Both the danger and the value of anthropology lie in the clash and collision of cultures and interpretations as the anthropologist meets her subjects in a spirit of open engagement, frankness and receptivity. There was, I concluded, no 'politically correct' way of doing anthropology. Anthropology is by nature intrusive and it entails certain amount of symbolic and interpretive violence to the 'native peoples" own intuitive though still partial understanding of their part of the world. The question then becomes the ethical one: What are the proper relation between the anthropologist and her subjects? To whom does she owe her loyalties, and how can these be met in the course of ethnographic field work and writing especially within the problematic domain of psychological and psychiatric anthropology where the focus on disease and distress, difference and marginality overdetermine a critical view.

(Nancy Scheper-Hughes "Ire in Ireland")