Hungry Ethics: from doing research to becoming-sangtin

This essay offers the metaphor of hungry ethics to think of ethics alternatively outside the epistemic boundaries of Institutional Review Boards. It argues that due to the ephemeral, embodied, and shifting nature of research relationships, there can be no predetermined definition of what ethical research is in ethnographic contexts. By building on the notions of radical vulnerability and hungry translation as conceptualized by Richa Nagar in Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability, this essay suggests that research ethics must be incessantly hungry and refuse to be satiated or saturated through a set of established rules and regulations. Hungry ethics are undisciplined, unstable, relational, and they are rooted in a dynamic praxis of becoming-sangtin. The author conceptualizes becoming-sangtin as the never-ending process of unlearning to occupy the privileged position of a researcher and relearning to embrace the role of a vulnerable companion. While becoming-sangtin echoes Deleuze & Guattari’s formulation of becoming(-nomad-minority-woman) as a way to dissolve static and hierarchical identity categories, it also draws heavily from feminist epistemologies. Ultimately, this essay makes the case that instead of trying so hard to do ethnography or to be ethical—ideals almost exclusively tied to restraining academic aspirations and regulations—researchers should aspire to become a sangtin, an intimate comrade, to the limited extent that we can.