This dissertation examines shifting relationships between Anglo anthropologists and indigenous informants in the Southwestern United States, 1880–1930. Through an in-depth study of Southwesternist anthropological fieldwork, this dissertation explores the politics of ethnographic documentation, presenting anthropologists’ strategies and motivations for obtaining certain sorts of ethnographic data, and the management of ethnographic inquiry by indigenous communities that hosted (or tolerated) anthropologists. Southwesternist ethnographers pioneered fieldwork immersion in the 1880s and 1890s, but soon found that both Pueblo and Navajo social restrictions on the free flow of knowledge complicated attempts to produce ethnographic documentation of ceremonial practices. Ethnographers, in response to resistance to public documentation, forged more intimate, even clandestine, relationships with select informants to obtain novel and “secret” information. Despite the idea that modern anthropology is rooted in participant observation, Secretsharers reveals a turn away from it in the early twentieth century, toward tactics that isolated individual informants to provide in-depth cultural information on sensitive issues about which an Anglo (or any outsider) could not openly ask.
Southwesternist ethnographers grappled with the professional tensions of discretion and disclosure in their inquiries among Pueblo and Navajo communities. On the one hand, anthropologists needed to practice discretion regarding the sensitive components of sacred events and the identities of their informants. On the other hand, scientific standards demanded disclosure of ethnographic documentation to be considered a contribution to “scientific” knowledge. Even as anthropologists sought indigenous “secrets,” they worked to keep their ethnographic publications “secret” from the communities they presumed to describe. The disjunction between scientific epistemological standards and Pueblo and Navajo beliefs in the importance of contextualized, situated knowledge spotlights the unforeseen consequences of information accumulation and dissemination within scientific knowledge production—the presumption that the science of humankind has a “right to know,” regardless of risks to “secretsharing” informants or to the integrity of sacred, situated knowledge systems.PHDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146056/1/afjhnsn_1.pd
