“We look for the golden rule [when it comes to research ethics], but it has to be situated…. Patchwork ethnography is about this—people have bank accounts, identities, limitations, timelines, and (our) own voices.”
Leticia Nagao
22 April 2021
Published: 10 June 2021
Image by Leticia Nagao.
Ten years in the field doesn’t automatically translate to ethical relations with interlocutors. Time doesn’t simply create good ethics. The ability to feel and understand people through anthropological sensibilities, that is, takes more than time. For her Bachelor’s degree in Brazil, Leticia Nagao incorporated interlocutor testimonials as a form of co-authorship. For her, it was an attempt to make an epistemological shift that was very much called for, given the many people at numerous sites she was told “she had to speak to.” However, because fieldwork in that case meant shorter periods of time at numerous places, she felt her attempt to “take people seriously” might have been seen as a shortcoming.
Now in an interdisciplinary program, she continues to navigate the challenge of people both within and outside of anthropology questioning the validity of patchwork-ethnography-type research. This is as she continues to build interlocutor relations beyond the field and attend to what is deemed important and ethical by those interlocutors we “write with.”
Leticia Nagao is a MA student at the University of Copenhagen. letizianagao[at]gmail.com