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Moving Beyond Culturally Bound Ethical Guidelines
various sorts to display in museums as illustrations at the synchronic
level of the diachronic evolution of human cultures and civilization.
The juxtaposition in a museum of Huron or Hottentot artifacts with
those of Europeans illustrated in the minds of the viewers a “sequence
of historical cultures,” from the most primitive, to the most advanced
(Zammito 2002 , 236 ). At the end of the nineteenth century, for eth-
nographers and museum visitors, to travel in space was to travel in
time. Encountering the primitive other was literally to come to face
with an earlier version of oneself.
Anthropologists no longer live their quest for direct observation of
others as a gate to the past. Fieldwork is nonetheless still privileged
as the most reliable means to encounter others in their environment.
Our participation in the lifeworld of others ought to be deep enough
to enable us “to describe reality as it is confronted by our hosts, to de-
scribe all that they cannot wish away and that, therefore, must enter
any reasonable and moral account of one’s actions and those of oth-
ers” (Goulet 1998 , 258 ). Like many other anthropologists, I maintain
that the more radical our participation in the lifeworld of our hosts,
the better positioned we are to describe it as it is.
Immersing ourselves in the world of our hosts, as they confront it,
we inevitably undergo various degrees of personal transformation as-
sociated with a heightened awareness of the human potential. These
changes result from our interaction with others who act on the basis
of ontological, epistemological, and ethical assumptions that differ
from those in the light of which, more or less consciously, we origi-
nally thought out our research agenda. In the light of such transfor-
mations in the field, we move beyond the canons of modern ethnog-
raphy that rest on the assumption that We (Westerners) are not They
(the ones we anthropologists variously referred to as the Primitive or
the Traditional) (Watson and Goulet 1992 ).
In this respect, Favret-Saada ( 1980 , 191 ) notes that the “Great Di-
vide between ‘them’ and ‘us’” was a device used by modern ethnog-
raphers and their audiences to protect themselves “from any contami-
nation” by the object of anthropological study. This point is reiterated
by Shweder ( 1991 , 191 ), who reminds us that “one of the central
myths of the modern period in the West is the idea that the opposition
