Hi Mike,
I've seen grad students sent to mental institutions trying to "never upset anyone" and worrying about the "inherent power imbalance between the ethnographer and the informant" .
Agreed and, BTW, that holds for doing good ethnographies as well. Even though our (Anthropologists) mission is to write ethnographies, never say never is a damn good motto for us, too, and too few use it .
Yup. I've seen wanna-be ethnographers (some with tenure) go into areas and tell the locals what they "should" be doing. Thankfully, I've never had to work under any of these twits, but they are there. Most cultures recognize everything that we would call a "relationship" (there actually aren't that many different forms), even though they rate them differently. Sounds like you tagged into one that they recognized pretty well.
Sounds like my wife's version of conflict resolution ! So, the key, then, lies in the arbitrator position. It sounds like you put yourself in the place of the arbitrator in a way they weren't expecting.
Cheers,
Marc
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