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The Politics of Ecstatic Research
campus attached credibility to indigenous knowledge through their
own approaches to research.
This is not a question of embracing cultural relativism, which has
no real requirement of obligation or reciprocity, and which is, instead,
based on an ethnocentric assumption that does not require we take
the other’s worldview seriously and demands that we respect beliefs
because they are totally other (Wilson 1994 ). Neither is it a case of
“going native,” which has no requirement of maintaining a univer-
sity persona, and which, as Goulet ( 1998 ) points out, makes us un-
able to fulfill the hermeneutic task of interpreting one culture to an-
other. This is a more difficult proposition entirely. It is a proposition
that risks taking oneself much too seriously, of appearing too self-
concerned or asserting a false insider status, the position Toelken found
himself in. However, this position can provide a sense of appropriate
activity, of knowing when one is violating rules. Otherwise, we are
akin to that tiny minority of people who do not experience pain and
have no sense of dangerous injury.
Issues of experience-near anthropology do not apply only to those
whose research interests focus on visions, dreams, reincarnation, rit-
ual, and religion. Those who wish to think about politics and jus-
tice, for example, might consider the same issues. This is in part be-
cause, in indigenous discourse, these categories of experience cannot
be easily separated, in part because our time in a community takes
us to a variety of settings, and, finally, because members of commu-
nities have multiple roles; ritual leaders might be political chiefs. But
because one’s focus might not be on ritual or religion per se, the idea
of ecstatic research might play out somewhat differently.
Nor do issues of ecstatic research relate only to the embodied per-
ceptions of the researcher. Research is commonly carried out in a con-
text larger than that of researcher-community. While I have given the
example of a vision in my own experience, I have been more attuned
to my children’s experiences of the extraordinary. One child, then
aged three, walked for the first time into one particular dimly lit win-
ter dance house (there are no windows, and only the light from the
doorway illuminated the interior of the 120 -foot-long, 50 -foot-wide
earth floor structure). He immediately headed across the floor, pointed
