ABSTRACT
The importance of the ‘self’ in the processes of fieldwork and interpretation should be obvious to anyone who takes the semantic dimension of anthropology half seriously. If the ‘self’ is the research instrument, any piece of research is suitable for an exercise in the sociology of knowledge (Gould 1975:64-5): why this research problem, why this interpretive frame, why this chief informant? If participant observation is ultimately grounded in human inter-subjectivity (Adler and Adler 1987:31), we clearly need to understand our ethnographic products in terms of the producers and the production process, that is to say in terms of ourselves, our informants and the specific contexts in which encounters have taken place (Dumont 1978: 96, 199). If much that we call ‘method’ has characteristics of a ‘reaction formation’ designed to protect the investigator from anxiety in the face of social phenomena (Devereux 1967), then clearly a most important kind of ethnographic data is what is going on inside the researcher. If anthropology is about ‘otherness’, any definition of our subject matter necessarily involves a corresponding self-definition. The fact that anthropology has always been implicitly about ‘ourselves’ is now clear; what is required is that the implicit become explicit (Crick 1976:153, 1982:288, 307-8). We require that our ‘selves’ become objects for scrutiny in the same way that our research has rendered ‘objects’ those other selves with whom we have interacted in the field.
