When Anthropologists Wear Two Hats: Ethnographer and Health Professional

Abstract

Years after he conducted field work in the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski's revealing description of his inner-most thoughts, feelings, and attitudes about the research site and informants was published posthumously (Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967). Since that time, personal accounts have appeared more frequently in the anthropological literature, although most are not as poignant and certainly not as pejorative as Malinowski's. These backstage descriptions and confessional tales provide anthropologists with opportunities to examine the ways in which their feelings and attitudes have impacted upon their research. They are especially important to the discipline as teaching tools, as means of alerting others to dilemmas they could face in ethnographic research and of stimulating consideration of alternative responses to such dilemmas.