Reciprocity Rules

Focusing on compensation, friendship, and collaboration, this book explores what anthropologists and research participants give to each other in and beyond fieldwork. Contributors argue that while learning and following the local rules of reciprocity are challenging, they are essential to responsible research and efforts to decolonize anthropology.

Reciprocity 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, examine cultural misunderstandings, and highlight the challenges that anthropologists face as they strive to maintain good relations with their hosts even when separated by time and space. The contributors argue that while learning, following, openly discussing, and writing about the local rules of reciprocity are always challenging, they are essential to responsible research practice and ongoing efforts to decolonize anthropology.

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