Paper short abstract:

What do anthropologists and their friends expect of each other? They undertake mutual responsibilities, changing each other’s lives in unpredictable ways. These feed into diverse genres of monographs and long-term cultural and linguistic documentation, in which responsibilities continue to evolve.

Paper long abstract:

What do anthropologists and their friends expect of each other, and give each other? Anthropologists parachute into the lives of others, who somehow undertake to keep them alive, while both sides take risks, elicit personal narratives and prompt unprecedented reflections. The Sora “tribe” in India and the nomadic Eveny reindeer herders in Arctic Siberia both have difficult relations with the state. I shall analyse some key incidents or processes in which we have changed each other’s lives amidst rupture, continuity, reparation and intergenerational tension. Such episodes are themselves an index of history, but it is hard to sense at the time what everyone’s responsibilities will be decades later. They feed into different genres of writing, each reaching out to wider theories of humanity or to local agendas. Local people may use their anthropologists to bear witness to their suffering, to intervene with authorities, to fund funerals, to provide amusement... Most of this is at a tangent from our anthropological monographs. I shall explore the twists and turns of my relationship with a close friend who pioneered his people’s conversion from shamanism to Christianity, then helped me to understand the shamanic texts he no longer “believed” in, and finally used my notes and recordings to establish a fertile, generative record of the old culture, to the annoyance of the church authorities. What responsibilities did each of us have then in this writing, and how does my responsibility continue to evolve now that he has moved on to join Jesus (or maybe his ancestors)?