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In a short passage in Triste Tropiques in which he describes a visit to a Buddhist temple while conducting fieldwork in the Chittagong Hills in the early 1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote of his acute discomfort when his Burmese companion proceeded to prostrate "himself on the ground four times before the altar" (Lévi-Strauss [1955] 1974: 411).¹ Worried that by not joining in he might offend the man, Lévi-Strauss was at the same time also reluctant to participate in a ritual that seemed to him to involve "bowing down to idols" and "acknowledging the reality of a supernatural order of things" (1974: 394). At what point, when faced with beliefs and practices with which one fundamentally disagrees, does the injunction to treat the subjects of one"s anthropological research with respect turn into hypocrisy? Does the call for tolerance when encountering "other" ways of thinking, doing, and being have limits?² The best solution to the ethnographer"s dilemma that Lévi-Strauss could come up with on that day in Asia was to maintain a kind of embarrassed silence, standing passively by during the performance of a "ritual gesture" with which he profoundly disagreed (interestingly taking his lead from his companion, who advised him: "you need not do what I am doing").

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-56795-6_1

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