Simply put: in the conduct of our re-search, we meet people. We talk with them, we ask them questions, we listen to their stories and we watch what they do. In so far as we are deemed competent and capable, we join in. There is nothing particularly special or unusual about this: it is, after all, what people do all the time when they encounter one another. What, then, could possibly distinguish an encounter that is ethnographic from one that is not? Here you are in what you imagine to be the field (of which more below). You tell people that you have come to learn from them. You are perhaps hoping that they will teach you some of their practical skills, or that they will explain what they think about things. You try very hard to remember what you have observed, or what people have told you, and lest you forget, you write it all down in fieldnotes as soon as the opportunity arises. Could it be the eagerness to learn, the strenuous memory-work, or perhaps the subsequent writing of notes, that lends an ethno-graphic inflection to your encounters with others? The answer is no. For what we could call “ethnographicness” is not intrinsic to the encounters themselves; it is rather a judgment that is cast upon them through a retrospective conversion of the learning, remembering and note-taking which they call forth into pretexts for something else altogether. This ulterior purpose, con-cealed from the people whom you covertly register as informants, is documentary. It is this that turns your experience, your memory and your notes into material—sometimes spun quasi-scientifically as “data”—upon which you subsequently hope to draw in the project of offering an account. The risks of double-crossing entailed in this ethnographizing of encounters, and the ethical dilemmas consequent upon them, are well known and much discussed. No one could accuse anthropologists of turning a blind eye to them. This is not where the fault lies. It lies rather in a temporal distortion that contrives to render the aftermath of our meetings with people as their anterior condition. Johannes Fabian (1983: 37), alluding to the same distortion, speaks of the “schizochronic tendencies of emerging anthropology.” In effect, to cast encounters as ethnographic is to consign the incipient—the about-to-happen in unfolding relationships—to the temporal past of the already over. It is as though, on meeting others face-to-face, one’s back was already turned to them. This is to leave behind those who, in the moment of encounter, stand before. Two-faced indeed!
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