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In January 2009, I arranged the renovation of a school in my field site in the south of Laos with funds raised from donors in Australia. This project was initiated at the request of village leaders, and, initially, I saw it as a chance to acknowledge the generous assistance that residents had granted me during my fieldwork. However, the execution of the project was tense, particularly when it brought to the surface long‐running ambiguities arising from my adoption as a daughter into a particular Lao family. This adoption, like the school project itself, involved a series of donations that could be interpreted as either self‐serving or altruistic—or both. Antagonisms, repressed in donations intended to produce solidarity, make frequent return and imbue those donations with an ambiguous character. Thus, although such exchanges are essential to everyday life in the south of Laos (and to fieldwork), they are also precarious and can lead to conflict as easily as to peace. This ambivalence is especially pronounced in the cross‐cultural context of fieldwork, in which the ethnographer is invited to seek out relationships of solidarity and shared understanding but also confronts his or her own specificity. [Laos, the gift, ethnographic fieldwork, fantasy, exchange]

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Relationships forged during ethnographic fieldwork are often ambivalent, if only because of the tension between “being there” and departure. Following Freud's argument that ambivalence in relationships lies at the heart of melancholia, I argue that ethnographic ambivalence can result in disciplinary melancholia, as seen in calls for a more ethical anthropology and in the pleasure of these appeals. I reach this conclusion by continuing a narrative I began in this journal in 2009, in which I describe my “entanglement” in familial relationships in my field site in southern Laos. Here I focus on the central ambivalence of Lao familial relationships (between nurturance and abandonment), especially in terms of how it informs understandings of death, ghostly agency, and Buddhism. I contend that the central ambivalence of anthropology (between being there and departure) likewise informs disciplinary debates about the ethics of fieldwork, collective culpability, and moral positioning.