Anthropology and #MeToo: Reimagining fieldwork

Abstract

#MeToo deals in the everyday ambiguous and intersectional, providing a space for discussion of the grey areas of sexual propriety. Since 2017, when the term was mobilised spectacularly in the US entertainment industry, other industries have undertaken an examination of their own practices and norms. In this paper we consider the implications of this political moment for the discipline of anthropology, and specifically the idea of ‘the field’ in the context of anthropological training in Australia. We argue that fieldwork is tacitly, and sometimes explicitly, fetishised by anthropologists as a transformative domain in which the normative rules of gendered interaction are temporarily suspended..