dilemma, I considered a more heretical quandary: had not anthropologists, all along, employed an ethically flawed method? After all, the “natives” in most conventional field sites, although they welcomed the foreign anthropologists, nevertheless rarely maintained a clear idea of the anthropologists’ craft or their forthcoming writings. Why privilege Western people, heterosexuals or homosexuals, when they happen to inhabit the ethnographer’s field? These, I assume, are partly naive and probably unanswerable questions.
Responding to Circumstances
Returning to the two major queries I posed earlier, what can I suggest from my own experience?
First, I gradually made my role and identity known to a growing number of congregants at the gay synagogue.8 In contrast, my role and identity remained far more obscure at the Community Center. The research situation and the constraints I experienced at the two different gay institutions (albeit in the same neighborhood) have underwritten the strategy of my presentation of self in each.
Second, I remained totally “chaste” during my fieldwork at the synagogue. I also remained uninvolved in the apparently “wild” Golden Shower party. But I did engage in sexual activity at a social event initiated by one of the organizations associated with the Center. However, it was neither a change of methodology motivated by new professional convictions nor an ideological transformation that made me adopt a more active type of participant observation at the Chicago convention. Again, I reacted to specific situational provocations and personal incitement.
Certainly, two anthropologists may be affected differently under similar conditions and make other choices. In real life, “circumstances” are not objectively defined and perceived as indicated by the term. Also, the same individual, when confronting similar circumstances, may adopt different modes of accommodation conditioned, for example, by changes of his/her personal status (as a younger or an older person, etc.).
I believe there is no prerequisite to be gay or lesbian in order to study gay people. Anthropologists have usually studied “other” societies. Gay and lesbian anthropologists can offer an insider’s perspective, but that is true for “native anthropologists” in all other fields. However, neither the insider nor the outsider anthropologist is privileged with the one definitive perspective. There are advantages and disadvantages to both practitioners.9
Anthropologists may find themselves becoming engaged with their subjects in intimate relationships that are unorthodox in terms taught at school or unexpected before departure for the field. I opened my discussion by presenting the experiences and conclusions volunteered by both heterosexual and homosexual ethnographers. My own experience suggests a more pragmatic approach than that advocated in some recent works presented earlier. The method of conducting my observations and my response to specific trials during fieldwork represent the consequences of sound or poor acts of judgment taken at a particular moment. The ethnographic project is dependent on the instant decisions made by anthropologists engaged in various sensitive domains of behavior and relates to both the researcher and his/her subjects. The history of ethnographic work proves that we mostly rely on the wisdom of its practitioners and that we have no way of scrutinizing the outcome of their actions. I can now better comprehend the old Jewish saying “Don’t judge your friend until you share his position.”
CHAPTER 2
Concealments and Revelations in Ethnographic Research
I wrote this chapter in a state of emotional anxiety, but also one of great relief. It relates to the relationship with one of my closest informants/friends, Jeff, whom I had met at CBST twenty years earlier. He assumed the role of a dedicated guide and taught me about the inner life of gay men and their popular sex venues. Although in a very different ethnographic world, I could compare him with Mochuna, Victor Turner’s admirable teacher of Ndembu society and culture (1967b). Jeff’s personal history, his demeanor, and his ideas about gay life are presented in other chapters (Chapters 1 and 10 in particular). The following quotes suggest the complexity of research engagements in what seems to be a common phenomenon of secrets and revelations that anthropologists confront in their work:
This is the inner life of the individual with whom we interact. He may, intentionally either reveal the truth about himself to us, or deceive us by lie and concealment. (Simmel 1969 [1908]: 310)
In much ethnographical writing, the treatment of secrets constitutes a criterion for how the text and the ethnographic work behind it will be evaluated. The ethnographer’s ability to penetrate the secrets of his or her objects becomes a major stake in the ethnographic quest. (Lovell 2007: 57)
Secrets and silences operate, and are made, through all relational contexts and interactions. How is one to write about them, then, if they are so ubiquitous and of the ordinary? (Nast 2008: 395)
Anthropologists: Decoders of Secrets
From a young age we learn the art of keeping and sharing personal, family, and communal secrets. That skill is among the elementary assets of sociability that children acquire in most societies (Taussig 1999: 267–71). Since anthropologists try to penetrate the lives and culture of their subjects in societies both far and near, one might define ethnographic fieldwork as the art of secret-decoding.
Anthropologists long ago studied cultures of secrecy, men’s secret societies in particular (Morgan 1851). I mention Herdt’s more recent studies (1981, 2003) of male secret initiation rituals in precolonial New Guinea. Pitt-Rivers, in his study of the Sierra people, represented a different category of a cultural ethos of secrecy and deception: “Andalusians are the most accomplished liars I have ever encountered” (1971: xvi). But as suggested above by Lovell, beyond gaining entry into institutionalized secret societies or cracking the cultural codes of deception, anthropologists believe it is their special skill and privilege to penetrate the personal inner-life territory of the individuals they study and breach their sealed areas of behavior, beliefs, and sentiments. This assertion certainly calls for a measure of caution lest mainstream anthropologists be seen as stepping into the role of psychotherapists.
Particularly famous are the practitioners whose ethnographies revealed sensitive intimate details of sexual, spiritual, or mental health conditions. Examples include Oscar Lewis’s (1967) portrayal of the life of Fernanda, a Puerto Rican prostitute, and her close family members, as well as Crapanzano’s (1980) rendering of Tuhami, a Moroccan tilemaker who believed himself married to a camel-footed she-demon. We know, however, of a few cases of mutual antipathy that tainted the relationship of ethnographers with their subjects, the latter resentful of the researcher’s intrusion or offended by the manner in which the published text revealed their private lives (e.g., Turnbull 1973; Scheper-Hughes 2000).
I usually considered myself lucky to enjoy the collaboration and often the liking of my subjects at the various field sites of my research. My conviction about that advantage was reinforced in particular during my study of gay people, who shared with me many intimate details of their personal lives. Actually, I came to believe that gay people were exceptionally open in exposing intimate life experiences not only in the company of close friends, but also when participating in groups wherein they engaged with many strangers, as evinced in the chapters of this book.
My present discourse does not relate to the more usual situation of first entry into a new field site, when the ethnographer might confront subjects’ objections to efforts to infiltrate their public and private spaces and their withholding of sensitive information from his intrusive gaze (e.g., Geertz 1973; Godelier 1999; Kalir 2006). I intend in this context to expose the gray areas in our endeavor, the “shadow side of fieldwork,”1 when we may not comprehend the
