Academic correctness

This is a professional deformation that leads people to put too much weight on the academic truth content of what it being said. It is something most regular people don’t really care about all that much, though there may be variations. I sometimes get upset too quickly about the things that I research, when, in my opinion, people are talking out of their a***. These are things I value, things I have put in all my effort to get at a subtle understanding of how things work with all their complications and reservations and exceptions. I shouldn’t put too much weight on people not directly involved in the research, and who, for some reason think they can just patronise me for one reason or another. Recently I met one man who drove a BMW X3, had an extremely young girlfriend/wife, and who was being evasive when I asked him what he did in Sibiu, and how it was to live there (so much for my impression – the context was a breakfast table of a former Mayor of the village, a friend of my friend had suggested we pop into his courtyard before meeting the others in the morning of the dance, on the occasion of my accompanying the cultural formation of the village I live in to a festival in the mountains near Sibiu in a shepherd village). When I explained what I did in Romania, said: oh, I’ll tell you what European integration means for animal husbandry: a fall in the animal population. And he threw around numbers that were just taken out of the air. For him that was the end of it. How do you react to that usefully? What do I do with this encounter? Is it to be included in my research? Why? Why not?
People say things for all kinds of reasons and these may include the following: you say what you say because you want to or because it is your deep conviction or because you want to impress the conversation partner, or you want to say it because you want to assume a certain position in the discussion, the previous bit of the conversation forces you to say this, you want to make a point, you are being stroppy or stubborn or obnoxious or pleasant or chatty, you haven’t told anyone what you are really feeling about a certain person, you are gossipy by nature, you want to get a certain reaction or some other ‘gain’ from the conversation, you want to tease out a bit of detail that interests you and that has remained hidden in the conversation, you are bored and want to fill time with talk, you think this is what they want to hear, you want to cover up something else and think that noise about something else will do the trick, you are tired and you made a mistake, retrospectively, you seek closure in the conversation they initiated, because you think that it does not go anywhere if you pursue it on your own terms and that it will exclude most people around the table. With this guy, I politely sought closure and asked the host about the stuff she was serving.
How on earth are we supposed to do meaningful research with people and expect, as an outcome, to have even a grain of dust to stand on and say ‘what I say here is correct’. It is a dead end, because it undermines the anthropologist’s expert status which is highly valued in the world and brings up all kinds of awkward questions related to the value of our own research. Despite all efforts of so-called ‘collaborative’ methodology and what not, in the end you write the damn thing all by yourself, sign it, and are examined on correctness of argument, details and interpretation. And then, who is going to look at and read what we write about? I am working so the answer will not be: two anthropology students, one in London who was interested in the keyword ‘Romania’, the other in Stirling, she made a mistake with the catalogue; three family members, because they felt they needed to; and two bookworms in the British Library, because they liked the taste of the paper. They didn’t like the interpretation because it was not post-structuralist enough.