Dreams from a Saint: Anthropological Atheism and the Temptation to Believe

THE IDEA OF "GOING NATIVE" is one of the few taboos remaining within anthropology. Considered antithetical to the social scientist's stance of objectivity and standing as a professional, going native has traditionally been a term of derision among anthropologists. Despite an array of challenges to notions of objectivity, the taboo remains in place and continues to carry a heavy affective load.' Those of an interpretive bent are far more comfortable embracing the idea of "difference," an epistemological abyss between anthropologist and informant, than seriously entertaining the possibility of entering or believing in the world of the people they meet during fieldwork. The perception of an abyss rests on the assumption that all experience is semiotically constituted and historically contingent and that anthropologists, embedded in projects fundamentally different from those of their informants, cannot penetrate the language games2 of the "Other." I argue, in contrast, that the experience of an abyss between the interpretive world of an anthropologist and the people he or she gets to know stems largely from the taboo against going native. It results from a refusal to acknowledge that the subjects of one's research might actually know something about the human condition that is personally valid for the anthropologist: it is a refusal to believe. This refusal constitutes a hegemonic act, an implicit insistence that the relationship between anthropologist and "informant" be shaped by the parameters of Western discourse.3 In this essay I explore my own experience with this anthropological taboo. I suggest that though the possibility of neutral observation on which it rests has been vigorously challenged at the theoretical level, this stance has been retained in anthropological practice. Even in experimental ethnographic writing, the anthropologist rarely budges from this subject position into the embarrassing possibility of belief.4 The act of participation in a particular mode of social life draws us into a common reality. The fieldwork situation provides not only stimuli to respond to but also new models for how to respond to them, as the ethnographer struggles to situate himself or herself in a world of radically changed circumstances. Anthropologists have written about the experience of culture shock and the threats to identity that immersion in the field produces.5 My own early experiences in the field were consistent with this literature: I often felt an intense need to escape into privacy or to see other Americans. Temptations to believe, to accept aspects of a new worldview as true, were a part of this personal challenge that I labeled culture shock. But these temptations eventually ceased to be threatening to me, except as they constituted threats to my identity as an anthropologist. My experience suggests that, in order to preserve a stance of what he or she imagines to be professional involvement, an ethnographer may place the act of observing and recording between himself or herself and others. The effect is not only to shield those people from the ethnographer's own gradual immersion but also to misrepresent the "truth" of the field experience in the resulting ethnography, fitting that experience into existing stereotypes available in Western discourse. Dreams occupy a privileged place in this issue of immersion and distance. Dreams are what Foucault in his existentialist days called the roots of the imagination (Foucault 1986:21). Western research indicates that at least one important function of dreams is to help the dreamer master new experiences and integrate them into existing cognitive