Jean-Guy A. Goulet
ConclusionAn anthropologist and a student decide on the basis of the student’s
dream not to publish an account of a Cree judicial process. Is it suf-
ficient then to say that they then acted ethically, for, in doing so, they
did not undermine the Native North American understanding of the
event? An anthropologist listens to three local ancestors who visit
him in the night to assist him and the local community in their land
claims. Following the visitation of these three elders, is it sufficient to
share the news with tribal members and later on to write that “this
[Elders speaking in a dream] is an appropriate source of knowledge
in the community, for some at least” (B. Miller, personal communica-
tion, April 26 , 2002 )? How can we European and Euro–North Amer-
ican anthropologists truly deal with these questions as they arise from
our living and working cooperatively with Native North Americans
in their world?
To answer such questions, ethnographers often shy away from rad-
ical participation in the world of their hosts, claiming that such in-
timate association with others is not a prerequisite to penetrate the
reasons for which they account for their behavior within their socio-
cultural universe. In this vein, Augé writes the following: “I see no in-
convenience whatsoever in considering that the observer is recording
fictions, narrations that are quite foreign to him, but the reasons of
which he can penetrate. The expression participatory ethnology has
no other meaning and presupposes no kind of mystical fusion with
others” ( 2004 , 44 ). Broadly speaking, fiction is to be understood
here “not as fiction opposite to the truth of the narrative the histo-
rians claim to be true, but as narration, a scenario that obeys a cer-
tain number of rules” (Augé 2004 , 34 ). In this sense, living fictions is
the characteristic of human lives everywhere. No one is ever not liv-
ing a fiction, including the ethnographer interacting first with his or
her hosts, and later on with his or her readers. Nonetheless, in Au-
gé’s insistence that “no other meaning” be attached to the notion of
“participatory ethnology”, we see operating the fear of going native,
of crossing over the boundaries of rationality into the world of mys-
ticism. This fear unduly constrains the range of ethnographic experi-