They Lie, We Lie: Getting on with Anthropology

Peter Metcalf gives an engaging account of his fieldwork in Borneo, telling the story of his tortuous relationship with Kasi, a formidable old lady who, for twenty years, tried to strictly control what he learnt about her community and began all her stories began with the phrase ‘They lie, we lie…’, thus challenging the nature of truth. Metcalf uses his experiences to analyse the contraditions inherent in fieldwork and to join the debates critiquing ethnography that have arisen both within anthropolgy itself and from other disciplines such as cultural studies and post-colonial theory. The result is an account that is accessible to those unfamiliar with the current critiques of ethnography, and helpful to those who are only too familiar to them. His discussion shows, not how to evade the critiques, but how in fact anthropologists have coped with the existential dilemmas of fieldwork.