Edward Absewhat they call b’éenkoa and sums up in one word essentially the same
meaning as that of our own idiomatic expression. What I allude to
has everything to do with the sorts of misgivings voiced by my hosts,
which they had to overcome (again and again) if they decided to be
among those who cooperated with me in what was for them a very
strange project. This was an effort made especially difficult for them
since knowledge as a value in and of itself does not in any way corre-
spond to their own indigenous forms of understanding, wherein, as
Kenneth Morrison has said of Native Americans generally, “knowl-
edge as power derives [in part and in an important sense] from a cau-
tious scrutiny of the other that seeks evidence of good intention in
actual behavior” ( 1994 , 12 ). Indeed, certain areas of inquiry are re-
fractory both to cooperation itself and, even where limited collabo-
ration is offered, to preconceived eliciting methods intended to bring
such relationships to fruition.
On the one hand, then, this chapter explores some of the unantic-
ipated complexities involved in the implementation of a recently el-
evated ethical tenet of social science research, that is, of “informed
consent.” I argue that, rather than abiding the polite fiction of a once-
and-for-all, decided contractual agreement, such consent and the work-
ing alliance that it enables might more realistically be perceived as the
ever-renegotiated effect of a dialectic of mutual- and self-deception
and revelation between and on the part of fieldworker and informants.
On the other hand, I seek to call into question the efficacy of any ide-
alized solutions to what are in fact the intractable problems involved
in overcoming the distance between self and other in the collabora-
tive production of ethnographic knowledge.
In the mid-nineties, when I was preparing to embark on fieldwork,
an emphasis on “dialogue” and its transparent representation in eth-
nography was still being promoted by many anthropologists as a
corrective for the distortions of power inequalities methodologically
constraining and morally compromising our professional endeavors.
And yet, the ideal and the practice of dialogue itself present obvious
problems from the very outset of one’s research, from developing
competency in the native language to establishing rapport with host
subjects. One issue is especially acute in particular situations such as