Research ethics and everyday ethics: doing fieldwork with observers of their own ‘culture’ in rural Hubei

One of the things that constantly surprised me during my fieldwork was the extent to which local inhabitants observed and described their own ‘culture’. The forms that self-observations and self-descriptions take depend very much on the audience. In this article, I describe my encounters with such self-observations and my learning about the differences between outsider representations and insider understandings. Learning to recognise these differences was crucial for the ‘ethics’ of my research in terms of my interactions with both local officials and villagers, writes Hans Steinmüller.