0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Moving Beyond Culturally Bound Ethical Guidelines
home environment, but also when we ourselves are back “home,” be-
having “strangely.” The apparent contradiction is between the need to
maintain an identity, without which interaction and communication
is impossible, and the need to abandon an identity that would pre-
clude new forms of communication and, therefore, new insights and
information. In other words, “Because action needs an agent, we must
maintain our identity. And we must abandon it, because no action—
certainly not the action of exploration and ethnography—is possible
if we keep a rigid hold on our identity” Fabian ( 2000 , 278 ). Letting
go, we enter into the ecstatic, that side of the ethnographic endeavor
that is beyond the known and the taken-for-granted. Doing so, as il-
lustrated above in every other chapter of this book, we also learn to
“think of identity as a process rather than a property or state” (Fa-
bian 2000 , 278 ). As a result, accounts of dreams and of other “sub-
conscious processes are well on their way to securing a place in this
recasting of the ethnographic field” (Salamon 2003 , 250 ).^8“The stories are wet with our breath.”
For the anthropologist, the issues involved in living and working with
Native North Americans in their world are complex. Bruce Miller
( 2000 , 6 ) observes that “in recent years, there is an increased expecta-
tion by indigenous people that their understanding be foregrounded.... It is no longer a choice made by anthropologists sifting through
structural, functional, and symbolic models and methods” to deter-
mine the best framework in which to present their findings to fellow
professionals. If so, what happens to classical anthropology when in-
digenous understanding is foregrounded? Does the anthropology re-
cede in the background or, does it even disappear altogether? Trigger
( 1995 , quoted in Legros 1999 , 21 ) suggests this much when he asks:
“Can non-Native scholars write a history of Native people of North
America? Will the Cambridge history of the Native people of North
America be the last scholarly account of Native peoples by non-ab-
original scholars?”
To ask the question in these terms is to suggest that the assertion of
the aboriginal voice goes hand in hand with the negation of the voice