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Fieldwork and the Erotic Economy on the Colonial Frontier

T his essay is a personal reflection on doing participant-observation fieldwork in a colonial context, among Shuar Indians in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In particular, I am concerned with the ways power (Foucault 1980) and desire (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) infuse relationships and constitute knowledge and its subjects. This concern is evident in Edward Said’s (1978) argument that “orientalism” is not so much a body of disinterested and objective knowledge as a discourse through which power constituted both the colonizing Occident and the subjugated Orient. This position (following critiques by other scholars, e.g., Derrida 1974) sent shock waves throughout the human and social sciences, initiating a crisis of representation. Perhaps because Said was a literary critic, the predominant response among anthropologists was an inquiry into the literary conventions operating in ethnography and the ways ethnographic texts constitute knowledge (see Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fisher 1986). Many argued that ethnographies could no longer be accepted as transparent representations of other cultures and began to call attention to the contradictions between ethnographic texts and the research that produces them (see Fabian 1983, xi). The result was a call for textual self-consciousness and innovation. Although the consequent explosion in experimental ethnography is laudable, I believe that the emphasis on the ways in which “authority” is an effect of certain textual conventions misses Said’s main point about