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Moving Beyond Culturally Bound Ethical Guidelines
as being part of the lives of others—Native North Americans, for in-
stance. Knowing and understanding this, one may believe the prop-
osition to be false. For many Native North Americans, however, and
for many Euro–North Americans and Europeans also, the proposi-
tion is true at a deeper level. As illustrated in the ethnographic mate-
rial presented above, this proposition may also shape one’s behavior
and inform one’s feelings and unexpectedly open the door to genuine
interaction between Euro–North Americans and Native Americans
in their world. Such occurrences reflect the fact that the field experi-
ence becomes, to a significant extent, “the center of our intellectual
and emotional lives,” the process through which we are, “if not ‘go-
ing native,’ at least becoming bicultural” (B. Tedlock 1991 , 82 ).
Barbara Tedlock’s suggestion that many anthropologists become bi-
cultural through the process of fieldwork enables us to account for the
manner in which a student and I pursued a conversation on the basis
of aboriginal epistemological and ontological assumptions, ones that
we had not been truly familiar with before we became familiar with
our Dene and Cree hosts. Burridge had clearly thought through this
issue when he wrote the following:
Every anthropologist has experienced “culture shock”: a tempo-
rary inability, when moving from one culture to another, to grasp
and act and think in terms of the assumptions upon which the
newly entered culture is based. Not only is this shock experienced
in fieldwork, while one learns the ways of a new culture, but it
is experienced even more disconcertingly when one returns to
one’s own culture. Mind and emotions are confused: two different
worlds have met in the same person. One alternative is insanity.
Another is to comprehend one world in the terms of the other.
(Burridge1969, 163–164, in Fabian 1979, 9–10)
Beyond the stark alternative of going insane or comprehending their
world in term of ours, there is still another possibility. We may, as con-
tributors to this book do, compare and contrast competing epistemo-
logical and ontological assumptions as experienced in and beyond the
field. The task at hand consists in describing and analyzing the experi-
ences of communication when one “learns the ways of a new culture”
