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The Politics of Ecstatic Research
to talk with our collaborators. This sort of anthropology might let
us fit community expectations of learners and join those who have a
sense of what is going on, who are not a liability, who pose little risk
to the health and safety. These are obvious advantages, but I wish
to explore other advantages and also risks, traps one might fall into.
Within an experience-near framework we become more easily in-
terpretable, more predictable, to our collaborators; they more readily
understand what we are trying to do and why (Goulet 1994 a). There
arises a common language of motivation that might allow relation-
ships to deepen, to be more genuine. A trivial example from my own
experience: one hot summer day some years ago I sat working in my
office at the University of British Columbia. No one else was around
except a single secretary. I heard someone walk up my corridor and
was startled when a man walked into my office. He told me he had
found a wallet in a phone booth and wanted to return it to its owner,
and for some reason he couldn’t explain, he thought he should come
to the anthropology building at ubc. The wallet belonged to Pro-
fessor Cyril Belshaw, a previous occupant of my very office. I took
the wallet and put it in my desk for safekeeping. While my back was
turned, the man disappeared, or perhaps, vanished. I mentioned this
strange story to a few First Nations people, who offered their own
understandings of the event, and what I might do in response. One
noted First Nations scholar told me that possessions find their way
back to their owners. My office, in effect, continued to attract Belshaw
things. In addition, the man who brought the wallet might not really
be human, but instead a spiritual entity. Someone else, a Coast Salish
person, suggested that I spiritually cleanse the room so that this sort
of thing wouldn’t happen again, and hang cedar over the door. This
would involve bringing in someone qualified to conduct such work.
This suggestion hinged on the fact that Professor Belshaw had once
been tried in a foreign country for the murder of his wife, a charge he
was cleared of, but which nevertheless was associated with his name.
Belshaw items might themselves be spiritually dangerous.
There are several things of interest about this. One is the assump-
tion that indigenous interpretations were the ones that mattered, even
though this was an event apparently involving three white men: Belshaw,
