From Researcher to Human Being: Fieldwork as Moral Laboratories

This paper explores ethnographic fieldwork as moral laboratories. Drawing upon two episodes in my field encounters in Southwest China, I illustrate the nature of our method as a form of moral striving and experimentation. Fieldwork is a stage where practical actions become vulnerable ethical dramas in search for the situated good. Fieldwork recasts the ethnographer from researcher to human being and enacts the ethics of care and moral transformation in uncertain time.