Beholden to the Field or the Ivory Tower? the Emotional Resolution and Silencing of Ethical Dilemmas in Ethnographic Research

Alice Goffman was notoriously vilified for driving research participants around in search of a rival gang member who had killed their friend. While critics within academia argued that her actions represented an ethical violation of her role as researcher and conspiracy to commit murder, Goffman described herself as participating in a collectively validated expression of grief and anger that showed “people in the neighborhood that [the victim]’s friends were doing something.” This perhaps extreme example highlights a more common issue in highly-immersive fieldwork: more than we admit, ethnographers confront ethical dilemmas produced in the tension between the contrary social expectations of the distinct social worlds we inhabit, including both academia and our field site.

Focusing both on my fieldwork experience and my decisions about how to write about it (or not), I describe three ethnographic dilemmas: the use of a bribe to replace a lost license plate, financial contributions to research participants, and decisions around where it is safe to travel in an active conflict zone. I argue that ethnographers will likely resolve similar dilemmas in two ways: first, their behavior is determined by emotional responses that serve as roadmaps for orienting action; and second, we generally excise these dilemmas from our writing (here Goffman was the exception and she paid for it dearly). This silence protects ethnographers from recrimination but eliminates potentially interesting findings and weakens the training of budding ethnographers who must reinvent the wheel as they confront these dilemmas on their own.