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Step by fateful step, an anthropological practice located in the real
here and now of encounter takes us beyond our previously known
worlds. One crosses these epistemological thresholds, and still the pro-
cess continues to call us: into fidelity, into change, into question. My
aim here is to explore some entanglements of friendship and episte-
mology across the threshold of life and death. My exploration causes
me further to reflect upon silences, ethics, and connectivities.
I was privileged to do my graduate studies in anthropology at Bryn
Mawr College and to study under Professor Jane Goodale. Her work
with Australian Aboriginal people inspired my own research (Goodale
1971 [ 1994 ]), and her field methods course guided it. Goodale taught
us a full range of anthropological methods. The emphasis, however,
was on participant observation, and this method was set within the
broader epistemological frame of deutero-learning, or learning to learn.
Drawing on the work of Gregory Bateson, Goodale taught us that in
our learning from others in the field, a central method was learning
to learn. Our task as anthropologists, it seemed, did not allow us sim-
ply to transfer our epistemologies into another context. Rather, it re-
quired that we learn how other people learn, that we open our minds
and our bodies to other people’s epistemologies. For this reason, and
as a result of her own extensive field experience, Goodale taught that
good field learning is a whole-person experience. Our most impor-
tant research tool, we were taught, was our own self; self-observation
and self-awareness were not to be suppressed in the work of observ-
ing and gaining an understanding of others.
4. Recursive Epistemologies and an Ethics of Attention
deborah bird rose
