On monetary reciprocity

Considering that much anthropological knowledge rests on unequal economic relations, Salverda and colleagues hold that in present-day fieldwork settings, the ethical thing to do is offer monetary payment to research participants, or at least to think about payment in research design. Such payment, they argue, ought not be a corrupting, taboo subject, as suggested by the forceful mystique of reciprocity in fieldwork relationships and by the lack of professional guidelines on financial compensation. Instead, the authors assert, payment should be integral to our reflections on reciprocity, an idea they capture with the term “monetary reciprocity.” This reflection on payment inaugurates the new “Production of Knowledge” feature in AE, and it should yield interesting observations. Here are some of mine. First, let's recall that “payment” and “compensation” are not equal categories. The word payment comes from the Latin pacere, “to pacify, calm, or settle.” It meant buying one's peace by satisfying a creditor. Anthropologists have considered payment a deeply multifaceted social process. In everyday language, however, payment is a transactional act referring to a direct transfer of money for goods or services rendered. Compensation comes from the Latin compensatio, meaning a weighing of one thing against another, to counterbalance a debt or an obligation and bring things back into balance. Compensation need not be monetary, and payment can be a form of compensation. Of course, there are various conceptual repertoires that describe similar conduct, and they inflect in myriad ways. But we are talking now from the perspective of the professional anthropologist, and the language we use to explain ourselves and what we do matters. Second, when we speak of payment and compensation, we enter the realm of value-making judgments. It is a daring proposal to ponder whether the information shared by the people we seek out and often befriend is analogous to services rendered. To be fair, that is not what the authors claim; their argument is more nuanced. But they do use the notion of “payment” more extensively than that of “compensation” (154 times vs. 11 times) to make the point that, when appropriate, money transfers should form part of ethnographic practice. Considering the “political economy” of fieldwork (e.g., funding structures, institutional prestige, mobility, etc.) and anthropology's legacies of empire, it is salutary for us to overcome the disciplinary reservedness regarding our rapport with money in fieldwork. My point is that payment alone cannot fairly translate the worth of fieldwork. The complexity and open-endedness of fieldwork experiences exceed the money form. In other words, monetary payment is insufficient to account for the conditions of production of ethnographic knowledge—knowledge that is born out of relations we forge in the field. Sure, payment can facilitate access and bolster participation; it may be expected, required, or refused. It can signal respect or be perceived as a faux pas, even an insult. Whatever else it does, it materializes worth and should be part of ongoing methodological and epistemological reflections. Yet payment cannot balance out relations, all the more when they become long-term relationships; I pain to see it that way. Were it so, it would impoverish the generative push and pull of interpersonal entanglements and the unforeseen possibilities of anthropological encounters. How would one price that? To my mind, payment—as conduct and as a calculative grammar—is most equitable when it takes place within a configuration of transactions and gestures at once economic, moral, and affective. Such transfers express the lively messiness of gratitude, obligation, indebtedness, desire, expectation, and the like, all of which constitute the experiential vocabulary of ethnographic relations. Here, money becomes particularized and reinscribed into different semantics. I would like to briefly illustrate some of these questions through my own experience. I still send money to a family I met in 2001 during my doctoral fieldwork. I do not consider these transfers to be payments or compensation for past fieldwork privileges. Amounts stay manageable, and when I ask myself why I continue to send them money, well, it is partly owing to a feeling of indebtedness that has been impressed on me—sedimented. There is also a lingering feeling of attachment toward these people. Affects can be sticky. Yet indebtedness is more than just a feeling; it is also a value judgment on the relationship, tied to the emotional resonance of a shared past, and acknowledging indebtedness helps keep privilege in check. I am not trying to restore balance. Nor is this a case of ongoing reciprocity; calling it that would overstretch the term. Here, I agree that it's not always helpful to make reciprocity the basis of all ethnographic relations, especially when it masks inequality. But it is also important to allow payments to transmute and acquire all sorts of modifying affordances. A distinguishing feature of anthropology's methodologies is precisely that we open ourselves up and get caught in shifting regimes of value.