2006 Volume 70 Issue 4 Pages 505-527
This paper discusses the possibilities and limitations of anthropological practices through a discussion of my own anthropological research among the urban Inuit of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. As outlined in this paper, I have carried out anthropological research among the urban Inuit of Montreal since 1996. My 1997 research results stimulated several Inuit in Montreal to establish an association of Montreal Inuit as well as a monthly community feast in Montreal. Also, my ethnographic reports were among the first to study the urban Inuit, who had previously been ignored by their fellow Inuit still living in the Arctic, as well as by federal and territorial governments, not to mention anthropologists. As an anthropologist, I have attempted to write an ethnography of the urban Inuit. At the same time, as a volunteer with the Association of Montreal Inuit, I have served as a mediator among the urban Inuit, as well as between them and government officials on issues relating to the Association. Furthermore, several representatives of the Association, as well as federal government officials, have been using my research for their own purposes: the Association representatives have used my research data to obtain greater financial support and services from the federal government, while the federal officials use the data to better understand the current conditions of urban Inuit in making policy decisions in Ottawa. My own experiences have forced me to reconsider anthropological practices and the role of the anthropologist in the contemporary world. In particular, I realize that because much of our research affects many peoples' lives, we must be very concerned with ethical issues when undertaking anthropological research. From my view, one of the primary goals of anthropology is to understand practices, discourses, and other socio-cultural phenomena of a given people/society in relation to other peoples/societies, from both the 'native' and 'outsider' perspectives. As this paper illustrates, anthropologists have the opportunity to focus on the lives and cultures of various minority peoples who have consistently been ignored by the dominant society. Such research is of academic importance to anthropology as a discipline. Also, because such anthropological research can be applied to social movements and policy-making to improve the lives of minority or other disadvantaged peoples, anthropology can contribute significantly to solving human problems in practical ways. On the whole, contemporary anthropology tends to be classified into two separate subgroups according to its goals: ethnography and applied anthropology. In fact, their respective practices are interconnected: any anthropological research based on long-term fieldwork can be applied to the solution of a large variety of problems in the contemporary world. Recently, 'action anthropology,' or 'public anthropology,' has attracted broad attention in the discipline of anthropology. Even so, its practices raise serious ethical problems. Those include the justification of anthropological practices affecting people's lives and the encouragement of intra-group factions, as I have shown with my Montreal case study in this paper. Although those problems are unavoidable in anthropological research, I argue that we can improve such practices by reflecting on our own research methodologies and critically assessing those of others. Finally, I address the problem of "writing culture" shock in ethnographic representation. I argue that one drawback of describing culture "as is" is its association with modern anthropological practice. That drawback cannot be overcome merely by developing new ethnographic methods for writing others, since the problem is partially grounded in the inequality of political and economic power relationships between researchers and informants,
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