LAUSR

Researchers inevitably present partial views of the worlds they study. Decisions about what to include and exclude are shaped by disciplinary foci, current debates and imagined audiences. No research is ever complete: all findings reveal new areas of ignorance and fresh questions for enquiry. But if research reports can never be comprehensive, they should be credible, with inferences warranted on the data presented. When the field of research is one’s actual or potential collaborators – reflective agents who are also insightful analysts of the same worlds – debate around inference and credibility can become fraught. When those collaborations are between those with differential access to power, this debate becomes entangled with the politics and ethics of global, disciplinary, and other inequities. The first author of this editorial was in the uncomfortable position of being part of the field reported on in a recent paper (Aggett, 2018) in this journal. This paper argued that there were limitations in including medical researchers as part of the processes of community engagement in a setting in Nepal. As an ‘insider’ in the field, Karkey had a number of concerns about the interpretations offered in the paper, specifically around: the extent to which the community were ‘resistant’, as claimed; the claim that community medical assistants were not recognized in published papers and the claim that senior staff had little contact with the local community. Karkey also felt the paper was unnecessarily judgemental about the local limitations of participatory processes, countering that progress is inevitably slow, with trust built incrementally over many years, and that local successes in vaccination programmes attest to good relationships with local communities. These different interpretations of the same field generate questions around how far any ‘outsider’, with limited language fluency, even one who has worked and studied there over time, can be a reliable informant on such issues as the intricacies of caste and ethnicity, or whether local practitioners understand community beliefs. How can outsiders comment on issues such as lack of permanent contracts, for instance, with little understanding of local economies or working practices? Of course such questions are commonplace critiques of traditional ethnography, and its limited ability to speak for an ‘other’ who can be only partially understood. All ethnography, perhaps, entails betrayal (Fine, 1993). What is gained analytically by the outsider status should offset these limitations: fresh insights, informed by theory, and a critical and holistic grasp of what is going on. But as research subjects, rendered as local, most of us, when our life’s work is subject to critique, would struggle to avoid feelings of betrayal and misrepresentation. Anthropologists are increasingly in positions where their ‘subjects’ are also colleagues. David Mosse (2006), for instance, has written about objections some of his colleagues made at his draft account of an ethnography of international aid, and the long processes of critique he was subjected to (including being reported to his professional association for breach of ethical guidelines) before the report could be published. His ethnography had been read as evaluation, and as judgement, and some questioned both his credibility and his ethical position. As he notes, questions of veracity are difficult to defend in such ethnographies: both the subject and the author ‘were there’. For Mosse, one implication is that ethnography continues after the fieldwork: the processes of critique and defence are part of the ongoing task of exploring the field. As he puts it: ‘Anthropologists have the power to represent; and their informants have different capacities to object’ (Mosse, 2006, p. 951) CRITICAL PUBLIC HEALTH 2018, VOL. 28, NO. 5, 495–497 https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2018.1515294