I stumbled when I saw: Fieldwork, fallibility, and the politics of being wrong

Abstract

What does it mean for an anthropologist to be wrong? This essay takes the question seriously in two registers at once: the everyday mistakes of fieldwork, from mistranslating a greeting to misreading a shaved head as a sign of mourning, and the deeper entitlement through which our discipline claimed authority over other people's languages and lives. Drawing on three decades of learning Nepali and documenting Thangmi with community partners in Nepal, I show how language work makes error unusually visible, and how correction arrives on the speakers' terms rather than the scholar's. Yet, the freedom to admit a mistake is unevenly distributed by race, gender, and rank, and public confession can itself become a performance that leaves authority untouched. Unlike medicine or aviation, anthropology has built no machinery for metabolizing its errors, and our incentive structures reward the appearance of certainty. Being wrong, I argue, is an institutional and political matter, not merely a personal lapse quietly confessed and generously forgiven. A discipline serious about its own fallibility would have to change what counts as a successful career. The task is to move from being right to doing what is right.