“Anthropologists are bound in principle to study objectively, to cause no harm, and to contribute as little as possible to change. Yet, as is well known, we do intrude in a thousand ways, demanding a lot and leaving detritus in our wake. We plunge into our hosts’ social lives in order to stave off hunger as well as to decipher the local codes of social interaction. As anyone who has done this knows, our best attempts to practice our discipline ethically are inevitably flawed” (Riley 2013, p. 123)
References:
Riley, K.C. 2013. Learning to Exchange Words for Food in the Marquesas. In L. Coleman (ed), Food: Ethnographic Encounters (pp. 111-126). London: Bloomsbury.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 