When fieldwork is forbidden: Ontological dilemmas,subjectivity and moral imperatives as constraints in the field

Abstract

Undertaking fieldwork in a remote location with limited health care and transportation comes with inherent risks, but doing so with a small child, in a place where understandings of illness and malice may be of a fundamentally different nature than in the ethnographer’s home e, brings additional challenges and highlights the ethical dilemmas we may face in the field. This paper describes how continued fieldwork became impossibe when my infant son’s illness led to dilemmas that precluded the continuation of fieldwork. I take this experience as a starting point to interrogate the nature of being and reality and its real-world affects when working cross-culturally, especially in the realm of “metahuman” actors; issues of gender, identity and power in a discipline that is coming to terms with its colonialist roots, and the ethics of fieldwork in precarious situations. It takes a “hesitant” approach to the writing of a reflexive ethnography that includes more than human agents in one of anthropology’s most iconic locales.

Setting the scene

All was dark and quiet in our small house; the hamlet was largely asleep, though there is often a watchful eye to guard against would-be bwagau (sorcerers) or yoyowa (witches) who might threaten the safety and security of the village. My then-seven-month-old son, Lex, slept between my husband and me. We had travelled as a family this time to Kiriwina, the largest and most densely populated of the Trobriand Islands, for a short fieldwork excursion. I had previously spent nearly two years on the island, as a single, childless graduate student. Now, during my postdoctoral fellowship, I had returned in January 2016 as a wife, mother, and professional. My role had shifted, but so had my adoptive family on the island; a conflict with the village elder in the hamlet which had been my base for nearly all of my previous fieldwork had forced the family out since my last visit. Now, we were on someone else’s land, by their grace and permission, but the situation was tense. Matadoya (Mata for short), my adoptive father, feared retribution in the form of sorcery from the elder in our old hamlet. And I had come to work with women who claimed publicly to have once been yoyowa, who undertake malicious acts in disembodied form, but who had now been born again in the Pentecostal church and renounced their evil past. My goal for this fieldwork was to spend time in the churches, attend fellowship meetings and revivals, and to spend time with and interview women who confessed, as part of their conversion narrative to being born again, to having been yoyowa. ¹ In fact, just that afternoon I had finally managed to organize an interview with one such woman. Still, no one in the village really trusts that these women are ever truly converted, that the evil substance of yoyowa, which is considered part of the body and residing o lopola (inside) can ever be fully repudiated. They remain “half-half”, as one of my interlocutors put it – split between their dedication to the Church on the one hand, and the power inherent in the role of yoyowa on the other.

After my interview with the reformed yoyowa, my husband and I bathed, fed, and dressed our small son; we had brought some packaged cereal, as Kiriwina was experiencing a severe and prolonged drought, and garden food was scarce. I prepared it with a drop of coconut cream – nothing out of the ordinary, as we had by now been in the village for two weeks. He ate hungrily but soon he was crying with exhaustion after another day in the tropical heat and humidity. I took him inside to lay on the bed and he was soon sound asleep. Shortly thereafter, as I lay beside him, I heard the unmistakable sound of a diaper being filled with loose stool, and simultaneously, he retched and threw up a large puddle of vomit. Lex had never been sick in this fashion before. My adoptive parents, Vero and Mata, had been sitting out on their own verandah, and heard the terrible sounds of my son being sick. Vero came rushing over to ask what had happened as my husband and I scrambled to clean up the various messes, on our child and in the bed. As I was taking the soiled bedding outside to rinse, Vero came to me and asked me, pointedly: “I’m sorry, inagu [my mother – which was unusual itself as she normally calls me latugu, my child]. But I have to ask you. What is important to you? Your work, or your son?”

It was immediately clear that I would not be permitted to continue my interviews with women who are deemed dangerous in Kiriwina – those who are identified as yoyowa, even if they claim to be reformed and born again as Christians. Vero continued (in a mix of the local vernacular, Kilivila, and English):

I’m sorry. I don’t want to make things hard for you, but you have to think about it. I can’t help you if a yoyowa does something bad. That woman today, these bwagau [sorcerer] and yoyowa [witch] people you want to talk to – they are bringing bad things. I can’t protect you. Please think about what is really important. Besa yegu wala ananamsa [that’s only me, my thinking].

Mata, my adoptive father, added (in Kilivila, my translation):

I’m not scared, you don’t need to be scared. We do have ways of protecting ourselves. You and your child will be safe here, as long as we stay in this block of land. That’s why I didn’t agree for you to take him [my son] to Sinaketa [a village in the southern part of Kiriwina, where many yoyowa are understood to reside] or other places.

Despite Mata’s attempts to convince me (and himself) that we would be safe, at least inside the village, the larger message was that I was putting myself, my child, and the entire family andcommunity potentially in harm’s way by continuing to carry out my research with yoyowa. Not only would it lead people to question my morals and my instincts as a mother, but there was also a further risk that by inviting people that are seen as dangerous into the hamlet, it could lead to tensions with the other inhabitants. This would be especially problematic given that Mata and Vero had only recently relocated to this land on which they had little to no kin-based claims but were living there only on the good graces of the rightful landowners – a precarious situation for any Trobriand Islander.

Indeed, that same night, according to Vero, in the very late hours, the headman from the old village, from which Mata and his family were ejected after a dispute with this very fellow, came to the hamlet and sat on the verandah of one of the other residents – one who, I had been told, was not particularly happy about Vero and Mata taking up residence there. Vero said that this man had tried his best “to get under the house to do bwagau on Mata.” They had realized this, and so stayed up half the night with flashlights keeping lookout to ensure this man could not sneak close enough to their house to harm them. This, fortunately, was not attributed to my work, but to Mata’s own history with this man. Arguably, the drought had exacerbated cases of bwagau, as food shortages caused a great deal of stress throughout Kiriwina and beyond. The drought was the main topic of conversation that everyone turned to, dominating daily life as families struggled to get even one good meal per day from what little their gardens could produce.

This complex situation brings into intense focus and demonstrates the real-life consequences of fieldwork across ontological divides, wherein a scholar born and educated in the Euro-American tradition faces, in real terms, a world in which witches and sorcerers are dangerous agents causing sickness and death. In this paper, I focus on the ethnographic experience of working across “worlds” in which reality differs for the anthropologist and those she lives among, and how this collision of realities affects and even, in this case, prevents the anthropological investigation as intended. It grapples with the complexities of power dynamics and inequality inherent in the relationship between a white, settler-descended anthropologist and her Indigenous interlocutors who live on their own terms but in a world inevitably transformed by interactions with colonialism and missionization.

Thus, this paper is a reflection on the nature of fieldwork; on gender, subjectivity, and (de)colonization, but also what it means to be a human in the field, engaging with and affecting the lives of other humans and metahumans. It is about what happens when fundamentally different ontologies collide – in the world(s) inhabited by people who have fundamentally different understandings of cause and effect, while the effects themselves are visible to all. It is about the affective dimensions of fieldwork itself, for me – a mother of a young and vulnerable child in a place that is not his – but also for the family that carried the responsibility for his and my wellbeing, and my husband who accompanied me in the role of co-caretaker to our child. It explores the nature of those complex fieldwork relations, the stories that usually do not appear in to detached, objective, “properly academic” renderings of anthropological writing. It is, however, what ethnography is, experientially and existentially. I position this paper within the methodological framework of what Sophie Chao (2023) calls “hesitant anthropology”, or similarly the “anthropology of hesitations” suggested by Alessandra Gribaldo (2021), in which troubling ethics and the dilemmas of disclosure are foregrounded rather than hidden behind smoothly polished, theoretically driven ethnographies.

Starting out: First fieldwork

I had begun my fieldwork in Kiriwina many years earlier, in 2009. Back then, I was a single, childless graduate student in my early 30 s. Grant in hand, I was cautiously optimistic about undertaking fieldwork in the footsteps of luminaries of the discipline like Bronislaw Malinowski and Annette Weiner. I was nervous, to be sure – would I learn the language? Would people like me? Would I manage to actually do good fieldwork and write something publishable and get a job eventually? My arrival was exhilarating and terrifying, but in short order I had found a family who I fit well with and was integrated into their village, given my village name and clan affiliations, and settled into the rhythms of fieldwork. It was not entirely without drama or difficulty, but on the whole, it suited me. I enjoyed life in the village and felt welcome. In the Trobriands, everyone knows what anthropologists do, and also that they Trobrianders must be very interesting people that so many anthropologists continue to arrive over the years, so in general locals are more than happy to converse and facilitate research (often to the point of chastising me for not writing down something they told me, or failing to take a photo of something they consider significant). Though my parents back in Canada surely lost some sleep wondering if I was healthy and content prior to the arrival of cell phone service in 2010, I most often felt safe and secure, productive, and competent. I enjoyed my days and was in no rush to leave. Despite the monotonous diet and simple conditions of hauling water to wash, sleeping on a mat on the floor and working by kerosene lamp in the evening, I felt fieldwork suited me, even as I often found myself conflicted about the dynamics of my position as white, relatively wealthy (even as I identified as a poor grad student back in New Zealand, where my university was based), and with an Anglo-European ancestry that saw “my” people subjugate and denigrate Papua New Guineans during the colonial era. When the time finally came to leave, it was with ambivalent feelings that I packed up my hut and said goodbye to the family that had taken me in and cared for me so well for 18 months. My return visits in 2011 and 2013 were likewise rather easy to fall back in to, despite being of shorter duration. The circumstances of my 2016 visit were altogether different – the new village and attendant tensions, the drought, and of course, my young child and new role as mother.

The role of the supernatural in the trobriands

It is hard to overestimate the ubiquity and agency of metapersonal or more-than-human forces in the Trobriand Islands, and indeed across much of the region often called Melanesia, a topic of sustained interest in anthropology (see e.g. Eves, 2000 but also 2021; Forsyth and Eves 2015; Fortune, 1963; Gibbs 2012; Jorgensen 2005, 2014; Knauft 1985; MacCarthy, 2021; Patterson 1974; Stephen 1987; Rio 2019; Rio et al., 2019; Zelenietz 1981). In Kiriwina, this takes the form of the general umbrella concept of meguwa, usually translated as “magic” and which serves both benevolent and malevolent purposes, and the mostly malevolent forms of bwagau and yoyowa, usually glossed in English (problematically) as “sorcery/sorcerer” and “witchcraft/witch” respectively. While bwagau are seen to act in direct ways using for example poisons, yoyowa are seen to hold the power to cause illness and death via disembodied, psychic powers. The yoyowa spirit leaves the physical body behind and flies to their victim to do harm, sometimes shapeshifting into the form of a flying fox, firefly, or night bird (Malinowki 1925:238). This is usually because the yoyowa has been angered or become envious (pogi in the Kilivila language). White skin, and the material resources that are seen to usually follow from whiteness, may themselves be a source of pogi. Virtually all sickness and deaths are attributed to either yoyowa or bwagau, with the family of the ill or dead trying to determine which one, and why.

It is important to contextualize the role of yoyowa, bwagau and the more potentially benevolent, generic concept of meguwa in the Trobriand social field. These means of influencing the world -- of causing sickness or death in the first two cases, and influencing the growing of yams, fortune in fishing or kula, love, or even sitting exams, playing soccer, or applying for a job – are ubiquitous in the Trobriand Islands and indeed, much of the region often called (again problematically) Melanesia. It is not something one may opt in or out of “believing”; they are agentive forces that simply are. In the same way one doesn’t think about whether they “believe” in the wind – because it is there, and it has visible effects on the environment, it dries clothes and rustles the leaves and brings new weather – likewise, meguwa, bwagau and yoyowa are forces in Trobriand life that leave visible effects in the world. While I am not entirely comfortable with the terminology and seeming reification of “immanent” versus “transcendental” universes, this is what Sahlins (2022) would refer to as the former, an “enchanted universe [in which] the natural/supernatural distinction becomes meaningless… [H]uman persons are the same in constitution as embodied metapersons” (Sahlins 2022:36). Indeed, yoyowa in the Trobriand social universe are ever present in human affairs and regularly enter into various kinds of social relations with people, as do other types of spirits like baloma (Malinowski, 1916, 1925, 1935; Mosko 2016).

Yoyowa are generally gendered female, though any Trobriand Islander will tell you that men can be, and are, yoyowa, and they stand as counterpart to the generally masculine-gendered category bwagau who are (as far as I know) always men. Yoyowa possess the power to fly as disembodied spirits, to do harm to those they feel have wronged them. Malinowski pointed out that malevolent forms of magic like yoyowa and bwagau have the effect of legal force, insofar as they are used to ensure people behave in socially appropriate ways and therefore prevent actual violence and restore equilibrium (1925: 86). The pogi (jealousy or envy) that is the source of their anger and vengefulness can be over something as seemingly innocuous as failing to share betelnut, or something more valuable that is not given freely. ² When a witch sees a light-skinned baby, especially a well-fed, “fat” (pousa) one, this too can make them covetous. Witches throughout the Massim region are known to be cannibalistic, often feeding on corpses (e.g., Lepowsky 1993: 194; MacCarthy, 2021: 666; Munn 1986: 227.), and surely there is no sweeter meat to a yoyowa than the tender flesh of a fat, healthy baby.

While scouring the literature, I found few references specifically to children being the target of yoyowa, though this was casually mentioned by my interlocuters during my fieldwork from time to time and arises in one unpublished conference paper (Lepani 2016: 4). The only reference to a small child being attacked by yoyowa in the vast corpus of Trobriand ethnography that I could identify comes from Malinowski’s classic work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Here, he relates the story of a young girl punished with illness due to her parents’ refusal to buy a mat from a yoyowa woman, who then became angry. Malinowski relates the story as told to him by the victim herself, once grown to adulthood:

When night came, the little one was playing on the beach in front of the house, when the parents saw a big firefly hovering around the child. The insect then flew round the parents and went into the room. Seeing that there was something strange about the firefly, they called the girl and put her to bed at once. But she fell ill immediately, could not sleep all night, and the parents, with many native attendants, had to keep watch over her. Next morning, added the Kiriwinian mother, who was listening to her daughter telling me the tale, the girl ‘boge ikarige; kukula wala ipipisi,’ “she was dead already, but her heart was still beating.’…The father of the girl’s mother, however, went to Wawela [village], and got hold of another yoyova, called Bomrimwari. She took some herbs and smeared her own body all over… [Malinowski 1925: 243]

The story continues that Bomrimwari went in search of the sick girl’s lopoulo (insides), which the angry yoyowa had removed and hidden in a large ceremonial clay pot in her house. The yoyowa had left it there and gone to the garden, planning to eat it when she returned. Had this occurred, the girl could not have been saved according to Trobriand conceptions of the body and wellness. However, since Bomrimwari had recovered the missing organs, made magic over them, and returned them to their rightful place in the girl’s stomach, she recovered.

The literature on witchcraft across the Massim region of southern Papua New Guinea is clear: no one should ever publicly name a witch, and a witch will never openly identify herself as such (Battaglia 1990:63; Kuehling 2005:53; Lepowsky 1993:172; Malinowski, 1925, 1984:240, 241; Munn 1986:217). This had also been made clear to me in Kiriwina during my initial doctoral fieldwork. So, when I returned as a postdoctoral fellow in 2013, I was shocked to hear women tell me directly that they had formerly been yoyowa but were now born again Christians. ³ My interest was immediately piqued, and I knew this was something I needed to pursue ethnographically. In 2013, this was reasonably possible to do; there was some concern on the part of my adoptive Trobriand family, but the usual precautions could be taken to protect me. For example, Mata explained to me how when my house was built, he made a fire from coconut husks that had had magic performed on them beneath it (Trobriand houses are built on stilts); the smoke produced would engulf my house in protective magic. This precaution would mean, he explained, that if a yoyowa were to become upset with me and try to find me, she would be unable to locate me as the smoke would both hide the house from her sight and disguise my smell to confuse her (Fieldnotes, 22/06/13). Likewise, during the very early stages of my fieldwork, Vero and Mata described for me an oil that can be applied to the arms, face, and other exposed skin that will make one invisible to witches, called kegau. ⁴ Mata had told me he could make some for me if I were to travel to Kitava, one of the smaller Trobriand Islands in the southern part of the archipelago and the region considered to be the primary domain of witches. Vero told me that many people carry a vial of this with as protection, especially when visiting the southern part of the Trobriands (Fieldnotes, 11/05/09). However, while such protections might be seen as effective for me and my husband, my small son was simply too vulnerable; these precautions might not be enough to keep him safe in the Trobriand ontological domain.

Further, it cannot be overlooked that the demands our visit placed on the family were onerous. While they were thrilled to meet their bubu (grandson), my adoptive parents were in a precarious position, in terms of their residence, their food security, and now with the added responsibility of making sure nothing bad would happen to my son or anyone else on their watch. The threat of yoyowa is a culturally relevant and locally legitimate reason to suggest that it might be best if we relocated even if there was some material benefit to us being there (in terms of the store goods we could provide to supplement the meagre garden foods available at the time). In this instance, with a small child’s health at stake, the risks of us being there outweighed the benefits. It must also be said that both before we embarked on the trip and after we left, and despite my husband’s unwavering support, I did a lot of second guessing of my decision to go in the first place. I already felt like rather a terrible mother for taking my sweet young baby to such a remote place where malaria, tropical ulcers, and heat stroke were all possible outcomes, and now my maternal unfitness had all but been confirmed by my Trobriand interlocutors (see, for example, Barlow and Chapin 2010: 326 for an anthropological definition of “good mothering”).

Pentecostal and Revival christianity

The arrival of Pentecostal and Revival forms of Christianity began in the Trobriands in the 1980s and has been significantly felt across the islands (see MacCarthy, 2017, 2021; Eriksen et al., 2019). Conversion, as Eves (2016:248) points out for Lelet converts in New Ireland province, involves not just turning away from and repenting sinful behaviour, but rather involves the creation of a new self, a new person. While this might be the ideal, and indeed part of the Trobriand discourse of being born again (“Now I am a new woman!” one confessed former yoyowa told me ⁵ ), there is distrust on the part of many Trobriand Islanders that this is genuine. Especially when a woman is a witch because it is her tukwa, that is, part of her ancestral matrilineal heritage passed down via the maternal line, there is a strong understanding that the yoyowa is an inherent characteristic, a part of the very substance of the body. While one of the women I spoke to who claimed to have been a yoyowa in the past but was now born again put it to me, “You can’t serve two masters”; that is to say, you can’t be strong in either Pentecostal worship or in yoyowa if you do not dedicate yourself entirely. Pastor Michael, the head of a revival church in Kiriwina, noted the importance of “casting out” demons, but this must be followed with “filling the space” with Jesus; in the absence of constant vigilance in prayer, fellowship, and confessions, “the demons will come back, and they will be worse!”.

One of my interlocutors, a particularly eloquent man in his later middle age who is renowned as a healer, told me he does believe that some women who are initiated as yoyowa (see MacCarthy, 2021 for a description of this process) can be truly changed through being “delivered” from evil and brought into a life of Christ, but this is rare and requires ongoing efforts to avoid backsliding (Daswani 2015; Meyer 1998). As for the particular woman I had interviewed prior to my son’s sudden illness, however, my adoptive father pointed out that despite her claims at redemption, her face gives away the fact that she still practices as a yoyowa. He called her a “bad woman” [vivila sena gaga] and told me outright that he did not believe her claims to have found faith in God and repent her past misdeeds.

Such mistrust, and the ubiquitous threat of yoyowa and bwagau in the Trobriand context, made it all but impossible to carry out the rest of my intended fieldwork. Shortly after the incident of my son’s sudden and severe illness (which, thankfully, seemed to resolve itself by the next day), my husband and I decided that there was little point to remain in the village, where we were experiencing high levels of stress about our son’s health and where the entire community was experiencing not only the strain of coping with drought and a lack of food security, but also the added pressure of keeping our family of dimdims (white foreigners) safe. Vero had made it abundantly clear that it was neither appropriate nor safe for me to continue my intended fieldwork, as much as they appreciated our visit and the opportunity to meet their bubu and the financial assistance we were able to provide. Within a week, we were on a plane back to Port Moresby and on to Brisbane, Australia – far from the yoyowa who might do us harm.

Gender and fieldwork

As long as women have done anthropological fieldwork, there has been a recognition that women see things differently, and see different things, from their male counterparts. But as we know, identities are not singular, they are intersectional and complex and overlapping. I had done fieldwork as a woman before, but as a different kind of woman. I was a student, single, childless, and thus I was not a full social person from the Trobriand perspective. This time was different. As a mother and a wife, I had a new identity, new obligations, new expectations within the Trobriand social field. And my subjectivity changed as well. No longer was I just there for myself, to advance my career, to make my mark as an anthropologist. Now I was responsible for a tiny human who depended on my very body for his survival. I was responsible for dragging my husband with me, to care for our child while I was conducting interviews and writing up notes. I was exposing both to the risk of malaria, dengue fever, heat stroke, dehydration, parasites, and yes, maybe even witchcraft.

In reviewing the literature regarding self-reflection on gendered subjectivity as part of the ethnographic experience, Diane Bell (1993:4-5) cites Margaret Mead (1928), Hortense Powdermaker (1967), Elizabeth Warnock Fernea (1995) and Margery Wolf (1968) as some early and exemplary examples. Writing outside the “classic” ethnographic style, Bell notes that many women ethnographers (though, not exclusive to women either) express themselves in a manner that manifests “their search for a mode of presentation that represents their experience as affective and their knowledge as grounded in specific relations.” These relations are not just about gendered subjectivity, of course, but also other aspects of the self-other relation – in this instance, the position as parent/mother, as wife/partner, and my obligations to my son and husband as well as to my Trobriand interlocutors and enacted kin. Writing as though the ethnographer is simply an impartial observer of events seems, in instances such as the one I describe here, woefully incomplete. I thus here aim to write reflexively and autobiographically as a means of explication, not of self-indulgence (though the reader will decide my success in this endeavour!). The point, however, is less my personal experience than what the telling of the story elucidates about cross-cultural, even cross-ontological fieldwork as a sphere of encounter which not only creates knowledge but also conflicts, difficulties, and stress for the ethnographer and the community. It highlights difference and inequality, and the challenges inherent in interpretation and analysis of such an event that does not reinforce an “Us” (white, Euro-American, of a particular educational pedigree) versus “Them” (those who are not “Us” and are the subject of anthropological inquiry) dichotomy, while being acutely aware of the differential power dynamics at play (Chua and Mathur, 2018). As the American Anthropological Association’s document on Principles of Professional Responsibility state: “In a field of such complex rights, responsibilities, and involvements, it is inevitable that misunderstandings, conflicts, and the need to make difficult choices will arise.” ⁶ In this case, the difficult choice was to abandon my fieldwork for an indefinite period, to ensure that I would bring neither physical illness nor undue stress to my fieldwork collaborators, my husband, my son, or myself.

Feminist anthropologists have critiqued the “cult of objectivity” (Bell 1993: 29), whether advocating to deconstruct the term, make a case for re-valuing ‘subjectivity’, or both (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1991). Anthropologists, despite by the very definition of participant observation living with and among the community, forging personal bonds of friendship and even kinship, are nonetheless expected to demonstrate a certain scientific detachment (Okely 1992:8); “We” are not of the field, but extended visitors with responsibilities and expectations of a different nature back “home” (Chua and Mathur, eds., 2018). And yet, we are not, and cannot be, impartial observers collecting data without disrupting life in the community we enter. Our presence means something to us, and it means something to the people who, warmly or reluctantly, with goodwill or suspicion or ulterior motives, agree to assist us in our ethnographic task. And, in the case of my attempt to work with yoyowa, the goodwill and support that I had so carefully fostered over years of close, mutually respectful and mutually beneficial relations with my field family, was conditionally revoked. It is difficult, if not impossible, to look at this situation objectively and “scientifically” without losing crucial nuance and meaning, as well as the depth of feeling or affect generated on both sides. These ontological dilemmas, as we might call them, leave both ethnographer and interlocutors in an uncomfortable position.

Women anthropologists, especially those of us with young children who may be at formative stages in our careers, face pressures from the academy and from ourselves, which are by now well recognized. The stressors we may face in the practice of fieldwork, of being held to account for the decisions we make in our ethnographic work and the real and perceived effect on our children were issues which seem to receive relatively little attention, with most accounts being published as edited volumes (e.g., Braukmann et al., 2020; Cassell 1987; Flinn et al., 1998; Muhammad and Neuilly 2019), blog posts (e.g. Dombrowski 2015; Gibson 2016,; Halme-Tuomisaari, 2017; Hodgkins and Thompson 2022), or regional or gender-focused academic journals (e.g. Ayeh 2023; Brown and De Casanova 2009; Farrelly et al., 2014; Korpela et al., 2016) rather than in the most “prestigious” journals in the discipline. There are also several significant publications on the anthropology of mothering cross-culturally (e.g. Barlow and Chapin 2010; Walks and McPherson 2011). I was aware of none of this literature before I undertook my own fieldwork with a small child (though in hindsight, perhaps I should have been). After this experience, I heard stories from other anthropologists about taking their children to the field and experiencing near-disasters – severe malaria, close calls with drowning, burning, and various illnesses and infections. Putting one’s child at risk, whether physical or metaphysical, comes with a great deal of guilt for the parent, and stress for the hosting community. I had never regretted fieldwork, or been scared of doing it, or felt the incredible burden of my responsibility, until I attempted fieldwork with an infant child. The realities of this experience, and the effects of the burden on our ethnographic hosts, seem entirely underrepresented in the literature, since they are confined to intentionally reflexive and introspective essays rather than as part of more “mainstream” ethnographic accounts. Perhaps women are hesitant to reveal the vulnerability and self-reproach that may accompany bringing children to the field, as it might compromise their hard-won image of professionalism.

Transformations and translations in ethnography

Rabinow (2007 [1977]: 30), in his Reflections of Fieldwork in Morocco – groundbreaking in its time for its casual style and reflexive nature – wrote,

“One assumes in everyday life, when it goes smoothly, that people share what has been called a life-world—certain primary assumptions about the nature of the social world, about social personae, about how events occur and more of less what they imply. This fabric of meaning…can be taken for granted because [it is] largely shared.”

He later notes that what at first jolts the ethnographer with is strangeness – just as when he first observes a curing ritual (p.38) or when I first saw a magic spell performed – heightened attention and intellectual curiosity prevail, but over time as the ethnographer becomes more accustomed to what was once strange, these same practices increasingly become normalized and, indeed, part of the ethnographer’s own world; What the described situation tells us is that in circumstances such as the illness of my son, the intersection of life-worlds illustrates the lack of common primary assumptions and the discrepancy in explaining how events occur and what they imply. This discrepancy must be reconciled by the fieldworker acknowledging and accepting the local explanation, or else risking her own reputation and credibility amongst ones community of interlocutors while as the same time risking that same reputation and credibility among the community of the international academic community for being “chased off by witches,” because even if witchcraft has become part of “my” world while in the field, it is not so “back home” among my university colleagues. Similarly, the illness of my son in the context of fieldwork on yoyowa and being born again created increased reflexivity on the part of my Trobriand hosts, who had to verbalize their fears and their cause-and-effect interpretations of this small, fat, white child’s malady. The experience highlights difference and inequality, and the challenges inherent in interpretation and analysis of such an event that avoids reinforcing an “Us” (white, Euro-American, of a particular educational pedigree) vs “Them” (those who are not “Us” and are the subject of anthropological inquiry) dichotomy, while being acutely aware of the differential power dynamics at play. How to write about this? Only with much hesitation.

This discussion brings to mind other ontological dilemmas, such as Eduardo Vivieros de Castro’s analysis of the “truth” held by some Amerindians that “peccaries are humans.” The point is that the concepts are fundamentally differently understood, or rather, are simply fundamentally different, between de Castro and Amerindians, or myself and Trobriand Islanders. This makes the job of the anthropologist not “cultural translation”, as premised “on the assumption that unfamiliar concepts must, to some satisfactory degree, have familiar equivalents” (Holbraad 2012a: 84). My “default concept” of the category “witch” does not match with the Trobriand category “yoyowa,” even as through extensive participant observation fieldwork I have come closer to knowing the concept from a Trobriand ontological position. How far do we have to change our assumptions about what counts as a ‘peccary’ before we could say that peccaries are human?” (Holbraad, 2012a: 85, 2012b). In this case, what counts as yoyowa and how we can understand that to make it true that one caused my son’s illness? Or at the very least, to make it true that because it is true in Trobriand ontology, it has real-world consequences: in this instance, that I was unable to continue my line of inquiry with born again yoyowa and was effectively sent home? And further, what counts as a “good mother” and how could I make it true that both I, and my Trobriand community, agreed that I was one?

As Rabinow observed,

The ‘facts’ of anthropology, the material which the anthropologist has gone to the field to find, are already themselves interpretations. The baseline data is already culturally mediated by the people whose culture we, as anthropologists, have come to explore. Facts are made…they cannot be collected as if they were rocks, picked up and put into cartons and shipped home to be analyzed in laboratories…Every cultural fact can be interpreted in many ways, both by the anthropologist and by his subjects.” [Rabinow 2007[1977]:150]

There is, in other words, a mutual and ongoing interpretation and reflection on self and other, and the similarities and differences therein. The fact that my son became ill, on that day, and in that manner, could be explained in multiple ways, each of which is culturally mediated. My explanation, which was not the only one a Euro-American anthropologist might have come up with, was that it was the heat, perhaps something he ate that didn’t sit well, or something in the water. These are explanations that rely on ideas about the body and environmental factors, on notions of health and sickness that place an emphasis on the “internalizing system” (Young 1976): physiology, bacteria, pathogens, and so on. My interlocutors’ interpretation, which is not the only interpretation a Trobriand Islander might have (albeit a common one), was that this was the direct result of my interview that day, and my interest in and involvement with women who were dangerous, problematic, and not to be trusted. It was a spiritual affliction, one that could be linked not to etiology as a western-trained medical doctor might conceive it, but rather an etiology of moral basis. In such circumstances, it hardly matters what my interpretation of the situation was – that my son suffered from the heat, not from a vengeful yoyowa as a direct result of my interview. My interpretation was wholly irrelevant, because to do anything but accept my Trobriand family’s interpretation and behave accordingly would be to jeopardize not only my small son’s wellbeing, but also my integrity and reputation as a sometimes community member and kin based on my adoption and position in this family and the broader Trobriand social field. It was incumbent on Vero and Mata to explicate to me the meaning of my son’s illness and responsibility as a parent in local terms – “facts” which, by then, I fully comprehended, even if they didn’t match my own interpretation. While external to their life-world and the Trobriand ways of thinking about yoyowa and their agency, I was at the same time familiar enough with this life world to recognize and respect it. In this particular ontological dilemma, I was hesitant to even verbalize my own explanations, as my Trobriand family was so adamant about theirs.

In her publication on what she calls “Antihero care”, in which she draws on Ursula LeGuin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Emily Yates-Doerr suggests that “The goal [of anthropology] is not to master belonging elsewhere, but to learn to attend to how differences matter” (2020:24), arguing against ideals of “holism”, which she would deem not only impractical but ultimately impossible. She stresses the importance of honouring one’s own limits while undertaking fieldwork, and I would add that one must also be attuned to the limits of one’s interlocutors. We usually think of fieldwork being limited or prevented by large-scale processes like political instability or war, personal hardship or lack of access to resources, or more recently, the global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (see for example Gallinat 2023). But sometimes, specific events – or more accurately, specific interpretations of specific events – can stymie attempts to collect data. While I did ultimately write several traditional, ethnographically-grounded analyses of my research in this area (most of which data was collected prior to this ill-fated 2016 field visit), the difficulties of this encounter left me unable to conceive of returning to the field while my children were small. The stress (not only mine, but that of my adoptive Trobriand family) in this situation was one I could not bear to repeat. Even now, years later and with my children school-age, returning to “the field” still seems out of reach.

A point of No return?

In fact, I often wonder if I will ever go back to do research in the Trobriand Islands. Partly for practical reasons: lack of time, limited research funds, other obligations. But also, because the discipline is changing. It is becoming less and less common, or even desirable in the anthropological space, to do “exotic” ethnography in places where inequalities and “othering” seems inevitable. In a discipline that has by necessity taken a critical look at itself in terms of the history of anthropology and its relationship to colonialism, it becomes hard to defend the use of resources to travel to a remote location, so that the elite white researcher can go figure out what “they” are up to. Is it better to never go back, to let go of my relationships there, to send money while keeping myself at home? Maybe. Despite my best attempts to forge real, meaningful, ongoing mutual reciprocal relationships, there is of course an inevitable power imbalance between my research participants, who are for the most part subsistence farmers living precariously, and me – now an associate professor, a title gained directly from those very relationships that allowed me to write my books and articles. What do I owe? How can I best serve and repay those who assisted me? Is it possible to do this kind of research “right”? If so, have I done so? These are difficult questions, and I do not know the answers. Hesitations and dilemmas abound.

For several decades now, following the publication of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s influential publication Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999), issues of power and positionality in settler-Indigenous peoples relations in research (and more broadly) are becoming increasingly problematic (see also Kaur and Klinkert 2021). Researcher-researched relations must not replicate the power inequalities of colonialism, but how do we ensure otherwise? Is I have always endeavoured to be respectful, reciprocal, and genuine with my Trobriand interlocutors, and leaving when my work brought unease to the community seemed essential – both to alleviate tension and stress in and on the village inhabitants and especially my adoptive family, but also for my own peace of mind and to ensure the wellbeing of my son. That same son, eight years old at the time of writing, now tells me he wants to go back to the village (which he of course does not remember). But do I? Does my Trobriand family and the broader community? As visitor or researcher? Is one better or worse than the other?

I have made every effort here to enact hesitation as methodology, to avoid privileging one way of knowing over another, and to acknowledge and respect the Trobriand world in which different actors are at play in illness and death than in my own Canadian-European world. I see my closest Trobriand interlocutors as family, and have built meaningful and enduring relations, even as I feel it so very difficult, if not impossible, to return. I continue to communicate with and financially support my Trobriand kin to the extent I am able, thus reciprocating the gifts they have shared with me. But is it sufficient? I have a tenured position at a university, with a good salary and as much job security as one can have in this unsettled economic and technological environment. Without the cooperation and generosity of Trobrianders, I would not have achieved this. How is this debt best and most equitably repaid? What do we do with the meaningful and enduring relationships forged as the discipline and ideas about ethical fieldwork in a feminist/anticolonial space complicate the nature of those relations? These ontological dilemmas fuel the hesitant anthropology I embrace herein. And while this paper details a specific set of circumstances in a specific place and time, it is my hope that the reflections presented herein will resonate beyond those geographical and temporal specifics.

The geographer Max Liboiron (2021:137) stresses a commitment to anticolonial science, which they understand

[A]s one rooted in incommensurabilities...Rather than erasing or smoothing difference, or claiming that something is incomprehensible because it does not align with what makes sense in my/our/your logics, or reaching resolution or consensus, I understand an ethic of incommensurability as one that digs into difference and maintains that difference while also trying to stay in good relations.

This “ethic of incommensurability” parallels the notion of ontological dilemmas as outlined in this paper. I have tried to make sense of the difficulties of this fieldwork experience in this spirit, hesitatingly, while recognizing the problematics of my own settler identity as I attempt to “stand with” as a methodological approach to ensuring that research is done in good relation (TallBear 2014: 5). The reader will decide if I have done so or failed miserably. I perhaps finish here with more questions than answers, but perhaps it is as it should be.

Afterword

One may reasonably wonder why it has taken me six years to write this paper. Indeed, this should have been penned just after I returned from the field, when it was freshest in my mind. But I had a baby, and then, in early 2017, another one. I moved countries for a new, teaching-focused tenure-track position, and threw myself into developing undergraduate courses. Then COVID hit, bringing my children home under my primary supervision, precluding peaceful time for writing and reflection. In spring of 2021, when my teaching duties wrapped up, I finally made some good headway; perhaps I could send the paper for review now? But it didn’t feel quite finished. How to write such an intimate and self-critical paper? It went back on the shelf, and only now – in the wake of the terrible, devastating and sudden death of my husband – do I come back to it. My circumstances and subjectivity have changed yet again, and should I return to Kiriwina one day – a possibility that, as the sole parent of my two children, I often doubt – I would do so as a widow, a nakakau, an entirely new subject position from which I would have to navigate my way through the complex relations I hold in the Kiriwinian community. Life – and death – often get in the way of the best laid plans.