Description
Book SynopsisReciprocity Rules explores the rich and complicated relationships that develop between anthropologists and research participants over time. Focusing on compensation and the creation of friendship and family relationships, contributors discuss what, when, and how researchers and the people with whom they work give to each other in and beyond fieldwork. Through reflexivity and narrative, the contributors to this edited collection, who are in various stages in their professional careers and whose research spans three continents and eight countries, reflect on the ways in which they have compensated their research participants and given back to host communities, as well as the varied responses to their efforts. The contributors consider both material and non-material forms of reciprocity, stories of successes and failures, and the taken-for-granted notions of compensation, friendship, and helping. In so doing, they address the interpersonal dynamics of power and agency in the field, exa
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Introduction
Michelle C. Johnson and Edmund (Ned) Searles
Chapter 1: Brother to a Scorpion: Making Anthropological Obligations Visible in Urban Nicaragua
Josh Fisher
Chapter 2: Predestined Help: Cosmology and Constraint in Transnational Fieldwork
Michelle C. Johnson
Chapter 3: Existential Debt: How Race and History Complicate the Legibility of the Gift
Carolyn M. Rouse
Chapter 4: Reflections on a Community of the Heart: Ethnographer and the People of Juchitán, Oaxaca
Anya Peterson Royce
Chapter 5: Cigarettes, Cash, or Spare Parts: Compensation and Reciprocity in Arctic Research
Edmund (Ned) Searles
Chapter 6: Conversations and Critiques on Creating an Anthropological “Family”
Chelsea Wentworth and Julie Kalsrap
Afterword: Concluding Thoughts and Fieldwork and Friendwork
Alma Gottlieb
Index
Works Cited
About the Contributors
