Ethics in Ethnography: Lessons of Amana and Ghayb in the Middle East for Medical Anthropology

Much has been written about the ethics of doing and writing ethnography, the imbalance of power between anthropologists and the communities they study, the extraction of information from interlocutors – who are often themselves on the margins of their communities – and the ethical dilemmas that arise in ethnographic fieldwork. For medical anthropologists working with vulnerable populations – patients, refugees, migrants – on the relationship between medicine and politics, these ethical concerns are only intensified. I write this not to take us down the path of recounting the ills and evils of ethnography, nor to explain many anthropologists’ turn to activism and performative solidarity. I also do not aim to return us to the critique of writing culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), or the idea that confessing our ills and various privileges will save us from our position within a stratified world. Rather, I ask how ethnography can explore truth and justice while allowing space for others’ desires to be heard ethically, without slipping into a politics of compassion and empathy (Dubal 2018; Iqbal 2019; Liu and Shange 2018; Mittermaier 2019; Pandolfo 2018). How could such an approach be the means by which space is produced for waves to be generated for our interlocutors, for ourselves, and for scientific inquiry (Pandolfo 2018:339)? In this essay, I present reflections from my own fieldwork experiences that detail the knot of positionality and methods of research and inquiry that I encounter as a medical anthropologist specializing in the Middle East.

As I moved through my field sites of Yemen, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia during the summers of 2009 and 2013 and for 24 months between 2016 and 2018, working with physicians, bioethicists, patients, migrants, and refugees, I found my interlocutors and medical staff evaluating me by the same criteria that are used to evaluate physicians: i.e., do they bear the divine trust (amana) and practice their craft with an openness to the unseen realm (al-ghayb)? This assessment of a good physician included evaluation of their modes of knowing and expertise. These in turn depended on their capacity to hone their internal and external senses, which was affected by the cultivation of their soul, piety, and akhlaq (character). In my field sites, the physician was understood as a malakat al-rahma (angel of mercy). That they were seen as instruments or tools of the divine, in working for individual and communal wellbeing (‘afiya), did not enhance their authority so much as underscore their fallibility and limitations (Hauter 2020a). As I found myself being assessed by the same criteria, I came to understand that, for an ethnographer, bearing the amana and admitting the ghayb involved listening ethically, transmitting knowledge as intended, not stealing or misrepresenting ideas, and not Orientalizing or essentializing interlocutors. These latter commitments are particularly relevant given the prevailing geopolitics of medicine, science, and politics in the Middle East North Africa region. The rest of this editorial explores the implications of being held to this standard.

Following the prompt of my interlocutors, how might anthropologists see themselves as tools and instruments, rather than as messengers, scribes, or excavators whose primary commitments lie outside the ethnographic exchange? What criteria of evaluation and consideration are appropriate? How might becoming an instrument let ethnographers learn without knowing: to hold our capacity to learn within our hands and our potential to not know within our hearts? This is to learn without transforming that learning into positive, historical knowledge and allow our tools, orientations, and methods to transform when we are not entirely possessed by them. Such an ethics begins with exchange, channels through analytic processes, and maintains a (non-sovereign) gap within one’s writing.

Within hospitals, I witnessed physicians exercise and buttress their expertise in the eyes of patients not by demonstrating biomedical mastery but through amana and reintroducing al-ghayb into the clinic. Physicians acknowledged their temporal limitations when making diagnoses, contrasting their knowledge against vast literatures and unknowledge, and by refusing to foreclose the future by offering precise prognoses. An openness or orientation to al-ghayb in this context allowed patients to relate to their diagnosis and its uncertainties, released from the clinical enclosures of physicians’ prescriptions. Physicians acknowledged the double bind of at once being seen as masters of medicine and science while simultaneously being expected to reaffirm that they are merely instruments or tools of the divine (as historically designated within the Islamic tradition of prophetic medicine: Al-Jawziyya 1998). This modulating work of al-ghayb contributed to the understanding of illness within the clinic. Practicing medicine while acknowledging al-ghayb and upholding amana shaped the ethics of local biomedical physicians and researchers toward scientific inquiry that serves their Muslim community.

Both amana and al-ghayb are theological concepts that ground ethical actions beyond the materiality of this world. They invite divine judgment on the transnational Muslim community (umma) (Hauter 2023a). In the Quran (33:72), amana is a divine trust, granted to humans after the mountains and the heavens refused it. As such, humans are implicated in relationships with (and responsible for) other humans, animals, and the environment – despite and prior to the other’s reciprocation. It names a relationship between an individual, her character, her will and desire, and the mediating uncertainty of the unknown (al-ghayb). The term al-ghayb does not simply mean hidden, but encompasses that which is concealed, forgotten, invisible, or temporally, spatially, and metaphysically beyond us (Bubandt et al. 2019). It is not simply knowledge waiting to be discovered; it is withdrawn from us, even in its transformative power. Moreover, amana refuses extraction, opportunism, and exploitation: it is put into circulation through making space for others’ capacity to express their will and desires. It requires the cultivation of wisdom. It also requires not presuming others’ desires (about the entailments of freedom, emancipation, and equality, for example) nor restricting others’ desire for an otherwise (McTighe and Raschig 2019). It requires exploration and curiosity.

I found amana and al-ghayb bound up in my field sites and my research questions. I found myself implicated in them. To carry out research with amana, an ethnographer must resist the compulsion to find proof for their hypotheses. Instead they must become open to what unfolds within the field, become open to al-ghayb. Acting with amana and being open to its wisdom entails submitting to uncertainty and the unknown (al-ghayb). It thus entails avoiding foreclosures in ethnographic writing, not reducing phenomena to a single text; cultivating the wisdom to refuse a discourse of mastery of knowledge and encapsulation through unveiling the unseen. Here, even biomedical and scientific diagnoses and prognoses must be approached with a view to their gaps and limits.

During my fieldwork my interlocutors often asked if I was amīna. By this, they meant: will I uphold amana in the written texts I will eventually produce? They could not affirm that about me (my soul was opaque to them), and so initially I was denied access to hospitals through their Institutional Review Board and Protection of Human Subjects (IRB) protocols. Within my field sites, the intimacy that developed between me and my interlocutors in-between the space of knowledge production and its inflections, both prescriptive and descriptive, had palpable effects. What was critical to the question of amana was how those I encountered read my soul. My own methods of ethnography as unveiling were placed in doubt and forced me to reckon with them.

Ethnographic theory has conventionally valorized the position of the outsider, the stranger, the indisposed, the sick/ill/disabled, the melancholic, and the oppressed, recruiting these figures for purposes of demonstrating structural marginalization. Work that infantilizes such outsiders, as lying in need of the witnessing power of the anthropologist, only detracts from the sacrifices they have made to bear witness to what others refuse to acknowledge (violence, inequality, difference, racism, stasis). As others have noted, celebrating the emancipatory potential of ethnographic knowledge infantilizes these outsiders by stripping them of their own intentions and desires. Therefore, it is not sufficient for anthropologists to proclaim their solidarity as an alibi for their ethnography. I write this not to question solidarity with our interlocutors per se but in order to rethink the politics of empathy which may undergird performative solidarity and to allow ethnographers to evade ethical challenges in the field (Harrison 1991; Shange and Liu 2019). Some of the dark sides of empathy entail manipulation, resentment, selectivity of suffering, and false equivalence across experiences (Breithaupt and Hamilton 2019; Bubandt and Willerslev 2015). By focusing on the implications of amana and al-ghayb, I suggest that grappling with local formations of ethical commitment can demand a researcher’s fidelity to on-the-ground realities.

As a refusal of extraction, opportunism, and exploitation in research, I ask, what if ethnography involved listening ethically, learning lessons collectively, and expanding horizons, rather than seeking to describe worlds we enter, proving our hypotheses, or performing solidarity against the structural challenges that we diagnose? In asking such questions, I began to take seriously the implications and consequences of our methods toward the goals of ethnography. Between prescriptive, interpretative, and analytical methodologies, something can be bridged through the broadening of epistemic horizons, which leads to the question of power and labor within an imagined solidarity (Bourgois 1990). I intended my own ethnography on science and Islam to think through the ways scientific inquiry and methods can become expansive when thinking with other traditions. I now consider ethics not simply a justification for fieldwork, but as a commitment to pluralize methods and analysis while expanding epistemological registers.

These considerations stem directly from my positionality as a researcher and from the nature of my fieldwork. I am a Yemeni-American woman who set out to continue my field research within hospitals and with vulnerable populations. Within my fieldsites, disclosure of citizenship, linguistic capacity, and regional affiliations came with a price. There were moments when my own precarity opened up doors, and other times when it closed them (losing my passport, being barred from the hospital, and being refused visas). Although I was a woman, Muslim, and Southern Arabian, gaining entrance to multiple gendered spaces proved difficult. Having to relocate my fieldwork to Jordan and Saudi Arabia due to the war in Yemen left me moored within the margins of the war and its limitations (Hauter 2020b). I could have passed for a Yemeni-Saudi, a Yemeni resident of either of these countries, a refugee, or a migrant. Each positionality would offer me entrance or bar me from certain spaces and access to certain populations. It was also impossible to avoid situating myself, as the first thing patients or physicians asked me were versions of: How are you here? Why can’t we recognize your last name? What family are you from? Are you a physician? Do you work for the hospital? Do you work for the state? Are you also displaced? What is your lineage? These probing questions emerged even from patients I encountered who were barely conscious.

In the hospital setting, it was not easy to quickly summarize and convey my positionality. I grew up in the United States and benefited from its educational system and its many privileges relative to a Yemeni enduring the entirety of the many civil wars and upheavals that have plagued the country in recent decades. It was necessary for me to disclose this information to interlocutors, given that this privilege comes from the sacrifices they themselves made and make in order for capitalistic modes of production to sustain empires such as that led by the United States. Withholding such information and broader context from my interlocutors and my readers, would perpetuate the asymmetries and epistemic injustices that we now denounce in colonial ethnographies. The current conflict in Yemen waged by the allied 10 countries, including Jordan and Saudi Arabia, made it nearly impossible to discuss the war in these diasporic sites. There were many times when I faced diatribes about the wealth of Yemeni-Americans, for example. In some of those moments, I responded by negotiating a space of dialogue, while other times I was rebuked. My positionality was important because the social field itself was grounded in the explosivity of positionality. Disclosures of positionality transform scholarship. Some anthropologists may denounce the disclosure of positionality as insufficient to rectify longstanding imbalances of colonial power, while others may accept disclosure as necessary for obtaining access to conduct much-needed first-person accounts for research, especially in cases of oppressed and silenced populations.

Throughout my fieldwork, I had to regain access repeatedly, as my capacity for amana was in constant doubt. An individual looking from the outside would view some of these methods, and the restrictions that required resorting to them, as nepotistic, corrupt, and perpetuating inequality rather than evaluations. There were many times when my interlocutors asked me about my connections and how I gained access, which I explicitly outlined. These conversations positioned me on the side of the Hadhrami Hijazis (Southern Yemeni Saudi) travelers and with my institutional affiliation as an American researcher. Thereafter, when I met with the IRB, fellow physicians conducting research on bioethics, and the vice dean of research of the university hospital, it became clear there were many reasons behind the restrictions initially imposed on me. The most prominent of these related to questions about my capacity to be amīna (possessing divine trust): will others trust that I would not violate their rights?

In the hospitals where I conducted research, there were many researchers and medical students conducting surveys and interviews. When I approached my interlocutors, I disclosed that I was a Yemeni American studying in the United States, and shared a little bit about my project. I spoke in the Arabic dialect that they requested and in English for medical staff when they preferred. After this initial contact, I would often wait patiently, be rebuked, be shunned, and wait for hours, sometimes days, for individuals to come to possess the desire, capacity, and willingness to participate. Other times I was taken seriously from the outset. Still others in hospitals called my work a film on paper; many avoided me like the plague; one physician joked about me being a Yemeni or American spy in front of his patient who was a soldier. As I was going to work with a vulnerable population, I committed to not wearing a white coat in hospitals and clinics, so they did not feel coerced to participate nor feel that their level of care depended on their willingness to engage with me. This is in spite of physicians and residents explaining that many patients were accustomed to researchers coming in with surveys and interviews and would be startled if someone was not professionally dressed in the role of a biomedical researcher. Further reflecting my commitment to be seen as outside of the medical establishment, I also reached out to participants without the presence of their caregivers or supervisors. Moreover, the population I worked with were not only refugees, migrants, and individuals experiencing dispossession, but also people who could become psychically, politically, economically, and socially impacted by my ethnography (Hauter 2023a). In order to meet the demands of this particular engagement, I concurrently underwent psychoanalytical work and training (Hauter 2023b). This was precisely to respond ethically to the uncertainties and unknowledge of my fieldwork, but also to acknowledge my own unconscious drive behind my research questions.

The foreclosures produced through self-disclosure of positionality and openness to al-ghayb do not disable us from conducting ethnographic fieldwork. But they can and should pluralize our methods and expand our epistemological registers beyond the much-contested objectivism within anthropology. An ethnography is a limited invitation into a community, a tradition, a set of practices, memories, dreams, and relationships akin to many scientific inquiries. As ethnographers, we enter spaces with limits around our practices, and eventually must recognize and adhere to shifting practices within the field. In the past, ethnography has benefited from improvisions seen in Zora Neal Hurston and Anzia Yezierska’s work (Jirousek 2006) that transformed anthropology by reflecting on its methods (Hammersley 2020). The limits set against any scientific inquiry should be acknowledged in ethnography rather than transgressed or repressed. Yet, it seems that an orientation to enclose knowledge and its emancipatory potentiality has risen alongside attempts to justify anthropology as discipline and ethnography as method, both as part of the fight against the underfunding of social science research (and also perhaps the guilt of the ethnographer). These very limits are those I initially experienced with the IRB.

In order to conduct field research in hospitals, I applied to both the UC Berkeley IRB as well as the IRB for each hospital I worked in. The IRB is a body of scholars dedicated to the protection of human subjects. Although the IRB states that its protocols are not required for oral history, it does requires anthropologists to obtain its approval due to the dynamic nature of participant observation. At Berkeley, my IRB application was about sixty pages, and was not simple. Applying to the IRBs in Amman and Jeddah was just as long and arduous, reflecting the desire of the hospitals to which I applied to be internationally-recognized research institutions. Both the IRBs in Berkeley and abroad were institution-based committees that review social-behavioral, biomedical, and humanities protocols, including FDA-regulated research. These protocols involve the applicant not only providing an overview of the project, but also sharing a project justification, methodological grounding, and insurance of protection for recruited participants, particularly vulnerable populations. However, the IRBs in Amman and Jeddah represented more than a committee of researchers and physicians reviewing my purpose and methods and ethical procedures and data security.

In both cities, I was warned that the IRB was becoming more selective in order to deter western extraction of data and for the protection of patients. These institutions were also seeking to protect the intellectual property of the research institutes/hospitals. For them, the IRB represented a bridge to an international community, facilitating their involvement in global networks of knowledge sharing. Meanwhile, the IRB comes out of a history of abuses committed against human subjects in biological, medical, and social scientific research, many involving racial injustices and violence against Indigenous and Black people (Doucet-Battle 2021). Accordingly, IRB ethics applications have come to require the meticulous delineation of a project’s theoretical import, methodologies, recruitment, and acquisition of voluntary informed consent. Importantly, most IRBs do not have ethnographer/anthropologist (non-biomedical) representatives routinely serving on them. This history of the IRB and understanding of social and biological sciences as practices of care and health rather than as mere permission to conduct research does not mean that we simply infantilize vulnerable populations as those in need of us or of science. Gaining IRB approval is not a guarantee of ensuring ethical conduct, securing trust, or sharing knowledge without fracturing the limits insisted on or silently intended by our participants/interlocutors. The IRB enforces regulations that redefine the parameters of research in accordance with particular protocols to ensure participant safety; at the same time, what communities require does not always fully align with the institutional demands imposed on projects and researchers by the IRB.

In conducting anthropological research, ethnographers settle within communities and claim to adhere to groups’ shifting practices (whether sincerely or otherwise). However, to continue sustainable engagements with others requires sacrifices and accommodations beyond what the IRB can secure. My experiences with the IRB in Amman and Jeddah illustrate the importance of cultivating amana as a stranger to the community. In Amman, I was able to locate the IRB office and the necessary application through the mediation of Yemeni medical students and residents I met through the Yemeni cultural center in Amman, relationships that took months to cultivate. To enter a social field requires an immense amount of bureaucratic work, social capital, and relationships.

When I met with the hospital IRB in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I stressed my adherence to the protocols of my qualitative research, which they were familiar with. But they were still conflicted about allowing me permission to conduct research in their hospital. I assured them that I was not a medical physician. I could not evaluate their physicians or assess negligence or malpractice. My participant observation would be limited to individuals willing to participate in my study. In that hospital, my research activities would be limited to performing rounds in various subspecialties to visit adult patient participants in post-operative, clinical, and the Prophetic Medical Clinic settings, all overseen by the hospital. I would not record informal conversations between physicians or patients. These long discussions with the IRB and the detailed outline I submitted to them as an entirely separate application reassured them of my intentions. However, when I met with the vice-dean of the hospital, she reminded me that I was not needed in the hospital, and that my work would probably have very little impact on them and their operations. She explained that in order to avoid the brain drain (Pfeiffer and Nichter 2008), I was to sign a commitment to share and disseminate my work with other physicians. I signed this commitment to return to the hospital after analyzing my data and to give a lecture. Additionally, throughout my fieldwork, other staff requested workshops on qualitative research and editorial feedback on thesis and articles.

Many of those who sought me in the hospital were not my actual (intended) interlocutors, but were other residents, fellows, attendings, and medical students my interlocutors introduced me to in passing. I found myself amongst a community of scholars and practitioners. Sharing my work with them and learning about their work is one aspect of amana: to reciprocate and act beyond transactional motifs within a social field through exchanges. Some patients and their families would ask me to find their physicians, to check on pending consultations by reaching out to the team I was rounding with at the time, and even to check if a non-Saudi relative could be seen by a trusted physician. I tried my best to provide assistance given the relationships I cultivated, but also noted my limitations as a non-staff member. While the space created by the very virtue of our dialogs (hiwar) transformed the space of the hospital, my limited ability to give back to communities also showcased the limitations of my project in terms of providing benefits to participants, who eagerly looked (in their interactions with me as with anyone else) to secure their wellbeing (‘afiya), which required material, physical, and spiritual transformations within their communities. My interlocutors (patients, visitors, families) in multiple occupancy rooms began to discuss the causes and effects of their ‘afiya (physical, psychological, spiritual wellbeing) and illness with one another, and families engaged their histories intergenerationally amidst or following our encounters. Topics ranged from negotiating care to reflecting on its limits and their desires beyond it. In other words, the conversations I started in the hospital continued beyond my physical presence there.

Ethnographic ethics are similar to everyday ethics in that both ethnographer and interlocutor possess a desire for engagement toward certain ends and adhere to certain rules in order to share and exchange within a field. However, two things make the ethnographic encounter different from an encounter with a barista at the coffee shop, given the deeply stratified world we live in. First, in ethnographic research, interaction is transformative and may be productive or destructive, given the form of intimacy and the longue durée of fieldwork that most ethnographic work demands. Second, the work that an ethnographer produces may resonate beyond the temporality of interaction, placing the ethnographer outside of a community’s adjudication of ethical assessment and restitution. As it is, the demand to be heard, entrusted, and allowed entrance into a social field, and responsibility for transparency and engagement in addition to the curiosity of the demand and desire of the interlocutors, falls on the ethnographer. Unlike the encounter with the barista, the ethnographer has what many others do not: the ability to wreak havoc, during and post-fieldwork, and then to simply withdraw, especially when the consequences can be evaded. While past ethnographers’ ethical dilemmas revolved around the directionality of study, I am pointing to the ethnographer’s access to refuge, indifference, evasion of restorative justice, and potential silencing of the desires of the communities they study.

The IRB, and even the American Anthropology Association’s (AAA) own resolution on ethics in fieldwork, reflect some of ethnography’s constraints and purposes. The AAA resolution on ethics recognizes potential undue harm in ethnographic design, application, and advocacy. It calls for sustained dialogue between anthropologists and the communities they work with so as to prevent harm, protect confidentiality, and ensure that ethnographers conduct themselves in an ethical and professional manner. According to Castañeda, the AAA resolution “works away from normative moral positioning and moves toward a fundamentally situational and relativist ethics” (2006:140). As the AAA resolution states, in any given field there are complex involvements and obligations whereby “anthropologists are responsible for grappling with difficulties and struggles” that arise out of conflicts, misunderstandings, and the need to make choices among apparently incompatible values (2022). Castañeda concludes by calling for the expansion of tools to understand this responsibility and the multiplicity of ethics involved in fieldwork, ethnographic writing, and professional practice in the field of anthropology more broadly (2006). However, ethics is not simply about the permission to conduct fieldwork. It transforms the ethnography being produced within the field and in its very writing.

In this vein, I consider the orientation I cultivated in fieldwork with my interlocutors toward amana and al-ghayb as necessary ethical. This practice does not signify a move toward relativism or activism, but is rather a position toward scientific inquiry that builds the capacity to make space for the presence of informal forces, divine judgment, and the question of unknowledge that bends epistemology. My aim here is to simply acknowledge that ethnographic work already entails entire cosmologies that organize objects, subjects, ghosts, intermediaries, texts, philosophies, and indigenous theories presented within a field.

Against this backdrop, I want to invite us to think deeply about how ethnography itself is not simply the transmission of expert hidden knowledge, for knowledge is elided and evaded through various institutional injunctions and restrictions and ethical and intimate fidelities.

For my ethnography, there are events that I could not include in the dissertation and names that I could not acknowledge – for the reasons of the various IRB protocols but also for other distinct (if overlapping) reasons. In ethnography, this deferral of knowledge is institutionalized within our very own IRB protocols and the practice of applying to IRBs itself: we start with questions and hypotheses, but not aims.

The IRB applications for me were a useful step to establishing amana, but it did not guarantee this outcome. Moreover, I would like to argue that the IRB highlighted the ways research is already oriented toward al-ghayb. The very few restrictions and limitations on research methods that the IRB places to protect the safety of those involved already produces foreclosures. They should serve as a lesson to the limits of researcher’s ability to unveil, allowing us to understand how certain elisions are necessary. Therefore, much of ethnography is already ghayb (unknowledge/unknown/unseen). Considering the transgressive nature of scientific inquiry itself and the necessary limits it requires in order to pursue our own imagined benefits further, can we reconsider anthropological notions of “unveiled” logics of local practices, the encapsulation of a fieldsite, and the certainty in due diligence and saturation of our research project a phantom we need to lay to rest?

From my interlocutors, I learned to reorient myself away from foreclosing diagnostic and prognostic methods, refusing the position of the subject who is supposed to know or holds the answer/cure/truth. In much of my research, I built my theoretical frameworks in collaboration with my interlocutors in ways that resonated across Islam and in dialogue with other traditions. I came to note the crosspollinations in what we perceived as “eastern” and “western” philosophies and medicines, decolonizing the western canon in the process (Hauter 2020c). Our dialogs yielded benefits and imagined benefits around local claims to contemporary medicine as indigenous to Islam and the epistemic possibilities in troubling western epistemologies. In turn, my physician interlocutors insisted that I present the multiple orientations toward science and medicine and modes of expertise present in medical practice in their locality. They urged me to showcase not only their expertise, which rivals that of their western counterparts, but also their innovative thinking and their appreciation of local epistemologies without reducing them to being secularists or traditionalists.

My own commitments to the lessons of al-ghayb enabled me within my fieldsites to listen to the ways the adjudication of sound physicians modeled that of a reliable transmitter and witness, echoing the tradition of authenticating oral transmission within the Islamic discursive tradition (Asad 1986; Brown 2007). This involved being known as an honest and upright individual that others have witnessed in exchanges and transactions. For me, this commitment to sound transmission ranged from being entrusted with secrets to personal accounts that were meant not to bolster my ethnographic fieldwork but to aid in my instruction as a researcher and as a student of knowledge. In a field that is laden with many transgressive markers and socio-political sensitivities, female physicians shared with me their personal histories as nasiha (counsel) for my career, life, and personal development. Others divulged personal information and pitfalls not for the sake of documentation but to further explore the depth of situations at hand. Physicians in Saudi Arabia and Jordan either confessed their Yemeni heritage or outed other physicians as Yemeni, and told me to seek the aid of my Yemeni brethren. We often laughed about it, as it underlined the complex politics of the incorporation of a non-Bedouin population within the Saudi nation through citizenship that only became a significant source of tension after the First Gulf War.

These moments of confession and identity politics called into question my ability to perform interpretations of ta’wil (inner meaning) involving a particular discernment. This included understanding human limitations in the transmission of knowledge and the ability to intuit intentions, examples, and wisdom without objectifying material forms. This question of witnessing organized the relationship between evidence and authority. Things are sealed because of relations to people, institutions, and moral injunctions, but also because of limits internal to human adjudications and mode of knowing. These moments of ethical demand invited me and my writing to consider the weight of what is at stake in my field sites, rather than simply reducing them to contexts I needed to navigate to collect data.

What is required of ethnographers, then, is not simply to believe that their work has emancipatory and/or curative potential, absolving them from the affective potential of the field. Such work does not settle a debt incurred through exchange. Additionally, there have been suggestions to co-construct and collaborate with interlocutors as a means of reciprocation. But are these models based on the desires of our participants, our own attempts to fill the lack that confronts us in face of the other, or what we suppose the other would want? To be sure, an engagement that does render material transformation can be practiced through institutional support, scholarship programs, assessment, and partnerships that attend to community needs and resources to make way for their desires. What is required then on the part of ethnographers is to create space whereby our interlocutors voice their desire or lack thereof for co-engagement in research, but also voice their needs and allow their demands to be heard without superimposing our own assumptions onto them. This requires vulnerability, rejection, and foreclosure. This might open up a space of potentiality for our interlocutors to move through their local and global landscapes differently beyond our exchange. When we enter the field, we do not enter neutral spaces, nor do we neutrally walk within them. We also don’t remain within them to navigate them after our departures. There is always after.

How then can we think with the variegated ways ethnographic work is already in a position to trace the lessons of al-ghayb? The ethnography I am continuing to work on is marked by an amana oriented toward ethically listening toward al-ghayb, one I intend to deliver as a passage, an ‘ibra (lesson) for those willing to hear.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the editors of Medical Anthropology and the two peer reviewers for their transformative and insightful comments and questions. I would like to thank Nancy Chen, Basit Kareem Iqbal, James Doucet-Battle, Zunaira Komal, Iracema Dulley, Fernando Castrillon, William F. Stafford Jr., Asim Alam, Matthew Wyman-McCarthy, and Hallie Wells for their readings, insights, comments, edits, and discussions. I am especially grateful to Brinkley M. Messick for encouraging me to pursue the question of ethnographic ethics in relation to the various Internal Review Boards I encountered in the field. I am indebted to my interlocutors for our transformative discussions on methods and theory in scientific research and practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The field research was supported through the generous funding of the National Science Foundation, the American Institute for Yemeni Studies, the UC Berkeley Center for Middle East Studies, and the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

Notes on contributors

Ashwak Sam Hauter

Ashwak Sam Hauter is an assistant professor of medical anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her manuscript in progress details scenes of Islah (reform) within medicines in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan aimed at securing demands for individual and communal ‘afiya (holistic well-being). She is the author of “Fright and the Fraying of Community: Medicine, Borders, Saudi Arabia, Yemen” published in Cultural Anthropology and “Madness, Pain, & Ikhtilāṭ al-ʿaql: Conceptualizing Ibn Abī Ṣādiq’s Medico-Philosophical Psychology” in Early Science and Medicine.