Lying Informants: A Fieldwork Experience from Ghana

For its conclusion alone, I would not have written this fieldwork note. That conclusion is merely a truism: survey research cannot handle delicate issues. My reason for writing this note is a coincidental event, something almost anecdotal that occurred during my research in a rural Ghanaian community. That event showed how valid the truism is. It is well known from countless anthropological field reports that not all informants are as enthusiastic about anthropological research as the fieldworkers themselves. Evans-Pritchard's (1940: 12-13) recording of his conversation with an uninterested and unwilling Nuer informant has become a celebrated example of that differential.' That an informant's unwillingness to cooperate increases as the topic becomes more intimate and embarrassing goes without saying, although anthropologists have thought it worth a considerable amount of words. Interviewers who ask personal questions about delicate topics, sometimes with more sense of duty than common sense, force polite informants into lying ones. Salamone (1977) has pointed out that such lying is a meaningful form of communication and not its negation. Asking why people lie may lead to important new insights into personal, social, and cultural aspects of their lives. First, however, there must be an awareness that people are lying. Some researchers may never make that discovery. In 1971 and 1973 I conducted fieldwork in a rural town in the Kwahu area of Southern Ghana.2 The kinds of things in which I was interested were definitely delicate: family quarrels, suspicions of witchcraft, sexual relationships, and birth control practices, including induced abortion. Initially, I limited my research to the members of one lineage (abusua). I was then residing with the head of that lineage. My research approach consisted of participant ob-