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The American Anthropological Association’s “Code of Ethics” is pref-
aced by the statement “In a field of such complex involvements and
obligations, it is inevitable that misunderstandings, conflicts, and the
need to make choices among apparently incompatible values will arise.”
And when such conflicts of interest do arise, we are told that “the in-
terests of the people with whom we work take precedence over other
considerations.” Why? Because “the anthropologist’s first responsibil-
ity is to those whose lives and cultures they study” (aaa 1998). This
statement leaves an important question unanswered: which of those
people’s interests determines our responsibility when the conflict of
values confronting us is between them? This is precisely the sort of
ambiguous situation I faced among the Mazatecs, when I found my-
self involved in a disagreement between shamans, provoked by my
presence and activities in the field. Here I shall only obliquely address
this question, for which I can provide no good answer, certainly not
one that is adequate to forestall the necessity for my individual atone-
ment or that other ethnographers might find at all useful in resolving
similar ethical dilemmas of their own.^1
Instead, this problem serves as the indeterminate and overdetermined
context for the recognition of ethical-cum-epistemological difficulties
inherent in the fact that anthropology is (and anthropologists are) nec-
essarily two-faced, that is, at least in the sense that knowledge of our
host cultures, gained or invented through the intimacy that charac-
terizes personal relationships in the field, is then represented, circu-
lated, and consumed in the impersonal realm of a public academic dis-
course back home. The “two-faced” metaphor is the Mazatecs’ own,
11. Don Patricio’s Dream: Shamanism and the Torments
of Secrecy in Fieldwork among the Mazatecs
edward abse
