Paper short abstract:

This paper explores ethnographer/informant relations when anthropological writing is presented to research participants, including some of the epistemological and practical problems encountered studying an NGO.

Paper long abstract:

The production of ethnographic knowledge has the potential to create ruptures between informant and anthropologist. This is especially acute in sites where our informants systematically produce their own representations of practice, separate to those of the ethnographer. My research on an international NGO with a carefully managed public image represents such a field site. In this paper I focus on a particular instance in my field research, where the act of disseminating ethnographic findings back to my informants, as per ethics requirements and a research agreement, resulted in a rupturing of the relationships that I had relied upon to generate my insights in the first instance. In presenting a viewpoint outside of organisationally mandated modes of representation that did not reflect agreed upon, normative understandings, but rather my own observations, the act was an example of what Mosse (2006) has called 'anti-social anthropology'. In giving an account of this event in fieldwork this paper explores questions of intellectual property, of assemblages of what is in and what is out as legitimate subjects of anthropological research, and the epistemology of situating 'ethnographic authority' alongside NGO discourse. In spite of having good relationships with our informants, it is by pointing to things that usually remain unsaid that the study of the social can become a rather anti-social endeavour.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore a few key interactions with my informant M. Situating our encounter in the wider context of applied anthropology, I will consider what she taught me about power, and reflect on impediments to honesty and trust in research within the native title system.

Paper long abstract:

M demanded I take her out to lunch. There, as we discussed a recent failed exchange in the context of native title research, she demanded, 'Why do you need to know?'

Although we sometimes worked quite closely over a period of four years, my relationship with my informant, 'M', and our (joint?) project was a source of confusion. While other informants were willing to answer my many, sometimes very personal, questions, M was different. Acutely aware of her agency, she wielded silence, and refused my attempts to play the role of innocent researcher. She was strategic and perplexing, reserving the right to inconsistency.

This paper will explore a few key interactions with M. Situating our encounter in the wider context of applied anthropology, I will consider what she taught me about power, and reflect on impediments to honesty and trust in research within the native title system.

Paper short abstract:

Using ethnographic examples, I explore the moral dilemmas that arise from witnessing awkward encounters between White people and actual or potential Aboriginal informants in the Northern Territory's capital city, Darwin.

Paper long abstract:

The Northern Territory's capital city, Darwin, plays host to thousands of Aboriginal visitors at any one time. Darwin also serves as a base for anthropologists who work in many different capacities throughout the northern parts of the NT, some permanent residents and others visiting for weeks or months.

This paper presents ethnographic examples of the (now relatively common) awkward, sometimes even hostile, encounters between Aboriginal and White people in public places like streets, shopping centres and buses, that reveal the differences in values and interests of the members of both groups. Some of these involve actual or potential informants who, in common with the rest of the Aboriginal visitors, have come to Darwin to attend meetings, visit relatives, receive medical treatment or simply have a good time. The encounters range from the relatively innocuous to expressions of violence and assault. And although it might be assumed these incidents are alcohol inflamed, this is not always the case.

As anthropologists on the spot, how do we intervene? Do we pretend not to be there? The assessments we make, often within seconds, clearly depend on the severity of the situation. Yet, there are many other factors we face, for example whether participants are part of our own professional or social field, whether we know one of them, or whether we are conferred with fictive kinship. I explore the moral dilemmas we face as the field of our workplaces extends into the capital city.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the challenges and moral complexities of fieldwork in the context of development anthropology, drawing on specific situations from time spent working as an anthropologist in development agencies in East Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores fieldwork in the context of development anthropology, a prominent form of applied anthropology that has encouraged reflection on the practice of anthropology itself (Mosse 2013). Drawing on specific fieldwork situations from time spent working for the United Nations and international NGOs in East Africa, I discuss several complexities and moral questions that arose. These include how politicized agendas and a ‘black box of implementation’ can distort fieldwork; how strategic representations linked to the economy of aid have shaped roles or ‘scripts’ for researcher-informant relations; and how interlocutors and local elites bring further subjectivity to fieldwork. Through these, the paper discusses what can be mutually exchanged between development and anthropology, with a particular focus on the accommodation and empowerment of local agency and participation.

Paper short abstract:

The paper addresses issue of the self in ethnography, advocacy amidst ideals of independent research, and the possibilities of teamwork among researchers in the context of a study of environmental dispute in southwest Australia.

Paper long abstract:

The paper presents a retrospective analysis of complex research with anti- and pro- forest logging groups in southwest Australia at the time of negotiated Regional Forest Agreements in 1999-2001. Three collaborating researchers faced the challenges of intimate fieldwork encounters among people committed to particular political and economic aspirations in regard to logging and forest management. This involved tensions between independent inquiry and expectations that the researchers would take sides in a highly vigorous environmental dispute. The presentation will situate description of the researchers' intellectual and emotional responses in this setting within anthropological literature concerning the 'self' in the ethnographic research process, advocacy as part of independent social science study, and forms of personal engagement with research subjects that impact on the working relationships between members of the project team.

Paper short abstract:

I conducted fieldwork at a Special Needs school. As my research evolved I became interested in new strands of inquiry which could breach ethics guidelines. Ethics approval can help refine the research methodology and analysis but cannot prepare us for the moral conundrums that arise in the field.

Paper long abstract:

All researchers have multiple and intersecting subjectivities that enable us to view our subjects through a variety of lenses. This positionality shapes our research interests and goals as much as the material we gather in the field. My research was conducted at a special education needs school where I hoped to discover something of the sense of self of adolescents with severe intellectual disabilities.

I aimed to do this through participant observation at the school, guided conversations with the staff, and interviews with the parents. I could then compare and contrast this material with my own experiences as the parent of a child who attended a similar school.

Using a case study of the interactions between a young female staff member and one of her students I illustrate the challenges of these competing subjectivities. On the one hand their interactions were potential ethnographic 'gold' but on the other they challenged me as a concerned human being, a parent, woman and feminist. To do no harm was to do nothing, but to act meant deciding where the least harm was done; none of which rests easy on any researcher.

My various crosscutting subjectivities enhanced my fieldwork experience, but also resulted in challenges to the need to adhere to ethical practice, and my desire to do no harm. It also challenged me morally as unforeseen situations emerged to undermine my own self, and worldview.

Paper short abstract:

Ethnographers rely on moments of insight in fieldwork encounters, but risk turning fleeting moments into overdetermined and atemporal cultural descriptions. Finding ways to bring the informant's temporality into that of the ethnographic text will enhance the value of ethnographic writing.

Paper long abstract:

A surface reading of a typical ethnographic text could easily suggest that anthropological research owes as much to serendipity as to deliberate method. There is, of course, much method behind the framing of fleeting encounters as ethnographically significant. Nevertheless, it is the chance encounter, often involving a fleeting phrase that sticks in the ethnographer's mind, but that may not even be remembered by the informant, that catalyses a theoretical insight or a way of conceptualising community. Long after such an event, I as ethnographer am often still mulling over it, seeking to understand what made it seem so significant to me, exploring its possible meanings, and uncovering the rich context that will make it come to life for my audience. This entails a series of temporal shifts from the time of the encounter to the time of the writing to the longer-term 'structural time' that lives on in ethnographic texts. In this paper, which draws from my ethnographic research in Bulgaria and Australia, I show how these temporal shifts, through displacing or erasing the informant's own temporality, may contribute to overdetermined accounts of our informants and their worlds. I explore ways in which we might recover our informants' temporality in our ethnographic writing and thereby enhance the wider value of our work and its value to our informants and their cultural peers.

Paper short abstract:

Anthropological angst about balancing friendship and research in the field is common. We often dwell only on our role in moral responsibility. Yet, this paper explores the unpredictable nature of interpersonal field relationships and questions how much power we, as anthropologists, have over them.

Paper long abstract:

The Alice Goffman debate has landed ethnographic methods in the line of fire. As an anthropologist studying teenagers in a high school, issues of participant vulnerability and litigious precariousness shape my ethnographic practice. How to 'do no harm' and 'do benefit' to my informants whilst collecting fruitful, often personal, information poses moral quandaries at regular intervals. Yet, how much of the interpersonal relationship is within my control? Challenging a litigious frame of reference, how much responsibility rests with the anthropologist? Based on year-long fieldwork in a marginalised, culturally diverse school in Melbourne investigating everyday cosmopolitanism among students, this paper explores the oft-asked question 'are we friends or are you just using me for your book?' and the personal and situational forces that are brought to bear on the informant-ethnographer relationship. Despite the constancy of the anthropologist's interactional style, the locational context and research agenda, informant-researcher encounters at school produced disparate interpersonal outcomes, ranging from the mutually fulfilling and uplifting to the disastrous and distressing. Drawing on three informant-researcher relationships, this paper argues that connections and junctures with informants are fleeting and unstable, influenced by differing and shifting meanings, expectations, practices and performances of friendship across different contexts and participants. In an unstable environment, where the informant and researcher both have emotions on the line, where does power lie and who controls the outcome? This paper aims to draw out rich ethnographic discussion about moral responsibility, agency and relationships in the field.

Paper short abstract:

Troubled by my atheism, Didier, like my other Christian informants, often sought to convert my faith. Here, I draw on one such conversation to consider how admitting godlessness shaped my field, opening some lines of enquiry, closing others.

Paper long abstract:

As an atheist, I was a moral anomaly amongst my Christian, Burundian informants in Sydney, Australia. If asked, I would respond frankly about my personal beliefs; I imagined this to be customary in the long history of anthropologists building relationships with people with whom they do not share a faith (even though such admissions and their effects are seldom written up). In my case, being honest instantly withered some connections, and often tilted hanging out towards discussions of my atheism, particularly with one informant, Didier, whose curiousity and concern about my godlessness often surpassed my interest in his faith. In this paper, I take seriously the questions posed to me by Didier and others: how did I, a non-believer, expect to understand faith's role in healing and resilience, as I sought to in my research? Was I not morally unequipped? I present one conversation with Didier on our respective moral orders (and their unlikely potential to change), and use it to structure a consideration of how anthropology's moral agnosticism shaped my field; the co-created lines of enquiry it opened, and those it foreclosed.

Paper short abstract:

Anthropologist and informant today make joint decisions about wider access to their work, but historic research is less clear. Using projects that digitize historic fieldwork as case studies, I examine methods for interrogating lines between late anthropologist, informant and contemporary scholar.

Paper long abstract:

The relationship between anthropologist and informant lives on long after both parties have passed. Elements effaced from written ethnographies are never entirely forgotten - captured in field journals, stored in archives and, in most cases, open to study and restudy through a historic lens in a post-colonial world. Just as today's informant-anthropologist relationship is evolving alongside ethical developments in the discipline, the relationship between historic fieldnotes and contemporary readers--including the anthropologist's intellectual great-grandchild and the informant's descendants--is entwined in questions of power, perception and interpretation.

With the digital age come opportunities to open up access to historical fieldwork, research residing in a conundrum. Archive walls which protect and preserve simultaneously impede access. Without resources to travel, papers which hold rich value for providing historic context to current research or which preserve a community's cultural or linguistic heritage are difficult to access. Digitization addresses this conundrum, but it raises ethical questions unimaginable a century ago. Where is the balance between what technology potentially enables for the legitimate goal of advancing knowledge and what technology potentially destroys in its disregard of the nuance embedded in informant-researcher relationships?

Historic fieldwork is being digitized at an increasing rate, including Boas, Malinowski, and Spencer and Gillen. Through these case studies, one of which I am involved with directly, I will examine three methodologies for addressing the ethical implications of digitizing fieldwork, including crowd-sourcing culturally sensitive documents, creating scholar feedback loops, and developing pathways for community input.

[Title quote attributed to Ruth Benedict]