Rivers’ tent in southeast asia: Ethnicity, relative status, and empathy in fieldwork

It is said that W. H. R. Rivers, one of the founders of modern kinship studies and a major contributor to the tradition of intensive fieldwork in anthropology, gathered data by setting up a tent near Toda villagers’ houses and inviting them in to talk about their quaint, strange way of life. This essay will discuss the problem of the role of the ethnicity of the anthropologist in his formulation of ethnic characterizations of peoples. Anthropologists may no longer, as Rivers did, assume that they are studying a way of life that is a positive reality, and that they, themselves, are neutral stimuli in the communities that they study. Instead, the writer will argue that the content of the data gathered, its emphases and biases, are always influenced by two closely interrelated factors present in the field situation, as in any other: relative status or prestige of the studier and the studied as defined in local terms, and a more subtle concept that is not less real—empathy. By empathy, the writer means the degree to which the anthropologist becomes entrapped in, and moulded by, the emotional concerns of the community in which he resides during the period of his residence and the extent to which he expresses this through use of local social forms. Some might argue that the degree of empathy, so defined, is inversely related to some factor of objectivity— that is, the more empathy, the less objectivity. However, the writer will suggest that although empathy does affect the content and quality of information gathered, one may not make absolute judgments concerning its worth.