Ethnographic Complicity

The method of participant observation often generates mistrust and suspicion; sometimes participation and observation also result in complicity between fieldworkers and interlocutors. Such ethnographic complicity, however, takes different forms and is expressed differently according to the co-ordinates of local knowledge and social institutions. This article compares ethnographic complicities in central China and in the Wa State of Burma. Accusations of spying, interactions with gatekeepers, and mutual surveillance run their course, according to the respective roles and rules of interaction. What emerges in this ethnographic comparison are two radically different forms of complicity: whereas in central China, complicity tends to be understood as concealment of the illicit, in the Wa State complicity is seen as positive co-responsibility. These differences are explained in relation to the nation-state apparatuses of both settings.