Steve Butts wrote:
It is simply suggesting that we must recognize the
relatively new _chreod_
Is that a real word or a typo--and if typo what was the right word?
------------
I agree with Steve's position here---commodification is everywhere, as I
suggested in my earlier comments on this thread-- all "peripheral"
destinations have been commodifed in one way or another, the tribal people
of the world have also everywhere been drawn into this process, resulting in
terrible loss to some and marginal gain to others.

As researchers we are deeply implicated in the political economy of
globalization.
I agree with Steve Butts that we need to be aware of this.  What we "do"
about it would vary from person to person.  Anthropologists for decades have
paid for information from respondents. In many cases such information would
not have been available had it not been paid for.  In my own fieldwork I
found that I got more information for my art research if I bought pieces
from the artists. That to them justified their taking time to talk to me.
If I just wanted to schmooze with them about what they were up to minus any
economic exchange, I was wasting their time in their estimation.  I did
achieve a sort of personal realtinship of the type Jane Gibson is speaking
of, incoving trust and confidence, with one artist. But he quickly made me a
fictive kin, and that dyad involves economic exchange--traditional in his
culture long before world globalization.

Work in the field has myriads of constraints of so many kinds that I fail to
understand why we would seek general "rules of engagement" over and beyond
our professional ethical requirements.   While I take a relativist position
on the phenomenal epistemology of field research, this does not mean that I
do not personally suffer from the loss of such things as a sense and
evidence of cultural integrity in my own "culture"--what's left of it!  It
does not mean that I don't respect and sympathize with persons in other
cultures who deplore what's happened to theirs in the bulldozer march of
capitalism and globalization.  But that puts things back into the personal
realm. If we must hold that the personal is political, then I suspect we
cannot claim to be "social scientists"---we would then be activists.  This
is a perennial dilemma, one of life's paradoxes,  and I suspect it is not
amenable to a one size fits all solution.

Joanna Kirkpatrick








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