity was an important value in itself. Respect for difference was ethically paramount not only to the discipline but to being human as such. With the political awakening in the 1960s, a number of other questions clearly followed from this, which have not lost their validity since. Some of the most basic questions are: If respect for others is an important moral value, what follows from this if we study others whose rights to dignity and respect have been tampered with – or if we study people who tamper with other people’s dignity? Where do we look, what do we ask, what do we write – and why? These are ethical questions, but they are also about power. In anthropology questions and loci of ethics have followed on the heels of questions and loci of power and its changing theoretical framings.

Questions of Power and Ethics

In the 1960s and 1970s the Vietnam War, the radical student movement, widespread anticolonial resistance and the rise of American neocolonialism were the background to the ferment that began to stir critical and radical voices within the discipline. These voices placed the micro-relationships anthropologists lived and studied across the world into macro-relations of inequality that had carved up the world into those with power and those without. In many ways the partiality of power was the partiality of the Western colonial and capitalist system, and anthropologists were, mostly ignorantly, implicated in this partiality through the history of their own discipline.

While even colonial anthropologists might have been politically liberal and ethically responsible as persons, their implication in wider systems of power worked primarily through what they did ‘professionally’(Asad 1973a: 18). This involved the discourse they were trained in, the knowledge base they worked from and its assumptions about ‘natives’, the questions they asked, the theories they applied, and the ways in which they used or let others use their knowledge. Thus the asymmetry of the world was reflected and perpetuated, or at least not challenged, in what had counted as professionalism, and in the conditions that enabled the pursuit of that professionalism in the first place (Asad 1973a: 16–18). Professionalism was not ‘value free’. Many anthropologists now turned to the task of unpacking the ideological baggage that had gone into its making (e.g., Asad 1973b; Huizer and Mannheim 1979). They also tried to make it more relevant to what was diagnosed as reality ‘out there’. The political impetus and ferment of change that came from ‘out there’, including from societies that struggled against what the Western anthropologist represented, enabled a debate about values and called into question the possibility of an objective, neutral science. However, these stimuli came mainly from those on the political left who had chosen to take sides with those who they felt were placed on the receiving end of systemic oppression.

It is interesting and instructive to read some of these earlier texts, both for the political passion they exude and the still relevant questions about power they identified. Kathleen Gough’s ‘New Perspectives for Anthropologists’ (1968), for instance, was a central piece in a Current Anthropology ‘symposium on social responsibilities’. Gough had no qualms about identifying herself as a ‘revolutionary socialist’ (1968: 429).³ She associated herself with revolutionary movements across the world, and expressed belief in the demise of capitalism through revolutionary force. She was equally clear on what anthropologists should study: ‘[A]lthough we have worked for over 100 years in conquered societies, and also for at least 50 of them we have emphasized the interconnectedness of parts of social systems, we have virtually failed to study Western imperialism as a social system, or even adequately to explore the effects of imperialism on the societies we studied’ (1968: 405).

However, what leftist anthropologists tackled with a spirit of passionate urgency was not so much the foundation of the discipline as such but the anthropologist herself. She was called upon as a practising social scientist and as an ethical and political being. She should realize this double-bound identity and translate it into a particular responsibility to ‘address the problems of our time’ (Berreman 1968: 394), or, in other words, the question of power in society. Many intellectuals now felt that their work entailed the specific responsibility to help transform society into a better place. Transferred onto the specific intellectual mandate of anthropologists, the argument was compelling: students of humanity should have a primary interest in the wellbeing of humanity. Taking sides on behalf of the disadvantaged meant minimally to study anticapitalist, anticolonialist, antiracist, and soon also antisexist processes. In more zealous terms, the imperative was ‘to serve the movement’ at home and abroad (Frank 1968: 413). This could entail the need to ‘study up’, to study the powerful at home instead of the powerless abroad and make ethnographic knowledge available to citizens who were regularly disenfranchised by political elites (Nader 1969). By taking sides with the oppressed and asking questions about injustice, exploitation and inequality, the democratically committed intellectual would ‘reinvent’ (see contributors to Hymes 1969) a more relevant science.

The ‘anthropologist’ was entrusted with remarkable authority and agency in some of these texts, able to intervene in liberatory ways and to write liberatory ethnographies (e.g., Frank 1969; Wolff 1969; Nash 1979). Feminists started to suggest that female researchers could assume a privileged access to the oppressed by virtue of their ‘double consciousness’ (Rohrlich-Leavitt et al. 1975; Nash 1976). It is hard to imagine that fieldwork then was less ‘messy’ than fieldwork now. Yet taking sides seemed fairly straightforward, with sides clearly identifiable as distinct camps and a morally unswerving anthropologist activist who could easily cross and mediate the boundaries between them.

In the 1980s, domestic and foreign policies in the centres of global power turned to the right, flanked by the Reagan era in the US and Thatcherism in Britain. In obvious response to the political climate, social movements that formed around feminist, gay and lesbian, and indigenous rights, as well as environmental and peace activism, grew in strength. Many anthropologists on the left diagnosed a postmodern transition within the discipline and a shift of attention from the political to the conceptual. Power seemed no longer lodged or primarily sought in nations, governments, economic systems or institutions but in rhetoric, representation, discourse and epistemology. While the world was not seen as less fraught by structures of inequality and domination, the anthropologist’s implication in the Western project was now slightly different. She was implicated not through who or what she studied, nor by who used her knowledge. Now the fault lay in the interpretive process itself and its translation into language and text.

In the wake of Said’s critique of Orientalism (1978), Foucauldian critiques of power, the ‘multifarious critique’ (Clifford 1986: 10) of representation, and feminist and non-Western interventions, anthropology was put under scrutiny as a project of scientific knowledge that was ailing from a misplaced confidence in ‘objectivity’.⁴ The ‘anthropologist as author’ is perhaps the most dominant figure emerging from the discomfort with objectivity in the 1980s. Her political and ethical situatedness lay within her authorship, now conceptualized as her ‘authority’ to represent the ethnographically apprehended ‘other’. By employing the stylistic, rhetorical and discursive conventions of the discipline, she established a narrative that was scientifically ‘authoritative’ and legitimate, but worked to appropriate the researched subject as a voiceless ‘other’. Most contributors to the seminal Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) worked on variations of this theme.

The new anti-authorial cum anti-authoritarian ethics necessitated a transformation of authorship into a self-conscious, reflexive act of accountability. Laying open the conditions of textual production, identifying the research participants’ collaboration in authorship and refusing textual closure were some of the ways in which a partial science should dismantle and replace the myth of objectivity. Partiality, translated into the relationship with the researched subject, fed on the irony that the other could never be truthfully represented and that keeping her in spectatorial distance or pondering with readers about the contingencies of interpretive meaning carried more ethical sincerity than assuming that one had a cause, a hope or a condition to share that could easily be channelled into joint action against oppression.

At the same time, however, this rejection of activist research was not simply a reflection of a general move to the right in the wider world. For many, the preoccupation with ‘ethnography as text’ was also a search for a more ethical subject (Rabinow 1986: 256). This subject would genuinely seek ‘dialogue’ (not a new, but a much used term) with the researched, aspire to build relationships of trust and reciprocity, and undercut her own authority by departing from the ‘realist’ forms of writing that had been characteristic of the positivist and ‘modernist’ anthropological tradition.⁵ The dialogical model depended on a recentring of fieldwork as the epistemological engine of the anthropological project.⁶ Fieldwork shifted into focus as the actual locus of authorship, the sphere where those crucial discursive encounters between self and other took place, to be ultimately transformed into text. The textual presence of the fieldworker was not new, but the explicit presence of the author struggling to communicate was. The construction, the possibilities and the choices were laid bare, while the author was shown trying for ways to make an honest dialogue out of her complex experience in the field.

Yet, this injunction was more often laid down than followed. The task of translation seemed trapped in an inexhaustible and ironic dilemma: the dialogue between observer and observed had to be transformed into the dialogue between writer and reader, that is, into the language of the interpreter. Strathern notes that this implied the mission to break with the modernist self-other distinction that was based on treating the other as an object. In postmodern terms ‘the author must objectify his own position in the ethnography quite as much as he or she strives to render the subjectivity of others’ (Strathern 1987: 264). Turning the fieldworker-author into an object of reflection was supposed to do several things at once. It deflated the alien nature of the other, for it said ‘we’ are culturally situated too. It made ethnocentrism available for inspection, accommodated its inevitable presence in learning cultural otherness and illustrated the effect of fiction in any process of cultural translation. In representation the ‘other’ had been dominated and in representation she should be liberated, or at least humanized, which in actual ethnographies often translated into a rather traditional assertion of cultural relativism, based on the insight that accessibility to each other in communicative exchange is never fully achieved.

Critics pointed out that the focus on communication in fieldwork and writing was deeply limiting, and could descend into narcissistic self-inspection (e.g., Friedman 1987; Kapferer 1988). Others accused postmodernism of disembedding relations between the self and the other from the wider contexts of history, politics and power in which they are set (e.g., Strathern 1987; Friedman 1987; Sangren 1988; Ulin 1991; Scholte 1987). The 1980s in Britain and the US, and to a certain degree across the globe, had been an era of right-wing individualism. Postmodernism had somehow reflected this, and the concentration on individual discursive relationships had hidden the larger structures of oppression.

Similar lines of critique grew stronger in the 1990s and 2000s, when, as some now argued, anthropology was losing its ‘confidence’ and increasingly its relevance in the face of postmodern and literary turns (Ahmed and Shore 1995a). Anthropologists on the left bemoaned the discrepancy between a seemingly self-referential, inward-turning reflexivity and a rapidly transforming political and cultural reality ‘out there’. As in the 1960s, many now suggested that ‘out there’ should be the real reference point for anthropological ethics and politics (e.g., Gledhill 1994; Ahmed and Shore 1995b; Lindisfarne 1997; Smith 1999; Burawoy 2000; MacClancy 2002; Eriksen 2006).

At the end of the millennium, the transformative currents seemed profound in how they redefined both global relationships and more locally anchored relations of place, class, race, gender or generation. The rapid progression of globalization in terms of border-crossing capital, technological interconnection and human mobility produced its own new perplexities and contradictions. The supra-nationalization and centralization of high-powered economic and political institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and EU went along with the ‘revival of localism and ethnic chauvinism … xenophobia and nationalism throughout Europe and beyond’ (Ahmed and Shore 1995b: 13). The intellectual scepticism about capitalist consumer democracies in the West contrasted with their seemingly enthusiastic embrace in the postcommunist East. A new transnational Europe was promoted on the inside, but closed to the outside. Hitherto excluded regions were included in the capitalist economy, even as entire continents were suddenly ‘switched off’ (Castells 1998: 93). The rise of identity politics included both creolization in some places and nativist reshuffles elsewhere. The world failed to respond to the genocide in Rwanda. The US had become the sole superpower. Environmental degradation and neoliberal ‘restructuring’ continued apace, and new but very traditional, imperial wars began in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Critical anthropologists registered these changes and once more began thinking about how to relate them to their science. Their calls for renewal, reinvention and more relevance sounded similar to those in the 1960s and early 1970s, as did their exasperation with critical thought that seemed to have become self-creationist as it retreated from real problems of real people.

Yet these echoes from a radical past resonated with discontinuities as well, which were tangible for those who, like most of the contributors to this book, received their training in the 1990s. Postmodern, feminist and postcolonial interventions had made a clear impact on how one imagined the social world one was studying. Theoretical journeys offered intriguing shifts from seemingly self-evident categories for ‘people’, like ‘the group X’, ‘women’, or ‘peasants’. Now visions of subjectivity and identity emphasized difference, heterogeneity and fragmentation within and across formerly imagined homogenous ‘communities’. From the 1980s on, anthropologists began to notice that the ‘natives’ were disappearing, both as people with firm roots in place and ‘ethnic’ identity, and as people who are willing to be studied under the aegis of Western academic expertise. Was one still able to anchor people in places? Was one still an interpreter, explicator, translator of different cultural texts, or was the role less clear, the ability to make sense of cultural difference much more modest? Or maybe even simpler?

Capitalism was restructuring the world. The old opposition between good colonized native and bad colonial power no longer seemed to hold water. Lumumba had been replaced by Mobutu and then Kabila. Mugabe the liberator had become Mugabe the dictator. The divisions between oppressor and oppressed now ran, much more obviously, within communities. And the postmodern challenge could not be simply wished away. The simple certainties of the 1960s had glossed over a complex political reality. It seemed there was no going back to Kathleen Gough’s view of the world. This did not mean that one was any less politically angry and frustrated by neocolonialism or neocapitalism. But one felt much less confident about locating power and understanding one’s own complicities in it. Power seemed to be everywhere, filtering down into every aspect of communication, from writing research grant applications to pushing one’s fieldworker pen. And, if Foucault was right that power was largely transmitted (and challenged) in discourse (Foucault 1980: 93–108), were discourses of liberation not in themselves part of the economy of power? Were intellectual leftist aspirations for liberation not driven by knowledge claims that, while socially and historically situated, could easily work as manipulative ‘truths’ in concrete relations between groups or people? As Rorty puts it: ‘One might spot a corporate bagman arriving at a congressman’s office, and perhaps block his entrance. But one cannot block off power in the Foucauldian sense’ (1998: 94). In anthropology it seemed one could no longer clearly see or analyse culture without getting entangled in Foucauldian webs of power or caught in the problematic of representation. Rorty and others noted the incapacitating effects of postmodern theories of power for a politics of emancipation. This felt somewhat baffling, given that many postmodernists had championed the standpoint of the excluded and marginalized before arriving at a deeply sceptical assessment of the possibilities of effective political criticism and change (see Benhabib 1992: 14–15).

Feminist anthropology serves as a good example of the shifts towards more complexity and less confidence in collective identities. Feminism was rooted in a movement outside academe with a clear emancipatory political and ethical agenda. By the 1990s, however, feminist theories about gender inequality had become quite complex. The question had shifted from ‘Why are all women oppressed?’ in the 1960s to ‘How is a female (or male) embodied subject constituted within a wider field of power?’ While the first question implied a shared identity of women, the second implied a notion of identity that rested on all sorts of differences, among which gender was just one.⁷ In response to postmodern theories, feminists had de-emphasized gender as a sole cause of oppression in human relationships. They now worked on the assumption that subject formations were crafted by the complex intersection of a number of inequalities, most notably race, age, class and sex. While it seemed simple to build coalitions and act politically on the basis of universal womanhood, it looked less feasible to do so on the basis of partially shared or incompatible femininities.

In any event, taking sides had become more complicated, perhaps because what constituted a side was no longer so clearly graspable, epistemologically and empirically. If how we came to see others went in important ways through how we see ourselves (the principle of reflexivity), one could not just claim to take someone else’s side without not also, in some way, taking one’s own. Epistemologically speaking, the self was present in the other and the other present in the self. Moreover, if the world was in motion and the relationship between identity, place and belonging had become discontinuous, then there was no real important difference any more between where anthropologists did research and where they lived. The home was in the field, just as the field was in the home.

The Primacy of Fieldwork

This volume is about ethnographic work that rests on such double-sourced (if not multiply-sourced) consciousness. Most contributors went through their academic training in the 1990s, and all did fieldwork in the 1990s and early 2000s. Most were well aware of the ways in which postmodern theory was tugging at the discipline’s confidence. Many of those assembled in this volume walked off to do fieldwork with a sense of over-theorized anxiety. At the same time, all of them also had a set of political values that came from positions of the cultural left and a clear sense of identification with, or, in some cases long-term experience of activism in, the new global social movements. All had gone into anthropology because they were in favour of a political ethos of equality and justice, and they anchored this particular moral sense of self in the questions and contexts they chose to study.

The purpose of this volume is to contribute to a clarification of political and ethical partiality in the formation of anthropological knowledge. Partiality is explored in both senses of the term, as commitment and taking sides, but also as incompleteness and limitation. Moral and political partiality is seen and discussed as inseparable from epistemology. By this we do not mean applying a political opinion to what we study, but asking what chances and limitations might govern our ability to perceive others in ethically and politically committed terms and explore which contributions this could make to understanding the problems and characteristics of contemporary societies.

The experiential core of the politico-ethical, not just as impingement on the formation of knowledge but as the condition for obtaining knowledge, lies in fieldwork. In the actual fieldwork experience of many anthropologists, the ethical and the political are intertwined. In other words, questions about ways of conduct, about the evaluation of actions, about right and wrong, about social relations that involve authority and power are wrapped up together. However, in the immediacy of fieldwork it seems that the ethical impresses itself first. Anthropologists who have recently written on ethics rightfully stress the ‘existential commitment’ (Carrithers 2005: 436) fieldwork can imply. This commitment works itself out in contacting and learning about new political and ethical worlds in ways that are conditioned by using one’s own embodied historical self as a primary research tool. Carrithers puts this eloquently: ‘[M]any of us have experienced fieldwork as being constituted as much by its labours and its rigours, its embarrassments and adjustments, as by its discoveries, so that one’s commitment to the new is written not only in fieldnotes but also in … our blood, or at least our blushes. Taken from this viewpoint, it is the openness to others … that not only make[s] fieldwork possible but also constitute[s] much of both its pith and its pain. Indeed, the pain may become knowledge (2005: 437).

This commitment and openness to others is a primary ethical stance no anthropologist can do without. The anthropological ethicist lays positive emphasis on relational selves, on the capacity to form concrete, positive relationships and to act and think in relation to others as a condition for understanding.⁸ She has to know the other ethically before she can know the other at all. This process of knowing may involve a personal transformation into someone she did not think she was before. Understanding how people in different moral worlds define themselves as persons can quite literally work through how they define and see the fieldworker, judge what they take to be her moral universe and teach her rules of conduct.

This epistemological route can be unsettling as well as rewarding. ‘Double standards and double identities’ (Pels 2005: 84) are necessarily involved when understanding others works through a confrontation with one’s own personal, political and moral certainties. Many of the contributions of this book address the intensity of the process, and its lingering effect long after fieldwork. At the same time, learning other people’s principles of right and wrong in the minuteness of the everyday reveals that ethics as practice is always political, embedded in power relations between people. In the field, principles of empathy can clash with real experiences of closeness and distance. Learning about someone else’s point of view, or about how they treat those in their care, can induce all those oppositional emotions that make the fieldworker hold on even more strongly to her own. After all, she just might not like all the people she studies and not all of them might like her. Empathy is not identity. The contextualization of ethics in politics, both writ small and with a capital P, is the politically sourced ethics all contributors to this volume engage with. Their openness and orientation to the other is primarily motivated by an empathy with pain and suffering, and by ‘taking sides’ with people in struggle. As will be seen in the chapters that follow, this stance does not mean a final closure to questions of ethics and politics in anthropology. Rather, it is an invitation to ask some more.

The Contributions

Nancy Lindisfarne’s ‘Starting from Below: Fieldwork, Gender and Imperialism Now’ was originally the Audrey Richards distinguished lecture at Oxford in 2002. It is a clarion call for anthropologists to start from the point of view of the oppressed. She reconsiders anthropology’s relevance in a post-9/11 age that she sees marked by both a fierce American imperialism and a growing antiglobalization movement. In her text taking sides is foremost a commitment to ‘studying up’ the proliferations of American empire at every local fieldsite, and to produce ethnographic accounts that are intelligible to nonacademic audiences. The following chapters are a response to her piece, all situated in specific fieldworks. Most of the authors specifically chose fieldwork that reflected their political commitments and socializations as leftists in their own cultures of origin. Most found, however, that loyalties and choices were not simple.

Tayfun Atay, for instance, came from a secular left-wing political position