In this collection, seven anthropologists reflect on how they have dealt with informants in the field. Collectively they tap into an important question not previously discussed in detail: namely, how to “repay” an informant, the source of data that scholars will tap into for their research. As all the contributors indicate, they entered into reciprocal relationships with their informants as varied as the cultures they studied. These relationships were complex, nuanced, and generally extended over multiple years of research, during which the anthropologist functioned as a quasi-member of the society in which they were embedded in many unexpected ways. They sharply bring into focus the complexity of intercultural understanding with well-illustrated examples, supported by an extensive and current bibliography. While this is clearly a volume for college and university libraries serving social science programs, it will also appeal to the patrons of larger public libraries. Recommended.

Choice Reviews

This truly exciting volume addresses an acute aspect of anthropological fieldwork: that of reciprocity. As it can be a thorny issue, a systematic inquiry into it has been neglected far too long. How can, and should, anthropologists give something back to the people who have allowed them into their lives, even into sensitive situations? And for how long should this reciprocity go on? As the editors Michelle C. Johnson and Edmund (Ned) Searles argue, this raises key ethical and methodological issues. Filling an embarrassing gap, Reciprocity Rules is bound to become influential.

Helena Wulff, Stockholm University

A very welcome volume about that fundamental question within anthropological fieldwork: How to compensate our hosts? Based on the extensive long-term fieldwork experiences of the authors and richly illustrated with telling ethnographic details the chapters convincingly and insightfully demonstrate the importance of a nuanced understanding of reciprocal fieldwork obligations. Topics as the importance of studying local gifting practices, the pros and cons of different kinds of gifts and support, the importance of nonmaterial forms of compensation, the obligations—and joys—of fictive kinship relationships, reciprocal writing strategies, the context of decolonization, and many more, each exemplify the essential ethical and moral fieldwork lessons that can be learned from this original volume. Highly recommended for classes in ethnographic research methods.

Geert Mommersteeg, University of Utrecht

Reciprocity Rules is a great contribution to our understanding of fieldwork. Applying “the Gift” and “reciprocity” in concrete and reflexive ways, this collection portrays the inside story of how relations between ethnographers and those they are working with actually develop over time. Like all close relationships, those in the field engage challenges and misunderstandings as well as treasures of deep connection. Based on diverse fieldwork across four continents, the book’s authors average 24 years of connection with their field communities. For those interested in the ethics, methods, and experience of fieldwork, including junior scholars, this work is a gold mine of concrete and practical insights that reach far beyond the standard generalities of research design and methods.

Bruce Knauft, Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Anthropology, Emory University

The problematics of reciprocity unify this stimulating collection. Its contributors illustrate, as Chapter 1 succinctly puts it, how fieldwork is ‘a fundamentally relational endeavor’ and—crucially—how anthropologists ‘owe our expertise to the bundles of relations that make, and have made, our knowledge possible.’ Recognizing the depth of those debts and the colonial histories that enabled them, the chapters converge around an understanding of anthropological knowledge as emergent from asymmetrical social exchanges among persons. The expertise anthropologists claim has never been simply our own. Our knowledge practices and products are therefore only as ethically sustainable and epistemologically valuable as our capacity to honor and renew the agreements on which they rest.

Rena S. Lederman, Princeton University

A brilliant and moving intervention into the fraught but fecund terrain of encounter between anthropologist and interlocutor, researcher and host community, and a profound set of meditations on the ethics of such engagement. Trail-blazing in its treatment of the unstated in anthropological fieldwork, this book should be required reading for fieldworkers, not only in anthropology but in all the qualitative research disciplines.

Charles D. Piot, Duke University