savage minds

I have to say, if there was one thing that the ethnographers of the 1930s had going for them in the field, none of their informants ever quizzed them about their methodology.

It is a pain in my ass.

Can you imagine some Nuer elder giving Evans-Pritchard shit about whether he was using survey data, who he was interviewing, and how generalizable his findings would be?

On the one hand, this has everything to do with the fact that the informants about whom I am bitching are well-educated, largely American professionals. They are not unaware of how social science research gets done. Some of them are steeped enough in particular authoritative registers that they at times they sound like they know more about what I'm doing than I do.

Yes, I find that aggravating beyond measure. The thing no one reminded me about 'studying up' is that it involves people stomping on your head.

But it also speaks to how power plays out in social science research: who has the authority to ask questions? Who has the authority to question the questioner? What is the proper object of anthropological research? Who defines this? Is a non-exploitative, non-objectifying method of knowledge production possible? And if it's not -- and I have my doubts -- how might one approach it, if only asymptotically?

I absolutely salute, even as I thoroughly problematize it, this questioning of me-the-researcher. But, oh, god, as a lone, junior researcher who has to actively coach herself through this project on a daily basis, I find it excruciating.