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    was looking at and on my informants' professional identities asscholars and cultural interpreters.

    I recalled my professor-informant's advice many times through-out my fieldwork, and learned to adjust my interview techniqueas necessary, but I never stopped thinking about the intellectualand ethical challenges my academic informants presented tome as an ethnographer. The issues were familiar-accuracy,confidentiality, and self-representation-but the research con-text impinged on them in unique ways. In fact, as a doctoralstudent studying grown-up academics, I was compelled todefy some of the behavioral norms typical of my lesser status.Conducting research outside of my own country, within a uni-versity system similar to but distinct from my own, helped makethis defiance possible. Sti ll, I was always constrained by mysense of presumption in studying a sophisticated academic com-munity, well able to furnish its own social science analyses.

    I was constrained also by my awareness of Irish social sci-entists' criticism in recent years of US ethnographers' researchin Ireland, a criticism endorsed by some of the academics Iinterviewed. I entered a fieldwork setting where both my disci-pline and my nationality sometimes made me ~u s p e c t . ~ hilethis is no longer an unusual situation for the western ethnog-rapher, the fact that my research population included those pro-fessionally authorized to judge my work created specific prob-lems and anxiet ies for me regarding my behavior in the fieldand the project's long-term implications for my career. My re-search therefore raised a second set of issues pertaining toethnographic authority: those concerning the foreign anthro-pologist's attempt to study native intellectuals.

    In this a rticle, I will discuss some of the methodological andtheoret ical issues that arose in my fieldwork with Irish aca-demic intellectuals, and describe how they related to my dualidentity as a graduate student and a US ethnographer. Whilethe first identity created practical problems for me of status,access, and rapport, the second raised larger questions re-garding intellectuals' eligibility for social analysis and the na-ture of their roles as cultural interpreters and, in some cases,cultural defenders. As will be discussed, the latter issues wereparticularly relevant to a study of Irish academics. Nonethe-less, the article suggests that contests of status and authorityare likely to emerge in the ethnographic study of any intellec-tual community undertaken by an outsider. Although thesecontests will be influenced by the outsider's scholarly statusand by local perceptions of anthropology, they are most deeplybased in the challenge of intellectuals' interpretive authorityposed by this type of ethnographic research.

    Foreign nthropologists and Native Intellectuals

    Methodological issues related to the study of elite, educatedand self-reflexive informants have been a focus of anthropolog-ical concern over the past decade (Clifford and Marcus 1986,Marcus 1983, Marcus and Fisher 1986) and have formed muchof the basis of the new critical anthropology. A major impetusfor this development has been the critique of western anthro-pology's role in enforcing colonial ideology and practice (Asad1973) and in creating reductive images of the non-western'other (Said 1978). Yet while the self-examination inherent n

    critical anthropology is a valuable corrective to the presump-tion of western interpretive omniscience, it has also con-

    strained analysis of the hierarchies of knowledge and powerthat obtain within intellectual communities that now chall engewestern anthropology's authority.

    The reluctance to examine native scholarly understandingsis based partly on western anthropologists' fear of reinforcingthe dominant discourse that critical ethnography has sought toundermine, and partly on anthropologists' membership, likeother academics, in a hypothetically universal community ofscholars. Justification for avoiding ethnographic analysis of aca-

    demics and intellectuals as self-interested social actors is foundalso in the traditional sociological view of intellectuals as rel-atively detached from class interests (Mannheim 1960) andtherefore both morally above and operationally beyond empir-ical analysis. But as Bourdieu (1988) and Robbins (1990) pointout, intellectuals are always situated and active within observ-able social processes and institutions, although their degree ofcommitment to these factors will vary. Nowhere is this moreevident than with academics, those intellectuals professionallylinked to universities and vested with a large share of publicresponsibility for cultural reproduction.

    Anthropological efforts to study foreign intellectual commu-nities are likely to encounter resistance in settings where nativescholars are now engaged in developing alternate analyses of

    their own societies. These scholars' understandable interest inmonitoring outsiders' research may be conflated with the morepedestrian des ire to control interpretation and limit critical ex-amination, particularly if elites and other influential groups arethe focus of study. It is not always easy in such settings to de-termine whose interests must be served, or to accept at facevalue the research priorities endorsed by privileged membersof the local community.

    Fieldwork with intellectuals and other professional and/orelite groups places the low-status anthropologist in the centerof these intertwined methodological dilemmas. We experienceour research as studying up because our informants' prestigeand power are often much greater than our own; at the sametime, we may be accused by local scholars of studying downif the research is conducted in a setting where outsiders havedominated social science examination of the area. But instudying educated, middle class people we are also studyingacross, and share some of our informants' professional and in-tellectual concerns.

    The research implications of the last situation are still un-clear for western anthropologists, given the discipline's historyand the heroic mode in which much ethnographic fieldworkhas been cast. To assume an advocate's role is inappropriate,because such informants don't need our help and may well havesome power over us in the research setting. The alternative-exposing middle class villainy s a disingenuous stand formost bourgeois academics to take. Western ethnographers nowstudy people whose individual power is comparable to or equalto their own, but whose societies are still subject to the polit-ical, economic, and cultural influence of the western core. AsWesterners and as ethnographers, how do we locate ourselvesbetween these two different sources of power: that derivedfrom local circumstances, and that derived from broader histor-ical and political economic forces? In studying intellectuals inparticular, how do we evaluate their ideological agendas whilestill honoring the authority of indigenous interpretation?

    Sorting out these issues can be particularly difficult in thecase of intellectuals who, like my research subjects, have a

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    legitimate claim to representing historically oppressed commu-nities but who themselves ar e members of a professional elite.in this case university faculty bodies. Under British colonialadministration (lasting from roughly the mid-sixteenth centuryto 1922), Irish language and culture were suppressed, margin-alized, and viewed with contempt by most Anglo-Irish andBritish scholars. Irish Catholics had limited access to highereducation and hence to the scholarly discourses about theircountry. Sociological analysis of Gaelic culture was per-meated by racist or, at best, trivializing characterizations thatoften served to justify colonial policy. This experience of cul-tural repression and misrepresentation was counterposed, how-ever, by pre-colonial Ireland's close links with continental tra-ditions of scholarship and later by the development of a distinctAnglo-Irish intellectual tradition. The colonial relationshipalso created collegial ties between Irish and British universitiesthat remained intact following independence, while the institu-tion of English as Ireland's dominant language allowed itsnative writers to enter the western literary canon.

    As a consequence of these factors, Irish intellectuals havelong been members of the western scholarly community, butas representatives of a small and underdeveloped country theyremain somewhat peripheral to the academic world-system ofscholarly funding and influence. One result of this relative mar-ginality is an understandable desire among some Irish aca-demics to protect Irish intellectual property from casual ex-ploitation by foreign researchers. Added to this concern is ajustified sensitivity to negative or distorted portrayals of Irishculture. so long part of the intellectual baggage of British colo-nial administration.

    It is understandable that ethnographic analyses that purportto explain modern Ireland in terms of its underlying socio-cultural patterns and traditions would be viewed with skepti-cism and even hostility by som e Irish scholars. Until the 1970s,when anthropology began to be established as an independentdiscipline in the Republic and in Northern Ireland, most ofthese analyses were produced by ou tsiders4 Since that time,as native ethnographers have sought to define their own re-search priorities, the work of US anthropologists in Ireland hasbeen subject to particular criticism. This critique became mostexplicit with the publication in 1979 of Saints Scholars andSchizophrenics a study of the cultural factors influencing ratesof mental illness in the west of Ireland conducted by the USanthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes. The book received con-siderable attention from the Irish media, which attempted tolocate Scheper-Hughes's field site, and provoked concernamong some Irish anthropologists about outsiders' fieldworkethics and the validity of the research models the latter broughtto their work in Ireland (Blacking et al. 1983, Kane 1982). (Seealso Scheper-Hughes's 1982 reply to Kane.) The sensitivenature of Scheper-Hughes's research, as well as the timing ofits publication, no doubt inf luenced the degree of discussionher book aroused.

    Criticism of Scheper-Hughes's work built upon a wider re-evaluation of Americanist ethnography of Ireland, most notablythe tradition of rural community studies initiated by Arensbergand Kimball's classic monograph, Family and Community inIreland (first published in 1940). As Wilson (1984) and Kane(1986) have argued, the influence of Family and Communityincharacterizing Irish rural culture has been so great that subse-quent ethnographers of rural Ireland (Brody 1973, Messenger

    1969) have used it to chart social change and decline from thetraditional society Arensberg and Kimball were seen as de-

    scribing in County Clare in the 1930s. (It should be noted thatArensberg and Kimball never claimed that their study repre-sented all of rural Ireland, nor that it depicted a timeless andunchanging way of life.) Some Irish social scientists believethat US ethnographers remain overly reliant on the declineand dysfunction model of Irish culture in their research on con-temporary Ireland, and that US funding agencies may help per-petuate this tendency through their support of proposals basedon such characterizations.

    Other factors contribute to Irish scholars' wariness towardUS ethnographers. One of these is US anthropology's historicalemphasis on culture, in contrast to the social anthropology tra-dition of the British Isles and the quantitative orientation of so-ciological research in the Republic. US anthropologists in Ire-land also suffer from the generalized stereotype there of USacademics as better funded, more influential, but less compe-tent in their research than their Irish or British counterparts.(The derisive term blow-in seems to be used mainly to de-scribe US scholars conducting short periods of research in Ire-land, and in particular those engaged in some form of socio-cultural analysis.) My own fieldwork suggests that anotherfactor influences the negative perception of US ethnographersamong Irish academics: the control native literary specialistshave had up to now over the discussion of Irish culture, an en-tity characterized by such specialis ts in terms of great booksand dramatic historical developments. In this context, out-siders' attempts to locate culture in the mundane realms ofeveryday life may be seen as a return to essentialist models ofIrish character, as well as an undermining of the major area inwhich the country maintains international scholarly prestige,the production of great literature.

    My own interest in studying part of Ireland's flourishing in-tellectual community would appear to refute any notion of Ire-land as a backward and dying society. By focusing my researchon university academics, I sought to locate Irish intellectualsin a social setting with explicit rules, hierarchies, and profes-sional roles. By looking at the national issues with which theyinvolved themselves beyond the university, I hoped to draw con-nections between intellectual activity and the wider realms ofpolitics and public life. But as a representative of a disciplineunderstood locally as a process of studying down, and as aperson from the US, I inevitably was seen by many of myinformants as challenging their own status and interpretiveauthority. This view of my research provoked varied responsesin those I interviewed, some of which reflected the ambigu-ity of my own position, and others the ambiguity of that ofmy informants.

    cademic Status and Interpretive uthority

    As a foreign researcher, I was given clearance to conduct myfieldwork by the social science departments of both Trinity Col-lege and University College Dublin. I also discussed my projectwith Irish anthropologists and sociologists at the beginning ofmy fieldwork, hoping to convey collegiality and a wil lingnessto share my ideas with them. Through these means I gainedpermission, as a graduate student, to analyze people whose

    prestige and scholarly standing were often much greater than

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    my own in any context. In studying academics, however, I en-tered into a professional environment where I could be con-strued as a colleague, and where shared intellectual understand-ings lessened my alien status. Neither of these ascriptions, ofcourse, eliminated the problem of my being a U S anthropolo-gist. major consequence of my having these overlapping pro-fessional identities was that much of my fieldwork involved anongoing negotiation of authority between me and those Istudied, who identified me variously and at different times asa student, a peer, and an invasive outsider.

    Even in those situations where my credentials were compa-rable to those I interviewed, my need to ask quest ions of myinformants established me as the more dependent individual inthe encounter. Most fieldwork situations involve researchers attimes in such dependent relationships, but I would argue thatthey are entered into usually on a short-term basis, with anthro-pologists maintaining a belief in their greater status and under-standing in the world beyond the field site. This belief isdifficult to sustain when studying academics, who are not onlyrecognized scholarly experts, but whose local prestige is en-forced by the bureaucratic structures of the university. In thistype of fieldwork setting, the intellectual and institutional au-thority of informants may fuse, allowing them, if they wish,to distance themselves from both the researchers and the issuestheir research raises.

    Shifting criteria can be employed by academics to definetheir status in relation to foreign scholars, knowing that thelatter recognize these criteria and will grant their legitimacy.Degrees alone do not determine status, given that the doctorateis not a compulsory qualification in many academic settings.Long tenure in the university, influential intellectual achieve-ment, and affiliation with state agencies and the media makeacademics potentially rich ethnographic informants, but arealso likely to limit the nature of the relationship a low-statusanthropologist can establish with them. More accomplishedethnographers may be too absorbed themselves in the elaborate

    professional codes of academic culture to consider such col-leagues subject to study. There is some suggestion of bad tastein the notion that one academic should study another, a deli-cacy of feeling rarely extended by social scientists to the restof the world.

    It is difficult, therefore, to establish a fieldwork relationshipin an academic setting where some professional or intellectualleverage is not being sought by the informant. Of course , theethnographer can engage in this as well, but at the risk ofoffending the informant, closing off the flow of information,or, worst of all, enflaming latent antagonism to the outsider'sresearch agenda. In my own case, I soon found myself seekingopportunities to refer to my teaching experience and profes-sional contacts. I needed to relieve myself of intellectual ano-

    nymity in order to validate my status in an environment soclosely linked to my professional identity. I could not help butthink that my finished work would be judged in part by the face-to-face impression I had made as a scholar on my academicinformants.

    In his discussion of fieldwork practice, Agar 1980:54-62)suggests that a flexible identity is desirable for the ethnogra-pher. This is probably true in those settings where the identitiesascribed to the fieldworker are generally positive or denotepower, and where (as in many instances) the ethnographer'sstatus is greater than that of informants in most contexts. In my

    situation, the variety of interpretations that informants placedon my status and intellectual authority could be useful to someextent. Deciding for themselves how to categorize me, infor-mants could justify their participation in the research and stillfeel assured that they were not disempowered by its terms.Being teachers, they often allowed themselves to instruct me,and I, well conditioned to be a student, often was content tosit back and play this role.

    A flexible identity is, however, of much less value to the eth-nographer where there a re few privileged constructions of iden-tity available, or where the power one may have is negativelyperceived. As noted earlier, my lower professional standingcould be balanced against my problematic identity as a U S anthropologist. The latter ascription, which extended somereified political and institutional power to me, provided an al-ternate way of categorizing me which sometimes worked to mydisadvantage. For example, I was cold-shouldered by a fewIrish social scientists, and was subjected to the suspicion ofother academics (revealed in informal conversations) that I wasout to get them or was really carrying out another, quitedifferent study. One Irish sociologist even suggested that I musthave a hidden research agenda because no one would do thekind of project that I said I was doing. To me, it seemed thatat least part of this overly suspicious response to my presencereflected simple academic territorialism, justified in terms ofprotecting Irish scholars against my potentially ill-founded ob-servations of their community.

    My dual identity as a graduate student and as a U S anthro-pologist therefore created a no-win situation for me, if we startfrom the assumption-which I believe most fieldwork does-that lessened authority and ambiguous status are only tempo-rary qualities ethnographers assume in order to conduct theirresearch. Where these ascriptions cannot be altered, in part be-cause they are based on an accurate assessment of the ethnog-rapher's academic position as well a s legitimate concerns aboutresearch motives, fieldwork will follow a course less controlled

    by the researcher and subject to more informed analysis andcritique. This situation challenges the assumption of interpre-tive authority that prevails in most ethnographic fieldwork,albeit balanced by the anthropologist's willingness to be a stu-dent of culture. It also compels greater attention to the limita-tions of standard fieldwork practice when studying those withsignificant intellectual or institutional influence. In such cases,access to key personnel and information may be limited a s aresult, paradoxically, of anthropologists' lesser social o r profes-sional standing in the field as well as local concern over theirpotential misuse of data in wider scholarly contexts.

    The cademic as Research ubject

    What are the consequences of these issues of status and au-thority to the actual conduct of fieldwork with academics? Asin research with members of most other professional groups,the first consequence relates to academics' deep incorporationinto bureaucratic structures that limit casual access. Aca-demics get used to the insulation university bureaucracies pro-vide, and, depending on their position and personal inclina-tion, can use it effectively to avoid those who might interrupttheir work. The traditional fieldwork option of just hangingabout and conducting participant observation soon shows its

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    was introduced at a conference in the US announced that hewould tell me to piss of f if I ever showed up at his office door ;he was outside my research scope, so I did not do so. Moreoften, subtle warnings were used. Many interviews began witha short discussion, initiated by the informant, of Scheper-Hughes's book. This was an attempt to find out where I stoodon her research as well as to establish the pitfalls that lay inwait for me. In one case, however, I was reminded of my vulner-ability in a more ominous manner. A few days before leaving

    Ireland, I was told by an Irish academic in a friendly toneof voice that were I to write anything unpleasant about thespeaker's friends and colleagues, they were quite capable ofmeeting as a group at Dublin Airport the next time I showedup in the country. This coda for my fieldwork conveyed onlytoo graphically the nature of the problems I would face afterleaving the field. Not only would I struggle to find a satisfactoryway of writ ing about my identifiable and in some cases influ-ential informants, but they were well aware that I would facethis problem. It is possible that some of them anticipated thepleasure of reading about their enemies as well as the outrageof reading about themselves.

    The cademic as Native Cultural Defender

    On one level. my informants' responses to me and my re-search were normal reactions to an outsider presuming to inter-pret a well established and self-contained world. In myfieldwork setting, they were no doubt exacerbated by Irishacademics' guardedness toward U S ethnographers and theirperception of anthropology as a process of studying down, alatter-day version of the colonial administrator's tour of theprovinces. As one Irish writer commented to me, You have tounderstand that Ireland has been a test tube culture for cen-turies. In the colonial period, political interests often guidedoutsiders' research. More recently, outsiders have tended tolook at Ireland to discern remnants of a traditional culture nolonger representative of the country as a whole. It is understand-able that my academic informants would be on guard againsteither agenda, and concerned with establishing their own au-thority as knowledgeable representatives of their society.

    But was my informants ' skepticism toward my researchbased solely on the legitimate impulse to protect vulnerableparties, or did it also imply that they themselves should not bestudied? The issue here is not just the individual researcher'scompetence or insight, but whether such informants should beexempt from the inquiry and observation their advantaged posi-tions would seem to justify. In some respects, this dilemma par-allels the classic sociological debate concerning intellectuals'uncertain class affiliations and their critical role as independentsocial analysts. If, as Gouldner (1979:7) proposes, the intelli-gensia may be the best card that history has presently givenus to play as a force for positive social change, should we there-fore place them, and ultimately ourselves, outside the sphereof critical analysis?

    My informants were, in the Irish context, relatively privi-leged people. They had prestigious jobs, some influence in poli-tics and the media, and significant control over a universitysystem still open to few members of the working class. Almostnone of them were members of the economic elite, althoughsome enjoyed considerable celebrity as television personali-

    ties, journalists, and government advisors. As such, they werequite used to being consulted for their scholarly opinions, andhappy to participate in various public debates. These werechosen so ial roles, however, that reaffirmed their professionalauthorit&nd kept them, as inteIlectuals, outside the sordidrealm of real influence-wielding. The ambiguity of theirstatus as intellectuals worked to their advantage as research sub-jects by allowing them to position themselves variously in re-lation to Irish society, to the university, and to me. Their influ-

    ence and authority were contextual, and this flexibility madeit possible for them to avoid examination of the institutionaland interpretive spheres in which they did indeed have somedegree of power.

    A distinction needs to be made, therefore, between the issueof respecting native research concerns and that of protectingthe professional and ideological interests of local authorities,including bourgeois intellectuals. These two issues are easilyconfused, particularly if the same intellectuals are engaged ina critique of externally imposed social science models. Suchinformants may indeed represent larger constituencies, but inwhat setting have intellectuals ever spoken only for an abstractcommon good and not for their own as well? Power and influ-ence are clearly relative, particularly in the case of such infor-

    mants. The relative power of the insider must be evaluatedagainst that of the outsider, reckoning class and professionalstatus into the equation along with history and internationalpolitical economy. In this broader context, power and influenceare no longer clearcut issues.

    Anthropological studies of power have dealt with this di-lemma so far by focusing their attention on political and, morerecently, economic elites. In looking at such groups withintheir own society, middle class western academics can main-tain some distance and a fixed ideological stance vis-a-vis theobject of study, who is understood to need little protection.Elite research by western scholars in foreign field sites main-tains the same critical focus on the politically and economi-cally powerful, legitimized by anthropology's modern tendency

    to defend the interests of the disadvantaged. US anthropolo-gists, in particular, often assume an advocate's role toward theunderdog, expressed explicitly or implicitly, which clarifiestheir relationship to local power-holders as well as to the widerresearch context. In taking this stance. ethnographers cast them-selves as ultimately benign, and only marginally influential, so-cial agents.

    Advocacy can be sustained, however, only where anthropol-ogists actually have some power and where it is possible to be-lieve in the moral superiority of a particular set of actors withina given social milieu. It is naive to assume that these conditionsapply to the study of intellectuals, who do not qualify in allcases as elites but who may exert significant influence in theirsocieties. Such informants possess forms of power simila r toor greater than that of the anthropologist, mediated by histor-ical and political circumstances that do not always work to theinformant's disadvantage. As local scholars and administrators,many of them authorize or monitor social science research byforeigners within their countries. In the early 1970s, Asad(1973:17) wrote that anthropology had not produced radicallysubversive forms of understanding because the powerful whosupport research expect the kind of understanding which willconfirm them in their world. In some settings , this critiquemay be extended now to native intellectuals who have gained

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    prominence as spokespersons for their societies, who are in aposition to evaluate outsiders' research, and who also wish tobe confirmed in their own forms of understanding. As Sangren(1988:406) argues, all claims to superior understanding involvethe imposition of new rhetorics of domination and legitimacythat serve the ends of their proponents. While criticism of localintellectual authorities would be inadvisable by outsiders , thisrestraint should not keep us from recognizing the investmentall intellectuals have, at home and abroad, in defending or dis-paraging competing forms of knowledge.

    Conclusion

    What are some of the implications, then, of studying aca-demics and other types of intellectuals, and how do they meshwith the desire to respect local scholarly concerns in settingswhere foreign anthropologists may be less than welcome? Inthe first instance, it is clear that whatever ethical precautionsmust be taken with powerful informants must be taken alsowith those who will never see the finished book or dissertation.In any cas e, the latter situation is becoming rare, given the pub-licity that attends outsiders' research in many areas. It is real-istic to assume that our work and conclusions will becomeknown to at leas t some of those we have studied , and that theyshould be known, even though we will have little control overthe way th is knowledge is disseminated and the interpretationsplaced upon it in the local context. Indeed, our lack of controlin this regard may be seen as balancing our informants' lackof control over what we have done with the information theyhelped provide.

    These circumstances require an additional and less glam-orous kind of anthropological fortitude, derived not from with-standing difficult fieldwork conditions but from living with thelong-term consequences of what we write after we come home.They a lso add to the possibility of a genuinely reflexive anthro-pology, based on a dialogue between more inclusive intellec-tual spheres than that of collegial, if often contentious, aca-demia. As yet, this dialogue is more hope than reality, and itsrealization may impose turmoil on many engaged in ethno-graphic research. It is unlikely to be the relatively high-mindedintellectual exchange Marcus and Fisher (1986:163) envisionwhen they propose that anthropologists write for multiplereaderships.

    But there are dangers here as well of self-censorship for thewrong reasons, and of over-sensitivity to the research interestsof local interest groups, who understandably wish to preserveor establish their own intellectual authority. These dangers areintensified when intellectuals themselves constitute part or allof the research population. In talking with friends who havealso conducted fieldwork with elite or influential informants.and who have sought solutions to some of the problems I havedescribed, I find that the first level of response is not very heart-ening. We joke about writing two versions of the study: onefor home (that is, our professors or colleagues), and one forthe field site. If we do so, we will protect ourselves as muchas our informants. We will also protect other researchers'chances of doing fieldwork in the same country, and this is ahumane considera tion. But the larger issues posed by studyinginformants who have the power to influence the researchprocess who in some cases are part of the research itself- are

    not resolved by such ad ho solutions, and few sources of pro-fessional advice seem available.

    Nader (1988) writes that up to now, fieldwork has dependedupon a power relationship that favors the anthropologist, andthat in the absence of this advantage new methodological guid-ance is necessary for those who study up, and, I would add,across. The solutions that come to mind, however, do not ad-dress the increasing complexity of the relationship between eth-nographers and their research populations. While anthropolo-gists often submit their research proposals to national socialscience review boards, this practice may compel the former totailor their proposals to appeal to local research expectationsand does not guarantee that the fieldwork conducted will con-form to the outlined plan; the latter is, in itself, a complex andlargely unexamined ethical issue.5 Similarly, cooperative re-search with native scholars, a strategy Wilson (1984:7-8) hasproposed in the case of Ireland, has the potential to lessen tensionbetween insiders and outsiders, but also suggests compliancewith safe research agendas and the possibility of intellectualstultification. Disturbing images of patron-client relationshipsemerge from this scenario as well, in which the division be-tween acceptable and non-acceptable research is reinforcedrather than overcome and in which local authorities (scholars,research administrators, and, in some cases, politicians) accrueeven more gate-keeping power.

    I do not think programmatic solutions to these problemsexist at this time. The problems themselves vary from one re-search setting to another, depending on historical and politicalcircumstances, as well as the status of the outside researcherin relation to the local intellectual community. What is certainis that the study of intellectuals and their institutions, as panof a widened ethnographic focus on the structures of power inmodern society, requires that critical attention be paid to thenature of our own investment-as academics and intellectuals,as well as social scientists-in the mystique of interpretive au-thority and the illusion of scholarly objectivity. As Robbins(1990:xxiii) writes in regard to the intellectual's politica l re-sponsibility, Better honest self-interest than hypocriticalabuse of a distant or hypothetical constituency. With this ad-vice in mind, we might begin now to examine our ethnographicpractice in terms of our potential role as informants.

    N O T S

    Fieldwork was conducted mainly in Dublin, the Republic of Ire-land, between August 1986 and July 1987. In most cases , however, theterm Ireland is used here to refer to both the Republic, an indepen-dent state since 1949, and the Province of Northern Ireland. part ofthe United Kingdom.

    Formal interviews with approximately 4 0 academ ics and univer-sity officers from each college were conducted, with follow-up inter-views taking place with about one-third of these informants. I alsospent part of each school day on on e or both of the campuses, at tendingpublic lectures and meetings. Interviews were conducted as well withintellectuals, politicians, and activists not employed in the universitysector.

    My ethnicity as an Irish-American was not a significant factorinmy informants' characterizing me, probably because manyU S scholarswhose w ork is based in Ireland are of Irish descen t.

    The first independent department of social anthropology inNorthern Ireland was founded in 1973 at The Queen's Un iversity of

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    Belfast. T he Republic s first department of anthropology was createdin 1983 at St. Patrick s Colleg e, Maynooth, a part of Th e National Uni-versity of Ireland. Anthropology is taught in other Irish colleges anduniversities as well, usually within sociology departments.

    There are, of course, many situations in which sensitivity to localor n ational political conditions is absolutely necessary in order to pro-tect informants.

    R E F E R E N C E S C I T E D

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    1979 The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class.New York: Continuum.

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