Ursula Sharma

Reflexivity, ethnography and the professions (complementary medicine) Watching you watching me watching you (and writing about both of us)

That reflexivity is a characteristic of high modernity is now a truism, but its ethical and practical implications for field research have not been explored. The article is based on research conducted among complementary medical practitioners, focusing on issues of professionalisation. This research revealed the problematic and permeable nature of boundaries in ethnographic work. For example, in the course of interviews and observation therapists vouchsafed information to us which seemed controversial, even indiscreet. Was this a matter of their own naivety, their failure to demonstrate the mature ‘professionalism’ to which they aspired? Or was it a conscious strategy, conducted in the expectation that we would make such material public without attributing it to them by name? We were obliged to reflect on the nature of our own ‘professionalism’ as researchers, the ways in which private and public selves interact in the course of research. The confessional nature of some ethnographic writing raises further issues about trust, privacy and the preservation of professional boundaries between researcher and researched. We conclude that social scientists are entitled to critique ‘professionalism’ as a historically situated ‘folk’ concept whose rhetoric often obscures material interests, but they would do well not to abandon it themselves if they are to claim a responsible and ethical form of practice.

Professionalization of complementary medicine in the United Kingdom

Summary Complementary medicine, within the UK, has undergone enormous change in terms of educational standards and internal organization. These alterations are partly in response to external pressures from the Government, the European Union, the medical profession in the UK and the consumers, and partly come from an internal desire to enhance the status and legitimacy of complementary medical practice. Consequently, the many professional associations representing complementary medicine have engaged in a process of professionalization. This paper briefly reviews some of the changes that have resulted.

Berreman revisited; caste and the comparative method

In a series of articles and books published in the ‘60s and 70s, Gerald Berreman argued that the institution of caste is not confined to Hindu India. In particular he drew attention to the similarities between caste in India and race in the United States of America, and drew specific attention to the processes by which deference was exacted by high caste/whites and by which untouchables/blacks devised ways of dealing with demands for deference. The dominant trend in the ethnography of caste (and in ‘Indianist’ ethnography in general) is away from comparison, towards a Dumontian emphasis on the sui generis nature of Hindu society. This is in line with a tendency in western anthropology to stress the specific and incommensurable nature of particular cultures. It is argued that despite this fragmenting trend, comparison is nonetheless a useful tool. While we may reject Berremans grand schema for classifying different kinds of social inequality as representing a totalising enterprise which anthropologists have rightly discarded, his use of comparison is valuable on two counts: a) it permits sociological generalisation about the micro processes by which domination is both attempted and resisted, b) it acts as valuable rhetorical device (used by ‘modernists’ and ‘post modernists’ alike) through which juxtaposition of the unexpected can surprise the reader into examining the implicit preconceptions and values which they bring to the analysis of other cultures.