Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

372 Chapter 13
Objectivity and Neutrality
Objectivity does not mean (and has never meant) value neutrality. No one
asks Cultural Survival, Inc. to be neutral in documenting the violent obscenities
against indigenous peoples of the world. No one asks Amnesty International
to be neutral in its effort to document state-sanctioned torture. We recognize
that the power of the documentation is in its objectivity, in its chilling
irrefutability, not in its neutrality.
Claire Sterk, an ethnographer from the Netherlands, has studied prostitutes
and intravenous drug users in mostly African American communities in New
York City and Newark, New Jersey. Sterk was a trusted friend and counselor
to many of the women with whom she worked. In one 2-month period in the
late 1980s, she attended the funerals of seven women she knew who had died
of AIDS. She felt that ‘‘every researcher is affected by the work he or she
does. One cannot remain neutral and uninvolved; even as an outsider, the
researcher is part of the community’’ (Sterk 1989:99, 1999).
At the end of his second year of research on street life in El Barrio, Phillipe
Bourgois’s friends and informants began telling him about their experiences
as gang rapists. Bourgois’s informants were in their mid- to late 20s then, and
the stories they told were of things they’d done as very young adolescents,
more than a decade earlier. Still, Bourgois says, he felt betrayed by people
whom he had come to like and respect. Their ‘‘childhood stories of violently
forced sex,’’ he says, ‘‘spun me into a personal depression and a research crisis’’
(1995:205).
In any long-term field study, be prepared for some serious tests of your
ability to remain a dispassionate observer. Hortense Powdermaker (1966) was
once confronted with the problem of knowing that a lynch mob was preparing
to go after a particular black man. She was powerless to stop the mob and
fearful for her own safety.
I have never grown accustomed to seeing people ridicule the handicapped,
though I see it every time I’m in rural Mexico and Greece, and I recall with
horror the death of a young man on one of the sponge diving boats I sailed
with in Greece. I knew the rules of safe diving that could have prevented that
death; so did all the divers and the captains of the vessels. They ignored those
rules at terrible cost. I wanted desperately to do something, but there was nothing
anyone could do. My lecturing them at sea about their unsafe diving practices
would not have changed their behavior. That behavior was driven, as I
explained in chapter 2, by structural forces and the technology—the boats, the
diving equipment—of their occupation. By suspending active judgment of
their behavior, I was able to record it. ‘‘Suspending active judgment’’ does not
mean that I eliminated my bias or that my feelings about their behavior