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The Anthropology Of Guilt And Rapport: Moral Mutuality In Ethnographic Fieldwork, Eric Gable

Sociology and Anthropology

In this article, I use Clifford Geertz’s backhanded defense of Malinowski’s seeming emotional hypocrisy—his dislike of the natives whose point of view he wished to understand—to argue that while empathy or at least sympathy are integral components of the intimacies of fieldwork, they are also the catalyst for the darker and usually far less openly discussed emotions that are associated with these feelings—guilt, anger, and disgust—that are also at play in the fieldwork encounter. Indeed these sentiments, inevitably intersubjective in origin and expression, are intrinsic to the kind of knowledge we produce as ethnographers. I explore how these emotions emerge …