Guestworkers: Farmworkers, filmmakers, and their obligations in the field

As fieldworkers-in this case, those who go to communities asking for the favors of interviews, images, and film footage-we often find ourselves caught in a complex web of promises, obligations, and gifts. Receiving the gifts of interviews often requires something of us in return, placing us in fieldwork predicaments that we must continue to negotiate long after the actual fieldwork ends. Fieldwork, of course, is a relationship we enter because we want to. Yet once we begin the work itself, people we meet in the field and who give us their energy, time, and stories begin to have their own designs on the outcome of the work we produce and how it will be used. As this happens. Copyright

Duke Scholars

Author Charles Thompson Cultural Anthropology