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Moving Beyond Culturally Bound Ethical Guidelines
ences that may be included in one’s accounts from the field, and in so
doing diminishes the range of meanings that may be attached legiti-
mately to radical participation as a method of investigation.
Extraordinary anthropology originates with the recognition that
“Western styles of knowledge, which typically give priority to detach-
ment over engagement, textuality over vocality, mind over body, are
to be exposed to radically different ways of understanding and inhab-
iting reality” (Orsi 2005 , 195 ). Such a change of priority may involve
giving oneself genuinely to aboriginal ways of learning and knowing,
including full participation in rituals understood “as a means of gain-
ing knowledge of the world” (Garroutte 2003 , 108 ). Through radical
participation in ritual we experience changes in the life we then live
and of which we are witnesses. “Unlike Galileo’s contemporaries, who
refused to look through his telescope, experiential ethnographers are
brave enough to stand inside what may be to them a foreign means
of encountering the world” (Garroutte 2003 , 108 ). What is involved
in this process is not “mystical fusion with others” (Augé 2004 , 44 )
but rather a modification of “our previous cognitive structures to in-
clude those new features of the environment learned through new or
unexpected perceptions” (Fuller 2006 , 83 ). Accounts of extraordinary
experiences in the field become part of the larger stock of knowledge
revealed through a “tracery of stories, intrigues, and events that in-
volve the private and the public sphere, which we tell each other with
greater or lesser talent and conviction (Listen, you’re not going to be-
lieve this, but something wild happened to me.. .)” (Augé 2004 , 32 –
33 ). The content of this chapter and of every other chapter in this book
provides such moments when the reader is invited to expand his or
her intellectual and moral horizon.
Notwithstanding our desire to enter the world of others, our minds
and hearts (like those of Native North Americans and of countless peo-
ple around the world) are firmly anchored in our familiar world: the
homeland, the friends, the loved ones, and the profession to which we
return. Initially, when entering the world of Native North Americans,
we discovered the possibility of opening ourselves to human potenti-
alities as they are actualized in that world, their world. This potential
