A recent thread on the ASAO (Association for Social Anthropologists Studying Oceania) listerv, asked the question: 'in academic writing what do you call your informants?' - what followed was a really interesting dialogue suggesting anything from using the person's name to 'informant', 'friend', 'consultant', 'teacher', 'assistant', 'participant', 'mentor' etc etc....
After a couple days of postings, what emerged was that: "this conversation regarding the term 'informant' really reveals more about how we think of ourselves as researchers than the ways in which the people we work with take risks to share knowledge and status with us - knowledge that we eventually craft in varying degrees of collaboration with its original 'teachers' or owners". Do we see and approach the people we work with as 'participants' in our work? 'collaborators'? (and really follow through with that) or do we focus only on data? evidence?
The other interesting question to emerge from this dialogue was "what do informants call us?'. Someone told a nice story of how the elders of her village in Papua New Guinea saw her as just a student, that they were really engaged in an inter-cultural discussion with her teachers back at her school in the UK where she would be sharing all her information.
here are just three of the exerts:
From Dan Jorgenson (UWO)
I guess I would call them informants if we were talking about a particular context of imparting information, at least in situations where I don't (and/or shouldn't) refer to them by name; when I speak generically about Telefolmin (but don't use the word Telefolmin), I call them "the people I work with"; when speaking of particular individuals (as I do when relating a story or a life-incident or an event in which they played a part), I usually use their name and call them friends if they were indeed friends.
For what it's worth, I think in practice I use the word informant rarely, if at all (possibly only in my dissertation?). I don't find it offensive in the way that many do, and don't find the word consultant to be an improvement at all. My preference whenever possible is not to speak of people in terms of a role or slot, and instead in terms of themselves as particular individuals - by name. It is, as I think of it, perhaps also fitting as far as Telefol sensibilities are concerned.
Incidentally, I almost never say "the" Telefolmin, as opposed to Telefolmin (without the article). This was established early on in my graduate training by Burridge thirty-odd years ago, who thought that it took a certain kind of hubris to claim to speak about "the" Tangu in a way that suggested all-encompassing and encyclopedic scope. (Am away from my bookshelf right now, so can't confirm whether he followed his own precept or not - I know a lot of us fail to do so - but this was, at any rate, part of his sense of what was proper.)
From Rod Ewans
I have no problem with "consultant". It seems to lack the overtones some are determined to find in the other words - though the abandonment of "informant" seems to me to be the victory of fashion over common sense and time-honoured tradition. Attempting to inform the researcher is what these wonderful, generous people do, and I therefore don't find calling them informants either demeaning or pejorative. Perhaps there are those among us who watch too much crime tv, or (perish the thought) have things they do not wish others to inform the authorities about, hence the aversion to the word! An informant does not have to be thought of as a stoolie, snitch, rat or grass (depending on your crime fraternity) - to concede that as a necessary connotation would be to make yet another concession to the dumbing-down of our rich language. I rather think it is up to all of us, collectively, to decide whether to be bullied by fashion or not. Do not go gentle into that good night!
From Alice Olseon
I prefer "teacher" or "mentor" rather than informant or even friend (since I am unsure if that was truly a reciprocal feeling shared between myself and the people I worked with during fieldwork). When I teach classes in anthropology and sociology at the small, midwestern university where I work, I find myself referring to Pohnpei, FSM (where I did Ph.D. fieldwork), and the people of Pohnpei as "the people I lived with and learned from."
Teacher or mentor seems to capture the sense of unevenness in cultural knowledge between the researcher and "teacher" as well as the eventual responsibility of the "student" (or fieldworker) to go on to make arguments and "knowledge" for which he or she is ultimately responsible. Using the term "teacher" or "mentor" also subverts older ethnographic paradigms of Western or Euro Scholar vs. Non Western "native" "informant"/other because it points to the idea that there are many different levels of insider/outsider cultural knowledge and we all take turns being the student and the teacher in different situations. In other words, it points to the shifting power relations of fieldwork and the different kinds of educational "power relations" that shift as the fieldworker moves from student (at University) to student (in the field) to teacher/professional back in academics (Think here, of Narayan's 1993 American Anthropologist article "How native is the 'native' anthropologist?" 95(3): 671-686).
The more I think about it, this conversation regarding the term "informant" really reveals more about how we think of ourselves as researchers than the ways in which the people we work with take risks to share knowledge and status with us--knowledge that we eventually craft in varying degrees of collaboration with its original "teachers" or "owners." Perhaps Ph.D. committees should ideally include members of the cultural groups with which we studied? While I worked on Pohnpei, several of the elders with whom I studied often remarked, "Ah, Alice, your Professors back home will really find this study interesting." It seemed to me that these elders clearly saw me as a student and my Professors back "home" as the elders with whom they were really performing cross-cultural communication. This question and scenario becomes even more interesting when thinking about "native anthrpology/ists."
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