Jean-Guy A. Goulet and Bruce Granville Millerter what its ostensible subject, to be but an expression of his research
experience, or, more accurately, of what his research experience has
done to him.”
In this book, as in publications mentioned earlier, readers are often
startled by accounts of this sort of knowledge gained through radical
participation in the world of others. In this experiential perspective,
reliable ethnographic knowledge is generated through radical partic-
ipation and vulnerability, not distance and detachment. How else are
we to grasp a “people’s point of view, their relation to life, to realize
their vision of their world (Malinowski 1953 , 25 ; emphasis in origi-
nal). In brief, ethnographers “use ‘participation’ much more radically
as a method than most interpretivists have imagined” (Barth 1992 ,
66 ). The recourse to radical participation as a method enables us, “if
only for a moment, to reach the highest goal of our work, fashioning
representations of other cultures that do not erase their immediacy
and presence” (Fabian 2000 , 120 ).
Together, all the essays in this book argue that “the triumph of logic
and rationality, the clever architecture of theoretical artifices, and the
cunning methods devised for novice researchers do not make science”
(Fabian 2000 , xii). What, then, do these procedures do? According to
Fabian, “What they do promote is ascetic withdrawal from the world
as we experience it with our senses. In the end, science conceived,
taught, and institutionalized in such a manner is sense-less” ( 2000 ,
xii). Against such a conception, we can choose to come back to our
senses. We write, then, in a manner that captures meaningfully the
immediacy of the experiences that challenged us to think beyond our
taken-for-granted notions of the real and of true knowledge.
Radical participation as a process becomes intrinsic to our search
for knowledge and understanding of the human experience. Through
radical participation or experience of the ecstatic side of fieldwork,
we discover new forms of engagement with others in the everyday
world. We are then confronted with the realization that we often
can’t find the line to know if we have passed it, that we have tran-
scended the academically defined boundaries of the knowable and are
therefore in relatively new territory. We are then confronted with an