Expectations and actions in the field

Resumen

Most if not all field ethnographers sooner or later encounter a situation in which the people they are studying hold assumptions and expectations of what constitutes correct action in a given situation that differ from their own. The situation may be trivial or a matter of life and death, and the consequences of acting (or failing to act) according to the cultural assumptions of the ethnographer or the people under study may range from amusing to mortal. I provide examples from my fieldwork with the Barí of Colombia and Venezuela. However, this problem does not end in the field. The ethnographer back home may ruminate for years about what s/he could or should have done differently. Perhaps most significantly, for purposes of this article, these ruminations, are eventually informed not only by the assumptions the ethnographer brought to the field and the different assumptions of the people s/he studied, but most interestingly by the way the ethnographer’s assumptions were modified by the field experience itself.