Why don’t more anthropologists work in pairs in the field?
By Tin Sum Ying
In 1967, Renato and Michelle Rosaldo travelled to the Philippines to conduct fieldwork on the Ilongot people of northern Luzon, investigating the history of local headhunting practices – a form of ritualised killing involving the taking of a victim’s head as a trophy. In trying to comprehend why men beheaded their enemies, Renato found insight in the idea of releasing liget, which Ilongot described as the feeling of intense rage experienced in bereavement. As he reflected, he initially struggled to grasp the concept of liget on an embodied level before experiencing a devastating loss of his own, which enabled him to identify with headhunting as a way to assert agency in the face of senseless tragedy (Rosaldo, 1993). In contrast, Shelly interpreted headhunting as an activity to allow young men to assert themselves in Ilongot society and achieve a ‘completed’ adult status, framing it as a “form of generativity that is both social and concrete […] born in a youth’s desire to equal peers and reach their elders” (Rosaldo, 1980). These two interpretations invoked different theoretical traditions – one personal, subjective and self-analytical, the other focused on the social functions of status and prestige – yet which approach was more correct? Or is there value in holding both simultaneously?
Two anthropologists, two perspectives, one fieldsite; and yet this kind of dual fieldwork remains rare. Anthropological inquiry has long been built on the ideal of the solitary ethnographer, the privileged, isolated researcher who embeds themselves into a social context and emerges as an authoritative expert. Even as Malinowski established participant observation as the foundational model of anthropological enquiry, critiquing earlier ‘armchair anthropologists’ who theorised about distant cultures without direct engagement, he nonetheless took for granted their individualist approach to research. In the Malinowskian paradigm, a single ethnographer would enter the field with a bag of methodological and theoretical tricks to transform people’s narratives, experiences, performances and intimacies into a piece of research; this scientific approach to grasping the native’s point of view expects interlocutors to ‘open up’ and articulate their worldviews, beliefs and practices to the anthropologist, who assumes the role of the authority who validates, analyses and gives meaning to their confessions. As Rosaldo critiques, “The Sacred Bundle the Lone Ethnographer handed his successors includes a complicity with imperialism, a commitment to objectivism, and a belief in monumentalism […] and a strict division of labour between the ‘detached’ ethnographer and ‘his native’” (Rosaldo, 1993). In this paradigm, ‘anthropological knowledge’ is situated within a framework of control, where explanation and articulation form mechanisms of power.
Yet even as anthropology has moved away from an unquestioning adherence to naïve realism, recognising the arrogance implied in the ethnographer’s assumed authority to “explain the other”, the persistent reliance on individual research reflects a continued romanticisation of the ‘lone ethnographer’ figure. While the postmodern crisis of representation forced anthropologists to acknowledge that ethnographic research involves constructing partial, situated truths rather than uncovering an ‘objective reality’ (Clifford and Marcus, 1986), there remains a sense that the discipline’s critical turn is enmeshed in the same power dynamics it critiques. An idealisation of epistemological individualism means that the modern anthropologist risks being trapped in a form of ‘hyper-reflexivity’ that emphasises the externalisation of positionalities, identities and desires, reflecting on how they might affect research without offering truly counterbalancing perspectives. In the era of self-scrutiny and confession, the ethnographic encounter becomes a mere performance of self-awareness. It is perhaps ironic that while anthropology has long aimed to critique and challenge Western intellectual traditions, it nevertheless upholds the myth of the fieldworker as “maverick and individualist”(Sanjeck, 1990), glorifying novelty and individual brilliance while dismissing collaboration and pathologising overlapping research interests.
And ethical critiques aside, while ethnographic individualism and subjectivity should be valorised for fostering the rich, personalised insights crucial to anthropological knowledge-making, they also introduce pragmatic issues regarding accountability, rigour and transparency. It is near-impossible to externally verify all aspects of conducted research – even with supervisor oversight – particularly as ethical procedures require falsifying the names and details of key settings and interlocutors (as seen in the controversy around works like Alice Goffman’s On the Run). Again, the system depends on trust and the privileged position of the single anthropologist for generating truth.
What possibilities could arise if we abandoned the lone ethnographer model? To propose a thought experiment, I imagine embedding two semi-independent researchers in the same fieldsite, not to validate each other’s findings but to intentionally observe and cultivate different approaches. This is not quite the same as the practice of a second anthropologist revisiting a site of past research, such as Kathleen Gough’s re-analysis of The Nuer, though of course such analyses play a crucial role in situating and updating anthropology within ongoing discourse. As I conceive it, a ‘parallel’ approach would begin with some shared research interests and questions but subsequently allow researchers the freedom to pursue divergent trajectories, where the aim would not be to reinforce a single interpretation of ‘truth’ but to explore how different perspectives might evolve in contrast. This would make explicit anthropology’s constructed nature, highlighting that subjective and partial knowledge is a key feature – and strength – of the discipline. Given that ethnography deliberately refuses preconceived hypotheses, such an approach would foreground how meaning is shaped by the confluence of what interlocutors and individual academics find significant in the field.
A parallel approach would also serve as a ‘counterfactual case’, shifting reflexivity from a mere intellectual acknowledgement of biases to something tangible and relational. By embracing epistemological multiplicity and discursive thought, we could simultaneously engage explicitly with positionality while increasing trust and lowering the risk of falsification. And beyond the methodological implications, this model could potentially inspire innovative forms of ethnographic writing, where juxtaposed accounts could highlight contradictions and real-time debates between researchers. Rather than ‘collaboration’ in the conventional sense, a ‘dialogue of divergence’ would stress the conflicts and unresolved tensions inherent in interpretation, raising the question of, what if the ideas we produce are irreconcilable? (and isn’t that exciting)?
Of course, this approach does not dissolve the hierarchies between anthropologists and interlocutors but instead keeps the anthropologist-as-interpreter structure intact. Yet I hold that such internal contestation introduces a different kind of destabilisation, one that directly challenges the solitary anthropologist’s epistemological authority and forces us to confess that ‘ethnographic truth’ is multiple. Rather than curating an “opacity”, which, to me, continues to privilege the anthropologist as the arbiter of what is revealed and concealed, embracing partiality and productive unknowability could generate a kind of radical transparency.
If this proposal is theoretically vague, that is because I am not entirely convinced that it could work in practice. Anthropological partnerships, where they do occur, often emerge for deeply personal reasons (most commonly because the researchers are married, given the extended amounts of time spent in the field); purposefully maintaining a working partnership in the field might be more challenging. Introducing a second semi-independent fieldworker would also introduce additional complexities, not least the issue of ‘funding overlap’ in an ideological system that prioritises originality as the key measure of the value of knowledge. There is also the question of authorship: how would researchers account for their partner’s contributions in a framework of intellectual property that fails to accommodate the inherently social and fluid nature of knowledge production?
And that is not to say there are no methodological benefits to solitude. Instead of reinforcing power dynamics, working alone can be a way of cultivating vulnerability – as successful research is contingent on the generosity, hospitality and emotional investment of interlocutors, a solo ethnographer may enable deeper engagement precisely by appearing more approachable and ‘in need of care’. The introduction of a second ethnographer could disrupt this, potentially reinforcing a sense of distance or self-sufficiency. But this, too, could be worth investigating; studying how the presence of multiple researchers shapes the field itself could offer valuable insight into the relational nature of ethnographic immersion.
I can’t claim to have any definitive answers – I am simply proposing a thought experiment, one which I hope is exciting and enriching to think about. As opposed to simply assuming that ‘two perspectives are better than one’, this could be a stimulating way of experimenting with partial truths, immersion and vulnerability, and a method of externalising core theoretical debates. Perhaps the real question isn’t why don’t anthropologists work in pairs? but rather, why do we still valorise the individual ethnographic gaze in a discipline that claims to embrace multiplicity and polyvocality?
Note to actual anthropologists – if you’re reading this, please let me know where I’m wrong (in particular, I have no idea how collaboration between anthropologists and research assistants actually works)! I fully acknowledge that it’s a bit presumptuous for me to write this as a second-year anthropology student with no fieldwork experience, so I would be very grateful to hear any insights and critiques.
Bibliography:
Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E. (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley, Calif. ; London: University Of California Press.
Rosaldo, M.Z. (1980). Knowledge and passion : Ilongot notions of self and social life. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Rosaldo, R. (2014). Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage. The Day of Shelly’s Death, pp.117–138. doi:https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376736-003.
Sanjek, R. (1990). Fieldnotes : the Makings of Anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.