Teaching in the Field as Participant Observation: Anthropology and the Ethics of Education in Nickerie, Western Suriname

Abstract

Teaching during fieldwork is not a common anthropological research method. In this paper, I will share my involvement with a local non-governmental initiative of setting up and teaching at the Volkshogeschool (a school for adult education) during my fieldwork in Nickerie, Western Suriname. By reflecting on some of the ethical and methodological challenges involved in teaching during anthropological fieldwork, I will show the potential of teaching in the field as a form of empowerment both in terms of responding to educational and other social needs of members of the local community and to those of the fieldworker. While being aware that education for all is not a universally held value, or good, I suggest that deliberately changing a part of the field during the research is not necessarily unethical. Indeed, to intervene more drastically in peopleÂ’s lives than simply by being there, through actively stimulating education, may in some cases be a more ethical choice than not to intervene. I will argue that if we understand fieldwork to be a dialogical interaction of teaching and learning, teaching in the field can be considered a form of participant observation. In my experience with the Volkshogeschool in Nickerie, teaching in the field was an inextricable part of the fieldwork endeavour.