IV. Negotiation

“When doing fieldwork, we are not only asking people to take time to work with us, we are also asking them to trust us. Each relationship we build with an informant is different, but all are implicitly reciprocal. Identifying exactly what our obligations are to our informants is perhaps the most crucial step we take in ensuring we act ethically.” _{(PERCS 2018)}

Point to ponder: What kinds of reciprocity do you know?

Buzz Group:
After a joint visit to the restaurant: Are you paying jointly (one bill for all) or separately? What rules apply, where & when? In Germany? In your country/ other countries?

Buzz Group:
• The Golden Rule principle of treating others as you want to be treated applies to most ethical issues, but here it is particularly useful as a starting point:
• If you were the research participant, what would you expect from the researcher you were working with? What would be a fair return for assistance? …:
• Direct Compensation?
• Maintenance of contact after project ends?
• Sharing of all data with you?
• Other returns you know or?
• Did they work?

• As long as one researches “down”the power structures, with disadvantaged, marginalized people, showing sympathy or even solidarity with them and advocating for them seems ethically sound.
• But what, if we study up, towards powerful, radical or even unlawful/criminal structures?
• Benjamin Teitelbaum, who spent 10 years researching on right wing groups in the Nordic countries, defends scholar-informant solidarity in ethnography as “…morally volatile and epistemologically indispensable. Seldom can we campaign against the people we study while collaborating and engaging with them personally, yet it is through exchange and partnership that we gain our signature claims to knowledge.” _{(Teitelbaum2019)}

Point to ponder: Can we “dance with the wolves” (Hübinette 2019), without howling with them; or do we always need a ‘detached’ form of observation in “studying up”, as Laura Nader (1974) put it, to stay ethically unblemished? What does Teitelbaum mean with “our signature claims to knowledge”?

The system of owed gratitude -utang na loob in the Philippines:
• hierarchical system of mutual, often lifelong, but informal relationships of favor and obligation between a patron and his clients
• translated by locals to development experts and institutions as reciprocity offer: ‘participation’ of the clients in project activities for ‘lifelong’social caretaking and favors by the project
• consider the consequences for clients when the project ends and researchers / experts leave the country… _{(Source: Teves, Lurli. 2000).}

Buzz Group:
How would you cope with expectations of reciprocity after the end of fieldwork?

• “In our informed consent statements, we often outline what participants will be asked to do, what they will receive in exchange, and how we will protect their confidentiality.
• But as the conditions around us change, we may discover that we cannot adhere to all of the things we promised.
• Further, it may become evident that we have discovered new questions that are more central to our understanding.
• How can we keep our participants abreast of our current thinking and the shifts in our research questions or practices? How can we think of informed consent as being an ongoing process of negotiation rather than a one-time guarantee?” _{(PERCS 2018);}

• “However, from the beginning of my research phase I faced major difficulties in approaching men as a female researcher.
• It was complicated to… talk to men –aside from discussions surrounding their careers –or to build up trustworthy professional relationships in general. Men will small talk about work or hobby-related topics, but it was impossible to discuss private aspects of their lives openly.
• It was extremely hard to get into contact with men in semi-public social spaces without being flirted with or ensnared in the androcentric-dominated [world].” _{[Johnson 2020]}

• Point to ponder: How would you have (re)acted in her place as a female researcher in the field?
• Buzz Group: If you are a gender mixed group, divide yourself into gender-homogeneous subgroups and compare your discussion results afterwards.

• “Schooled in post-1980s reflexive anthropology, I was acutely sensitive to the exploitative potential of the situation. I often felt like a vampire, sucking stories out of my informants, living and feeding off the blood of their lives.
• Thus, when informants demanded something of me in return for their participation –money, a small gift, help with finding a job, assistance with their child’s education, etc. –I was often relieved[…]
• With male informants, however, my desire to fulfil reciprocity expectationsplaced me in a position of vulnerability. Many men made it quite clear what they wanted in return for their participation… I felt paralysedby my desire to be a ‘good anthropologist’.”_{(Johansson 2015:58)}

• Driessen(1998) states that “the rhetoric of friendship often [..] operates to conceal the strains involved in the unequal power balance between fieldworkers and informants” [:132]
• Hatfield (1973) speaks of asymmetrical mutual exploitative constellations with the researcher in the triple role as: incompetent fool (stranger, child, or pawn), ‘Fort Knox‘ (reflecting her/his perceived wealth), and ‘Sahib‘ (apparent class-hopping skills between state/academic circles and local community, world traveler and cultural transvestite).
• Tillmann-Healy (2003) wrote in defense of friendship as a methodological tool, as a firm base for empathic understanding.
• For van der Geest”friendship developed in the course of research, ‘because of the research’. [..]It was through my persistent questions, they said, that they had seen new things in their taken for granted day-to-day lives.” _{(van der Geest2015: 7)}