Children’s Instrumentality and Agency in Amazonia

Several scholars (Behar 1996, Fabian 1996, Marcus 1999, Marcus and Fischer 1986, Myerhoff

1978, Rosaldo 1989) demonstrate how intimacy brings to the forefront questions of

subjective bias, personal expectations and emotions, and unequal power relations inherent in

the anthropological fieldwork encounter – precisely the central targets in many of the critiques

of the qualitative research methods that we champion. Perhaps it is for this reason

that some anthropologists shun reflexive ethnographic writing (Salzman, 2002, Robertson

2002), as it falls on what is already considered “murky” ground – a soil still nurturing ongoing

debates over issues of authority and representation and the possibilities of demarcating

subjective-objective experiences. In this article, I argue that, instead, it is precisely by incorporating

reflexive approaches that the production of knowledge, which is rarely crafted in

isolation, gains greater transparency allowing more consideration to be given to power relations

and other epistemological frames of reference within which the researcher and anthropology

are inevitably embedded. As such, analyzing forms of knowledge that intimate field

relationships produce exposes both the underbelly of our methodology as well as the underpinnings

of our theories and practices. By focusing on children’s instrumentality as a way to

examine these issues, this article contributes to literatures on personhood, relatedness, secrecy,

parenting, children and childhood studies.