Goulet.pdf

Deborah Bird Rose
The implications of deutero-learning take us into an anthropology
that is wonderfully open. Jean-Guy Goulet, for example, writes of his
work with the Dene Tha: “Dene informants are firm in their convic-
tion that individuals, including ethnographers, who have not directly
experienced the reality of revelation or instruction through dreams
and visions do not and cannot understand a crucial dimension of the
Dene knowledge system” (Goulet 1998 , xxix). His narrative ethnog-
raphy seeks to communicate this and other aspects of his deutero-
learning over many years with these people.
As the work of Goulet, among others, makes clear, the issue is not
only epistemological in the methodological sense but also leads into
a rich metaphysical domain concerning the human condition and the
condition of life more generally. This openness leads to an anthropol-
ogy that is dialogical, reflexive, and attentive to process, and that ex-
tends beyond the human and into the lives of plants, animals, and all
manner of extraordinary beings and modes of communication. The
ethics and methods Goodale’s students learned in the classroom al-
ready predisposed us to work outside the constraining structures, an-
alyzed so eloquently by Johannes Fabian ( 1983 ), that produce rep-
resentations of distanced others. The co-eval chronotope of ethical
ethnography is founded in attention to the actual here and now of the
encounter. In my view, the ethical encounter demands that anthropol-
ogists engage attentively both with our research partners and teachers
and with that which engages their attention. Such attention is demand-
ing. As the years went by, I began to realize that I needed to improve
my skills in history and geography. Then it was botany and ecology,
and, later, environmental philosophy and ethics. Holism or hubris?
Bradd Shore ( 1999 ) asks in an essay on anthropology’s engagement
with a holistic approach to humanity. Perhaps some of both, it seems
to me, but, in any case, a legitimate demand on a whole-person re-
search scholar.
Deutero-learning presses one to exceed the boundaries not only of
disciplines and categories but also of a normative or rational self. Fa-
bian ( 1991 , 399 – 400 ) expresses the view that a lot of our research
“is carried out best while we are ‘out of our minds,’ that is... when
we let ourselves go.” He notes that “ecstatic” experiences are rarely