Editors’ note

Anthropologists like to tell stories about how they were wrong. These stories are part of our collective identity. Consider Briggs's (1970) classic ethnography, Never in Anger. Briggs tells a story about doing fieldwork in Nunavut (then the Canadian Northwest Territories) in the early 1960s. She showed anger on behalf of the Inuit group she was living with when they were wronged by a white outsider. To her surprise, her Inuit interlocutors reacted by ostracizing her for months. She describes feeling devastated, lonely, and depressed, but in slowly working her way back to personhood with her Inuit participants, she learned in a powerfully embodied fashion a core principle of their culture: that adults never show anger or make demands, and that to lose one's temper is to demonstrate a dangerous lack of control, even insanity. She documents how this emotional control is inculcated in children from a very young age. Thus her awful moment of social failure is transformed into a profound reflection on affect and socialization in Nunavut culture. The resulting ethnography became one of that era's most famous. Even when our failures and mistakes are less obvious than Briggs's and don't threaten to derail our research projects, many ethnographic writings reflect on moments when the author realized they had brought a bad assumption into the field with them and, as a result, learned something from their research participants—something that shifted their methodological or theoretical approach, or changed what they were studying. These stories are particularly prevalent among graduate students returning from their first fieldwork experiences. The stories go something like this: I went to the field planning to study x, and when I was in the field, I listened to my interlocutors and realized that what I really needed to study was y. For example, in her book Food, Sex and Pollution, Meigs (1984) writes about going to the field intending to study divorce, but when she gets there, everyone seems bored and uninterested when she asks about the topic. Instead, they want to talk to her about sex, gender, and the pollution rules that govern what they can and can't eat. It's such a collective concern that she describes their interest in the topic as a “religion.” Responding to this, she changes her research topic and commits to addressing her research participants’ interests, letting them chart the direction of her work. Briggs tells a similar story: she goes to the Inuit planning to study shamanism, but when she arrives, she finds that the small group she is living with have converted to Christianity and don't want to discuss their “pagan” past. That, combined with her attempts to process the social ostracism caused by her angry outburst, leads her to a whole new project on emotions and socialization. Without having systematically reviewed all the different ways that anthropologists have described their “I was wrong” moments, the AE editors suspect that many, if not most, ethnographies include stories like this, even if most are not as dramatic as Meigs's or Briggs's. These stories are not just about ourselves as individual fieldworkers but about anthropology as a discipline. We tell them to remind ourselves and to teach our students about the discipline's orientation toward a radically inductive and collaborative approach to building knowledge. By telling stories about being wrong, we might seem to be sacrificing our own dignity and authority, but in fact we are shoring up our authority as authentic ethnographers. These stories illustrate our willingness to be humbled by what we don't know, demonstrating our commitment to what Lederman (2007, p. 310) calls anthropology's “systematic openness to contingency.” In short, anthropology is a discipline that has staked its methodological approach on the possibility of mistake and failure. In taking an iterative approach to co-constructing knowledge with our research participants and collaborators, we insist that when we realize we are wrong, we must acknowledge it to move forward. As we were reflecting on this as editors, we thought of our own “I was wrong” stories. For Lisa, it was less a moment and more of a dawning realization. She had been doing research in Egypt on emerging reproductive health technologies, including sildenafil (the generic name for the drug more commonly known as Viagra). As she visited acquaintances and friends in Cairo and Alexandria, she asked them, “Who uses Viagra, and why?” The first time someone mentioned using sildenafil and tramadol (a painkiller) in the same sentence, as if they were synonyms, she dismissed it as ignorance. The man she was interviewing was an illiterate fisherman. He probably didn't use either drug, she assumed, and didn't have the knowledge to realize that they were radically different, having completely different mechanisms of action. Sildenafil produces erections; tramadol, as an opioid narcotic, would be intrinsically erection-wilting, she assumed—and, indeed, recent Egyptian research has demonstrated this (Hashim et al., 2020). The second time someone described using sildenafil and tramadol for the same purpose, she again ignored it. It was not until the third time that an interviewee described the drugs as equivalent that she started to catch on that something significant was afoot. She realized that she had neglected a fundamental point of critical drug studies since at least the 1970s, namely, that a drug's effect is produced not by the drug alone but by the intersection of three elements: the drug and its neuropharmacology; the mindset of the person taking the drug and their expectations about what it will do; and the social context in which they use the drug (Zinberg, 1984). This led Lisa to ask a question that would prove important to her research: Why did people see these drugs as part of a semantic continuum, and what did that say about how Egyptians understand masculinity and its relationship to pharmaceuticals (Wynn, 2022)? In retrospect, I realized that scars were slowly being formed. More precisely, they were being encouraged to form through a communitywide cultivation of silence. Rather than silence being considered an inhibitor of healing, as it is in much of Western medical, psychological, and cultural discourse, this was a case of a community encouraging silence as a means of promoting healing. After several moments when her research participants gently corrected her social blunders, she realized something not just about them and their philosophies of trauma and healing, but about her own deeply held assumption about trauma: that to heal, you need to talk. In contrast, for her research participants, “to break the silence [about past trauma] would be akin to breaking open the wound” (Trnka, 2008, p. 180). Jesse had a key “I was wrong” realization during his PhD research in Aceh, Indonesia (Grayman et al., 2009), where he was studying postconflict humanitarian recovery programs. Jesse was working with an Indonesian medical team that was tasked with providing psychosocial and psychiatric support to civilian survivors of the separatist war (1976–2005). He gave the team a short training on ethnographic methods, with a focus on managing trauma and the ethics of discussing painful conflict memories. Later, during a field exercise, an overeager nurse interviewed a village head about his conflict experience, pressing on despite the man's visible discomfort. As a crowd gathered, the village head recounted horrific torture, evoking tears from an elderly observer. When the conversation ended, the leader quietly remarked, “Sometimes I think there is no need to remember the past like this.” Jesse wondered whether he had misconceived his effort to upskill the medical team with ethnographic methods. Afterward, Jesse reflected on this as a moment of failure, noting that confessional narratives, central to many mental health models, are not always therapeutic. While some participants thanked the team for listening, it was nearly impossible to discern the few who might not benefit from talk therapy. Though Jesse turned the experience into a teachable moment, he regrets that the researcher's moment of learning unfolded in a real community, with real people and real leaders, just barely coming to terms with peacetime after living through decades of political violence. Even today, remembering the event makes Jesse anxious and embarrassed. This draws our attention to another key aspect of the way anthropologists process being wrong. We often experience our mistakes as embodied, visceral moments of regret, embarrassment, frustration, or humiliation. Thus, perhaps recounting our mistakes is not just about asserting our ethnographic achievements and authority, but about helping ourselves process our dark, painful feelings and difficult memories of fieldwork. Wanting to reflect more deeply on these issues, we invited anthropologists to submit to a special forum in which they discuss their moments of being wrong and what these can tell us about our discipline. We asked them to recount events when they realized a flaw in their methodological approach, an interpretive error, an ethical mistake, an event that triggered a theoretical paradigm shift, or a realization that their approach to teaching or doing anthropology needed an overhaul. We asked them to address these questions: When did you realize you were wrong? How did you come to that realization? What did you learn? How did you change the way you do or teach or write anthropology? As we read the submissions to this special forum, we were struck by three recurring themes. The first was embodiment and affect. As described in Jesse's and Susanna's stories of being wrong, and in Briggs's powerful ethnography, it can feel like swimming in dark emotions to realize that you are wrong and to process what it means for how we understand our past and our future in a society. Coming to terms with our mistakes is both an intellectual and an affective process, one that is experienced and felt deep in the body, both as we live the moments of mistake and process them later. A second theme was scale. Being wrong can be a tiny realization leading to a subtle reorientation in focus or approach, a microrecalibration of knowledge or of everyday fieldwork practice, or a grand, dramatic moment that causes a seismic shift in perspective. Of course, it's rarely one or the other. As Kuhn (1962) notes of paradigm shifts, they might seem like revolutions, dramatically overthrowing old modes of thinking, but in reality they take place gradually: anomalies slowly accumulate until the dominant paradigm topples under their weight. The third theme is temporality: “I was wrong” can be a light bulb moment or a slow, unfolding realization, a moment in the field or a decades-later discovery. Some “mistakes” do not reveal themselves until several years or even decades after one's fieldwork, reshaping one's sense of not only their research or the people they spent time with, but of themselves. In My Life as a Spy, Verdery (2018) reflects on how state security services labeled her a CIA agent during her three years conducting ethnography in Romania in the 1970s and 1980s. Their mistaken interpretation of her as a foreign agent began, she suggests, through her own error in judgment—motorbiking alone through the Romanian countryside in search of a field site, she inadvertently strayed into a restricted military zone, missing the sign warning “Entry prohibited to foreigners” (“I had made a stupid mistake. It would not be the last time,” Verdery [2018, p. 3] dryly remarks). the way I carried myself was suspect. At least, so it seemed to my friend Emilia, who told me that when she met me in 1990 she immediately thought I might be a spy: “You were dressed very modestly, you didn't hold yourself above us. Your style was to reduce the difference between yourself and Romanians, under-communicating it.” In short, my manner of dress was a form of hiding. Eventually she came to see it as my way of trying to form good relations with villagers, but her first thought was, “Maybe she's a spy. Instead of seeming like someone from a totally different world, you seemed to be one of us”—that is, she thought I had been specifically trained to fit in. (p. 17) recognize me as a spy because I do some of the things they do—I use code names and write of “informants,” for instance, and both of us collect “socio-political information” of all kinds rather than just focusing on a specific issue. … When I read in the file that I “exploit people for informative purposes,” can I deny that anthropologists often do just that, as Securitate officers do? In 1962 the US Department of Commerce, without authorization or permission from the author, translated from French into English the anthropologist Georges Condominas’ ethnographic account of Montagnard village life in the central highlands of Vietnam. The Green Berets used the document for assassination campaigns targeting village leaders. For years, neither publisher nor author knew this work had been reprinted in English for military ends. How can one accept, without trembling with rage, that this work, in which I wanted to describe in their human plenitude these men who have so much to teach us about life, should be offered to the technicians of death—of their death! … You will understand my indignation when I tell you that I learned about the “pirating” [of my book] only a few years after having the proof that Srae, whose marriage I described in Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt, had been tortured by a sergeant of the Special Forces in the camp of Phii Ko. Condominas's outrage changed how anthropologists think about their writing, their politics, and their ethics of representation. As Price (2007) notes, ethics committees often focus on any immediate risks to research participants, including whether they could be harmed by certain questions (as in Jesse's recounting of interviews about a violent past). Examples like Condominas's, however, show that anthropologists also need to think about the different scales and temporalities of ethnographic work and its possible harms. These themes—embodiment and affect, scale and temporality—come up in fascinating ways in this forum's commentaries. Rejecting the simple binary of right or wrong, Veena Das dismantles the AE editors’ language of “moments” of realization. Instead, she sees anthropological knowledge as a long, dialectical process: the anthropologist slowly finding their way between, on the one hand, the dominant theories and theorists of their time, and on the other, their interlocutors, the “figures of thought” influencing them in the field. She describes a sense of incompleteness or poor fit with existing theories, one that slowly accumulates and eventually compels the anthropologist to see something in a new way, or notice what they haven't been seeing. “By taking a long-term perspective on the vulnerability of knowledge, which reveals itself over time,” Das aims to “draw attention, instead, to the connections between the knowledge of the alien and our own everyday modes of knowing. We miss these connections if we stay with the stark oppositions of truth and falsity, mistakes and correction.” Like Das, Carole McGranahan sees anthropological theory as formed not only in the relationship between fieldworkers and theorists, but also by the theorists in the field. Reflecting on her own training, she writes, “The ethnography often, though not always, came to me pretheorized. People shared stories with me alongside observations, musings, and explanations. Analysis was by no means only the scholar's domain. It belonged to narrator and audience alike.” Gil Hizi thinks through a series of unexpected moments during his PhD research and describes his mistakes as the “naivete of early graduate studies.” In studying practices of among young Hizi learned that after the is no with a but to the that come from interlocutors, in are studying While he at first that they would take no interest in the of an in his Hizi finds the Hizi from these unexpected moments with mistaken come and he through them to his with his realization of his mistakes from to decades He describes feeling early in his during his first with a he he was wrong until interviews when of the difference between the and the [of became account is through with embodied affect. when one to talk with in the of a field at a to being and even more and when he how to his field notes and back to the US without He up with a that … seems of you are wrong, after the when in the field you knew something was but didn't how to with it. writes about finding on an at a in one of which is about the impossible of a The of this with about medical issues, such as the of back into old anthropological about the to and is certain that the only to that the is from the on an from This to the of her and, like Das, her by asserting the of and the of knowledge. writes a account that a different to the of the anthropologist as about being as an and from and working to open up to the makes a that leads her to being Afterward, she her in terms of a intersection of gender, and also with In an dark and that many of us will she that she is not to for being she can't over what she did wrong. 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