Sister of My Soul

Book Discussion: Response to Comments by Anna High

“…8 But inevitably, in telling stories, to some degree at least, the children and informants whose stories I tell are cast as "objects rather than creators of anthropological knowledge." 9 This causes a moral tension, although Kirsten Bell has noted, in a passage that resonates with me, that the moral tensions of fieldwork arguably differ in degree rather than in kind from the tensions raised by human interactions in all its forms, with their vacillations between sincerity and insincerity, genuineness and hypocrisy, honesty and self-deception. Viewed in this light, the perils of ethnographic fieldwork, as with its promise, stem as much from the anthropologist's humanity as their professional identity as a researcher.…”