What difference does it make to be two anthropologists in the field? : Analysing male initiations among the Angans.

International audienceWomen anthropologists of the 1960s and 1970s blamed their colleagues of the opposite sex who worked in New Guinea (particularly in the Highlands) for paying greater attention to men’s activities and listening to men only. When these women decided to do fieldwork there, they wanted to balance out the ethnography and so favoured working with women. There was thus a strong awareness about how the gender of the anthropologist helps or hinders access to specific categories of people.What was not prevalent was the idea that the presence of a man and a woman working at the same time in groups performing male initiations could make a difference, not only in the ethnography but in the way such large-scale, significant events could be analysed. The paper will discuss this situation in particular, but will address others as well (bringing children into the field in a long-term study context or coping with obstacles thrown up by government representatives when they find themselves dealing with a woman on “development projects”)