Inappropriate closeness in fieldwork?: A view from anthropology of education

In the earliest decades of anthropological fieldwork in the late nineteenth century, fieldwork relationships with informants appear to have been anything but overly close. The stereotype of the anthropologist in the American Southwest is that of a white man who sat on the steps of the trading post and paid Indians to tell him words in their language. Attempts were made to elicit information on kinship systems through direct and imperious questioning: “What do you call your mother's brother?” The analogous British and German stereotypes were of those who sat on the verandah of the local colonial officer's house, conducting themselves similarly with “the natives.”