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The Politics of Ecstatic Research
directly account for these in their written record of fieldwork. These
are edited from most reports or, perhaps, taken as hallmarks of the
peculiarity of anthropological work.
My argument is that participation in or the failure to participate in
the belief systems of the members of this community is not politically
neutral. There are significant and unexpected reasons that one might
adopt the approach of “experience-near” anthropology that are nei-
ther naive nor evidence of scholarly failure through “going native.”
One might draw an analogy between giving anthropological testi-
mony in court as an expert witness and making the argument I am
making here. In that setting, if one does not understand the legal lan-
guage imposed by other participants (lawyers, judges, and others),
they can unwittingly and easily testify to something they did not in-
tend. The legal practitioners may use the same language as anthropol-
ogists, but often with different meaning; for example, “tribe,” “fish,”
or “time immemorial” may have specific content deriving from case
law and have limited connection to current anthropological use.^2 In
both the courtroom and the longhouse, one’s presence has unintended
political consequences if one does not participate in the local legal
culture in the Geertzian sense of a local, dense system of meaning
(Geertz 1983 ). This perspective stands in contrast to the more usual
and converse view that engaging the beliefs of non-Western commu-
nities as something other than the object of analysis is politically sus-
pect. From my perspective, it is naive empiricism and unfettered pos-
itivism that is intellectually and politically untenable in the emphasis
on examining local beliefs within a foreign framework. And such a
position is frequently simply not useful. Mills and Slobodin ( 1994 ),
for example, tell of a Paiute man who observed that anthropologists
sometimes fall short because they don’t know what questions to ask.
Similarly, I’ve worked with health researchers who refuse to consider
what they regard as uninformed or misplaced local views concerning
health, well-being, and disease. As a consequence, they produce ex-
pensive research reports carefully calibrated for reliability and valid-
ity, but which fail to speak to the health problems as understood lo-
cally and which have no impact on the lives of community members.
In addition, such research alienates community members who regard
