- I think one of the
privileges and
responsibilities that I carry,
as an ethnographer, as an anthropologist
is what to do with the hard stories,
or what to do with the
secret stories, the things
that are shared at different
levels of confidence.
There's no clear
pathway, usually, through those moments,
except for to remember that
my primary responsibility
is to, at that level, being
both a witness and a guardian
of the things that are
imparted to me, or shared,
and to figure out what might be beneficial
to share back out again,
and how.
To what extent do I anonymize,
how do I discuss those kinds of issues
with the people that I work with?
To what extent do I amalgamate
thousands of women's stories
of loss, let's say, in
pregnancy, into something
that is still meaningful?
And how, at the same time,
do I try to do justice
to what it means to have lived
those experiences of loss?
For me, the ethical piece
of this often comes back to
trying to find a way
to tell, at some level,
both an honest and a reverent story,
that protects as much as possible,
people's, not just their
privacy, but their sense of
intactness, and respect.
And sometimes, that's also
very difficult, knowing that
the actual paper I might write
is not gonna be meaningful,
to some of the people
who's stories I'm telling.
But, trying to be very
present in that moment
of the telling, I think, is also a part
of my ethical practice.
Being with people,
and not just sort of saying, oh, okay,
I've collected that
information, I will now move on.
And I think, also, remembering.
I'm fortunate in that I get to have
longer-term relationships with a lot
of the people that I work with.
And so, even it's not something
that we talk about all the time,
being able to connect
with someone, and remember
that this loss is part of their life.
And also, to open myself up,
to this is one of the ways
that language is really useful,
to be able to talk about,
to share a loss back,
or to share something
that might not every be
equal to what I'm hearing,
but that at least shows that I'm willing
to be vulnerable, is,
I think, another part of the way I
conceive of the ethics of anthropology.
