Formalizing the Interpersonal in Anthropological Field Research

Ethnographic field research and psychoanalytic psychotherapy are professional practices that rely on interpersonal relationships which are instrumental and deeply emotional, amicable and inimical, close and distant. Both could be seen as contrived social settings that, nonetheless, facilitate a genuine engagement between two or more people. Both require mutual affective attunement as well as moments of “cold” analysis. Both are held in place through the formalization of what, in a “natural” social setting, would be friendship or kinship or some sort of private business. Special

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agreements, rituals, and boundaries such as payment rates for the exchange, time schedules, meeting sites, confidentiality, and, for many anthropologists, the nominal integration into the local kinship system or system of social relations, set the parameters in which close and often intimate encounters can take place.

However, as I will suggest here, when relationships are reified through bureaucratic regulations the positive effects of formalization are erased, which in turn can destroy the social relationship it is meant to protect. I contrast such sterile formalizations with the mechanisms through which Aboriginal people in Central Australia safeguard the immanent goods of relatedness in the research process. I argue that accountability and responsibility in the local Indigenous society are enacted interpersonally, and that this differs fundamentally from the contractual if often internalized relationship that binds Western individuals to the external authority located in institutional bureaucracies. Moving between the two, the ethnographer is faced with the challenge to build a viable professional conscience without relinquishing a healthy skepticism towards either one.

Putting Relationships on the Books: Sterile Formalizations

On the face of it, the politics, ethics, and practice of anthropological research with Australian Aboriginal people has changed considerably over the last ten years or so. Methodologies are being “decolonized,” Indigenous intellectual and cultural property is receiving fuller acknowledgement, and rather than “feeding” information to the inquiring researcher, Aboriginal people have become partners and collaborators in the co-production of knowledge. Much of this has been good practice all along but these prima facie conditions of building relationships based on love-the anthropologist’s willingness to submit to total dependency on his host society, mutual recognition, reciprocity, emotional support, and desire for intellectual exchange—are now proscriptively demanded and thus deontologized by the academy. In other words, ethics become detached from personhood and confined to the level of prescriptive rules of behavior.

New levels of administrative surveillance of the research process are stifling and even perverting what is essentially an open-ended process of knowledge production that hinges on the dialogue

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between two or more people, and in which the success of the communication depends a great deal on the goodwill and subtle mutual perception of the interlocutors. In Australia where I work, the litigious stance of the academy towards its practitioners has something in common with the (more intangible) control mechanisms through which psychoanalytic training institutions reproduce themselves. Hidden within the hierarchy of professional rank in the latter and within positions and administrative bodies in the former are the desires, frustrations, aggression, and resentment of those who interpret and enact regulations that are seemingly objective. The lack of transparency and personal accountability can have negative consequences for the actual practice. What Jurgen Reeder observes for the psychoanalytic training institutes seems true for the Australian university and other research funding bodies: “there is often a clear distance between the immanent goods of the practice…and the… institutional functions meant…to safeguard these goods” (Jurgen Reeder, Hate and Love in Psychoanalytical Institutions: The Dilemma of a Profession, 2004, p. 147).

University ethics committees have put regulations in place that seek to protect the Indigenous “informant” from intellectual exploitation by the researcher. They take for granted that the Indigenous collaborator will identify with their protectionist measures, which may not be as benign as they look. Institutional ethic compliance might be an unproblematic aspect in survey type studies, where people tick off boxes on questionnaires. But when research means engaging the whole person, ideally over many years, the quasi-contractual moment seeds doubt: the relationship is set in legalistic terms from the start, adding an external gaze to the social experience at the heart of the mutual open production of knowledge, and implying that the exchange should be flawless or else contentious.

Just like the modern legal system at large, ethics committees disavow “direct appeal to the group, to ideas of relatedness to others as a basis for responsibility or justification for action” (Gary Robinson, “Violence, Social Differentiation and the Self,” Oceania, 65: 4, 1995, pp. 323-347). As an external juridical eye that functions as the superego system of the academic institution (after Reeder), it invites suspicion in the goodness of the relationship itself. Subse-

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quently, after a personal relationship has become an intrinsic and crucial element in the research process, the Indigenous friend might develop thoughts of bad faith about the persona “Chief Investigator.” In the mind of the participant, the elaborate assurances on paper, namely that the Researcher is conducting the study with good and not with malignant intent, might encourage the feeling that he or she must be an untrustworthy character in need of such legalistic assurances to the contrary.

Safeguarding Relationships in the Field: Living Formalizations

In working with the Aboriginal people I have come to know, the personal encounter is the basis of the formalization of the relationship. It took two years and a visit by ten desert women invited by a private art dealer to Berlin, during which we came to know each other, to get my first research permit for the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands in the northwest corner of South Australia. The formalization of the relationships through a research agreement followed suit when I received an invitation to present my proposal in person to the women’s representative body in Alice Springs.

The key supporters from among the ten women who had come to Germany remained my friends. They also taught me a lot and were initially seen to be responsible for my proper conduct once I had entered their home communities. However, they did not become my malpa—the Pitjantjatjara term for a social-politically significant friendship now used in bicultural organizations where Indigenous and non-Indigenous employers form a two-person team. I breached the most important rule on day one of my first arrival in 1995, namely by very nearly driving without company into the male ceremonial ground, for which those women who had invited me were subsequently severely scolded in a dedicated meeting. I knew that, in these neocolonial days, death, the traditional form of punishment for women thus trespassing, would not be meted out. Yet fear of punishment was real, as I could be expelled from the lands, meaning that my research and all that was to flow from it were destroyed before it had even begun.

Dependency was all on my side and I wanted to question the legitimacy and even reality of local forms of power and authority. I

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felt confused about my refusal to believe in the sanctity of the ritual domain, as if I, a white cultural novice, was going to be exempt from the social consequences of such a transgression. Having failed to slip unerringly into the Anangu life-world into which I had finally been allowed, the narcissistic blow to my professional ego ideal was made palpable as waves of discontent were ushered over our lowered heads. Yet I was not singled out as perpetrator and instead endured the accusation of having disregarded men’s law in a we-relationship with the women. If we had to avert our eyes defiantly from the accusers—powerfully present in person—enacting the law in the flesh. Moreover, there was room for generosity and re-integration based on a form of authority that relies on compassion rather than an authoritarian impulse to control from a distance.

After a good hour of having endured blame and shame, through which we were able to express not defeat but respect, one of the senior men ended the reprimand by announcing formally that, as my “older brother,” he would exert care and excuse my misconduct committed out of ignorance. A veteran of cross-cultural interaction, he gave me and everybody else the chance to keep face.

I arrived a second time when another woman decided to pair up. A few nights into this same large initiation camp, YY came and “claimed” me as her malpa. Taking hold of my arm she said, “You’re coming with me!” This ritual form of “seizing” someone traditionally signaled wife-taking, and I presume some negotiation had occurred about her taking responsibility for my learning and wellbeing. YY, a senior law woman and Christian, single in practice (her disabled husband in permanent care in town) with grown up if severely dependent children, could do well with a young malpa equipped with a vehicle and time to help in all sorts of ways. It turned out this “marriage,” certainly for me, was much more than one out of convenience. We shared a sense of humor, passion for scavenging, and tendency to improvise, while YY generously taught me language, songs, stories, family relationships, and much more. Every now and then, she would hold up a mirror to my “greed” for knowledge when, instead of answering yet another question, she’d look at me and burst into laughter. Utterly capable of deciding for herself who to engage with and why (without the help of an ethics committee), and of safeguarding the good of rela-

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tionships on the basis of committing to her own judgment and local cultural protocol, YY had enjoyed widespread recognition as an ethical personality. For me an inner voice of conscience survives her death and I rely on her voice in moments of crisis.

Conclusion

I have shown how accountability and responsibility in an Australian Indigenous society are enacted interpersonally, through my experience as a non-Indigenous anthropologist working in a remote desert settlement. In this cultural context, the interpersonal is structured according to kinship and friendship, with which certain behavioral patterns, rights, and obligations are associated. Here, the face-to-face encounter counts, and this means that the anonymous power of institutions is neither perceived as a threatening distant authority nor internalized. Social, rather than bureaucratic processes, bind people together, which for a non-Indigenous interlocutor, is both rewarding and immensely demanding. Research regulations put in place from the distance by academic Human Research Ethics Committees can disempower the Indigenous participants whom these very regulations are meant to “protect”: they are bound to undermine the trust that the Indigenous protocols—based on interpersonal accountability as it is lived and practiced locally—are taken seriously.

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