Jean-Guy A. Goulet and Bruce Granville Millerwho are local. These local actors, in turn, are also, to some degree, in
the dark about various aspects of their home environment. In such cir-
cumstances, as ethnographers we come to acknowledge “the fact that
interaction promoted through long-term participation produces not
only ‘observations’ but also conceptualizations and insights that are
clearly a joint creation of the anthropologists and his/her local part-
ners in interaction” (Barth 1992 , 65 ).
InThe Ethnographic Self, Amanda Coffey comments favorably on
“instances where researchers have reported extraordinary experiences
that have occurred to them during fieldwork,” noting that “these ex-
periences are extraordinary in the sense that conventional fieldwork
wisdom would dismiss or be unduly pessimistic about them” (Cof-
fey 1999 , 33 ). She mentions Being Changed by Cross-Cultural En-
counters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experiences, co-edited
by Young and Goulet ( 1998 ), which contains examples of such “ac-
counts by social anthropologists who have seen or experienced the
unusual or unexpected during fieldwork. These include seeing a spirit
(E. Turner, 1994 a); acquiring the powers associated with a shaman
(Guédon 1994 ); and witnessing the reappearance of the dead (Goulet
1994 a)” (Coffey 1999 , 33 ). In Coffey’s view, since “these accounts are
based on the ‘real’ experiences of the researchers, and echo the expe-
riences of other social actors (or members) in the field,” they should
not “be conceptualized (and indeed criticized) as ‘going native’ types
of story” for “they are presented in a somewhat different light: as
evidence of knowledge gained that would otherwise have remained
partial and opaque” (Coffey 1999 , 33 ). In other words, Coffey ar-
gues that the exclusion from one’s ethnography of the insights gained
through the ecstatic side of fieldwork is unwarranted and detrimen-
tal to the development of the discipline. This is why we welcome Fa-
bian’s “call for more attention to ecstasies” in the production of eth-
nographic knowledge ( 2001 , 31 ).
From this epistemological perspective, Amanda Coffey’s “concern
is not so much with the ‘truth’ of such accounts, as with the ways in
which they challenge the harsh rationality of the distinction between
observer and observed in the conduct of fieldwork and reconstruction
of culture” (Coffey 1999 , 33 , our emphasis). It is in this vein that we