Anthropology Matters Journal 2005, Vol 7 (1)

Imitative participation and the politics of ‘joining in’: paid work as a methodological issue.1 Hannah Knox (University of Manchester) In this paper I explore the ways in which participation as a research methodology is challenged by new kinds of anthropological enquiry and consider, from my own experiences, what the implications of these challenges might be for our expectations of how participation contributes to the construction of anthropological knowledge. I look at the ways in which different forms of participation affect what it is possible for the ethnographer to know, and look at the value attributed to not only what we know but also how we come to know it. This has important implications for our understanding of the interrelationship between different categories of knowledge and how to situate anthropological knowledge in relation to the processes of participation from which it is in large part derived. Although this paper is a contribution to a special issue about ‘new ’ methods in the anthropology of science and technology, I have chosen to discuss a core method of the discipline: participant observation. I explore the ways in which participation as