At the heart of the anthropological method is the practice of witnessing, which requires engaged immersion over time in the lived worlds of our anthropological subjects. Like poetry, ethnography is an act of translation and the kind of 'truth' that it produces is necessarily deeply subjective, resulting from the collision between two worlds and two cultures. And so, the question often posed to anthropologist - ethnographers about the dangers 'of losing one's objectivity' is really quite beside the point. Our task requires of us only highly disciplined subjectivity. There are scientific models and methods appropriate of doing anthropological research, but ethnography, as I understand it, is not a science.
Very much like the poet who decides to enter another oeuvre for the purpose of translation – Seamus Heaney, for example, describing his entering the poetry of Dante3 – the anthropologist sees something in another world that intrigues them. It can be as simple as ‘Oh, I like that! Let me see if I can’t understand how that particular mode of being and thinking and feeling and sensing the world works, the sense it makes, the logic and the illogic of it, the pragmatics and the poetics of that other way of life.’ And so we think, ‘Yes, I’ll go there for a while and see if I can’t come back with a narrative, a natural history, a thick description – call it what you will – that will enrich our ways of understanding the world’. Like any other form of ‘translation’ ethnography has a predatory and a writerly motive to it. It is not done ‘for nothing’ in a totally disinterested way. It is for something, often it is to help us understand something – whether it is about schizophrenia as a projection of cultural themes or about ways of solving perennial human dilemmas around the reproduction of bodies and families and homes and farms.

(Nancy Scheper-Hughes "Ire in Ireland")