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The Politics of Ecstatic Research
center. He was given to teasing widowed elders, to their great dismay,
about his prospects of marrying them under a provision of the local
kinship system, the sororate. He is a gruff former logger and semi-
professional boxer, and a bon vivant. He is irreverent by nature and
gave no sign of spiritual or religious inclination in my presence until
one afternoon when a non-indigenous tribal employee pushed her ra-
tionalist perception of the world too hard, arguing for the merits of
the economic development of the region. She suggested that a noted
feature of the local landscape, a rocky outcrop, might be removed. At
this, the elder exploded, in his only show of rage I’ve observed in the
years I have known him, shouting: “The rock is alive!”
I conclude from this that it is continually unclear what mutual ex-
pectations might entail. Goulet gives us that the Dene Tha insist on
the primacy of experience in learning and that they expect anthropol-
ogists to learn in the manner they learn. This is likely a widely shared
idea in indigenous communities; after all, as I have suggested, protec-
tion and safety arise only from power and knowledge. But indigenous
people recognize other forms of knowledge and ways of learning as
well, even if they contest them in their own communities. For exam-
ple, community members with a post-secondary education are some-
times scorned and thought to have lost their ability to understand in-
digenous knowledge, but they are also valued in other contexts.
The problematic assumption of the posture of learner
Academics are similarly problematic. Anthropologists commonly po-
sition themselves as beginners or learners in another’s culture (Guédon
1994 ). We assume this posture because we genuinely do not know and
because we hope it will cause others to explain things to us. It seems
intellectually honest, and it suggests that we will learn and that, at
some future date, we will have progressed. Learners, after all, learn.
We seem to learn oddly, however, and to learn odd things that do not
fit with local epistemology. An example might be knowledge of the
demographic structure of a community. We do not necessarily learn
things that suggest our maturation, how to think and behave, from
the community viewpoint. The anthropologist–indigenous relation-
ship sometimes might be more properly said to resemble a wardship.
