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Presence.” She explores what constitute two supposedly contrasting
sides of fieldwork: intimacy and alienation. While intimacy suggests a
sense of profound togetherness and state of oneness, alienation points
to a darker side of fieldwork, suggesting isolation, disconnection, and
separation. These two states, far from being mutually exclusive, are al-
most always at the heart of what we do in the field. Rethmann works
through senses of intimacy and alienation by closely examining states
of “being out of one’s mind” and “being in one’s mind” during an in-
tense fieldwork period from 1992 to 1994 in the northern Kamchatka
Peninsula in the Russian Far East. Learning how to drum became an
intrinsic part of learning how to be with herself in the world, in the
same way those around her had learned to be at home with themselves,
often in eloquent silence, in their environment. Throughout the anal-
ysis of these states, she brings into dialogue a phenomenological ap-
proach with political ethnographic material.
In her own chapter, Barbara Wilkes asks basic questions: reveal or
conceal? What is the place of ecstasis in one’s ethnography? In an-
swer to these questions, she argues that the adoption of a somewhat
dispassionate or scientific stance in research does not mean that we
must be passion-less in the field. Rather, as suggested by Fabian, pas-
sion—understood as both drive and suffering—can be seen as a con-
dition of knowledge. In this perspective, ethnographic objectivity is
the outcome of passionate personal experience that mediates between
the I and the Other in the production of ethnographic knowledge. Tell-
ing the story of how she came to participate in and appreciate Kainai
ways of learning about one’s place in a web of significant relation-
ships, Wilkes offers a new kind of scholarship, one that fully accepts
the challenges of decolonizing methodology and writing. This new
scholarship that has yet to emerge fully in its own right is “based on
Aboriginal cognitive and spiritual maps”; it “adheres to Aboriginal
protocols at all stages of its enactment,” and it uses “Aboriginal meth-
odologies, as appropriate to local traditions and the subject matter
being addressed” (McNaughton and Rock 2004 , 52 ).
Beyond Our Known Worlds
