Abstract:

It’s an established rule of research ethics of both anthropologists and journalists that we do not pay for information. There are good reasons for this. Payment suggests a commercial exchange and incentivises the production, sometimes manufacturing, of the sellable commodity – in this case information, testimony, stories. At the same time, anthropologists know very well that it is rarely a good idea to visit a new house without bringing a gift and that the building of trust over time includes a complexity of giving and receiving. In a broader perspective, the ethics of the relationship between researchers and participants, too, involves considerations of reciprocity of various kinds. When, starting in 2018, camp survivors from XUAR who had fled to Kazakhstan gave testimony to activists, journalists and researchers, they did so with a complex bundle of motives often including the hope of an improvement of the situation for themselves, their relatives or a larger community. In 2023 many of them told me: “they came, took and made their careers on our stories, but for us nothing has changed. Why should we continue to talk to them?” Some journalists and human rights researchers, at the same time, felt that they were doing these people a favour by providing them a platform. The classical core difference between commodities and gifts is that former are not part of an ongoing personal relationship while latter are. The real expectation entailed in a gift is not a counter-gift – this would follow the commodity logic – it is a lasting relationship of care and responsibility. In a word: community or kinship. The denial of this is often experienced as betrayal or exploitation. This paper draws on examples of camp survivors from XUAR in Kazakhstan, Turkey and Euromerica to explore the interview as an exchange of gifts situated in a larger social context of relations, hierarchies and power.