Jean-Guy A. Goulet“meaning-compatible experiences,” that is, “experiences unified by a
‘cognitive style’ that stamps them as belonging together.”
To engage in research of any kind is to suspend our ordinary sense
of reality and to join a community of scholars committed to the ad-
vancement of a specific kind of knowledge. Epistemological concerns
are therefore at the heart of any discipline. In Schutzian terms, as sci-
entists or investigators, we work within a historically constituted and
evolving province of reality distinct from that of our everyday life. To
operate in the scientific or professional domain, we shift attitude but
also presume that within this domain, “every one who is one of us”
is committed to certain values and goals. For instance, we take for
granted that everyone agrees on research methods and that everyone’s
work is submitted to peer review and evaluation. These standardized
processes allow for the critical assessment of knowledge claims, with-
out which a discipline simply does not exist. Within this province of
reality, in the investigation of any phenomenon, we are all expected
to distinguish between personal bias and professional, substantiated
claim. As noted by White ( 2003 , xxvi), there is general agreement
among social scientists that while “a person’s religion, gender, politi-
cal orientation, or race may affect what problems they wish to do re-
search on... they do not necessarily influence, nor should they influ-
ence, the research design and scientific assessment of the findings.”
In brief, to engage in research is to leave one’s daily concerns behind
and join the ranks of the initiated.
Among anthropologists, the journal article and the monograph con-
cerning a particular people are the vehicles through which knowledge
claims are made publicly available. These are the product of the field-
worker, someone who has taken on a profession created to generate
accurate and reliable observations about others in the world. The
goal of participant observation as a research method was to improve
on the unsystematic information gained otherwise through travel lit-
erature and the writing of missionaries and administrators. In other
words, it was thought and taught that “anthropology became a sci-
ence when it left the travelogue behind” (Fabian 2000 , 241 ). Field-
workers were expected also to bring back to the metropolis objects of