Fieldwork Confessionals

Public Anthropologies
Written By SEAN MALLIN

A sharp intake of breath, and then: “Don’t put this in your book.” A cheeky grin, and then: “I know I shouldn’t say this.” A subtle shift in posture, affect, tone: “You need to hear this, but you didn’t hear it from me.” Such uttered and embodied cautions frame an ethnographic genre that we call the fieldwork confessional, in which our interlocutors mark what they will share as charged, secret, sacred, or transgressive, and then proceed to share it anyway. In doing so, they place conditions on the work of anthropology. We argue that fieldwork confessionals trouble the commonsense that “closeness” is the mark of good ethnographic practice, belie distinctions between “field” and “desk,” and call attention to what remains unspeakable within our discipline. Through experiments in collaborative authorship, this collection takes the fieldwork confessional as an opening toward an ethnography willing to abide the tough work of not knowing and to be less precious about getting the last word. It is the product of the sort of serious play and serious care that we need more of within anthropology.

Keywords
confession, collaboration, representation, intimacy, ethnography

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SEAN MALLIN
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