Denise Nuttallis an engagement of a student to a master. Seen in this way, the power
relations between self and other becomes crystal clear, the master
has the knowledge, power, and skill; the anthropologist becomes the
apprentice.
The apprentice approach demands that the anthropologist explicitly
challenge the rigid subject–object dichotomy of old. In her work on the
rise of narrative ethnography, Barbara Tedlock addresses the issue of
intersubjectivity by looking back at the old accusation of “going na-
tive”: “What seems to lie behind the belief that going native poses a
serious danger to the fieldworker is the logical construction of the re-
lationship between objectivity and subjectivity, between scientist and
native, between self and other, as unbridgeable opposition” (B. Ted-
lock 1991 , 71 ). This idea that the fieldworker must somehow effec-
tively participate in and observe a new and somewhat strange way
of life, in the Malinowskian sense of observation as detachment and
objectification of the other, serves only to create a personal and ethi-
cal crisis in the doing of ethnography.
Although the apprentice approach to participant observation in an-
thropology has been most frequently used by ethnomusicologists and
dance ethnologists (Neuman 1974 , 1980 ; Kippen 1988 ; Chernoff 1979 ,
1993 ; Sudnow 1978 ; Zarrilli 1984 , 1987 ), there is a growing inter-
est in the practice of apprenticeship within the wider discipline (Coy
1989 , Stoller 1987 , Cooper 1989 , Goody 1989 , Dow 1989 , Taussig
1987 ). Past studies of apprenticeship have neglected to examine the
significance of apprenticeships where the anthropologist creates and
sustains concrete ties binding the student to a master or larger social
organization and culture over time (Lave and Wenger 1991 , Dow
1989 , Cooper 1989 ). Researchers have reported a type of schizophre-
nia arising from the problematics of engaging in a double role of ap-
prentice in a skill or trade and as an anthropologist–ethnographer.
The apprenticeship is seen as “pretense” or “play” because what the
anthropologist is really doing is gathering data “with an eye to use
in publication, explanation and testing theory” (Dow 1989 , 207 ).
A successful anthropology of apprenticeship is not based on a form
of “play.” On the contrary, in the case of tabla communities, the re-
searcher–apprentice must learn the knowledge and learn it well; oth-
erwise, the field literally disappears.