Our feelings and definitions of alterity as anthropologists are pro-
duced to a significant degree by direct and prolonged contact with
our hosts. Our indigenous cultural beacons, however, sometimes not
only fail to illuminate but produce an ultimately enriching confusion
that challenges the very postulates by which we have carefully con-
structed our anthropological and personal selves. In this paper I take
a position that differs with the theme announced by the editors. This
theme emerged from the notion, first advanced by Fabian ( 1991 ), that
our best ethnographic fieldwork is often carried on while we are “out
of our minds,” temporarily deranged by the strangeness of it all. Ac-
cording to the premise advanced by the editors of this volume, the
clash of viewpoints obliges us to confront deep epistemological, polit-
ical, moral, and other issues, because the boundaries of the ways we
constitute knowledge of the world and of ourselves are brought into
sharp relief by prolonged contact (Goulet 1994 b). I argue that field-
work is not bounded in place and in time and that the prolonged con-
tact of field research continues to operate well beyond the boundar-
ies that define the formal aspects of contact.
While it is not for me to second-guess other people’s thinking, it
seems to me that this position, which privileges the spatial dimension
of the encounter at the expense of the temporal, is a refinement of the
earlier postulate of cultural relativism that dominated postwar an-
thropology. It opens the door to the same problems that anthropolo-
gists have been trying to avoid for the last two decades. Briefly, in the
1960 s, anthropologists couched the issue of relativism in exclusively
Sharing Meaning through Time and Space
- Experiences of Power among the
Sekani of Northern British Columbia
guy lanoue