Does the practice of anthropology require someone to listen? The obvious answer is, yes, the anthropologist. The practice of anthropology has focused on observing others and their lives. It has focused on how to learn to hear others.
But an equally important question: If an anthropologist works with people who ultimately are indifferent to the speech of the anthropologist what does this do to the practice of anthropology? Does an anthropologist need to be listened to?
This is perhaps a question more suited to government aides, priests, Seelsorgers, or the like, where the relation is constructed around ‘advice’ such that object of intervention , the patient, the minister or congregation, through their subject position, need to be capable of listening.
As Asad pointed out (in Clifford & Marcus, 1986), more often the relation goes the other way around. The task of anthropological translation was for a long time, perhaps still is, to turn something opaque, the implicit practices and meanings of another, into authorized discourse: To listen and then speak or write to a third party, usually the 20 or so people in the audience of a panel discussion. Of course, then, this is the insertion point for a critique of anthropological authority, of the inequality of languages. Asad, in the essay, leaves us with a good diagnosis of a problem, but little way out other than something akin to Weber’s ‘be honest about what science does and does not do and be careful about how it is done, if you really want to do it’. As Asad himself suggests, anthropology is not a practice of reform. But if this is true, what then is the setting in which anthropology can be heard? As a set of claims about people and their lives, including the life of the one doing the inquiry? It seems that if either side of the relation of inquiry is indifferent about this, then one enters into the task of translation with the ever present question of the flattening of all values even closer at hand.

And so a question; when you entered the field was it a concern as to who would be willing to listening, in addition to finding those whom you wanted to listen to? Perhaps this question is a little obvious. If it was a concern, or is a concern, in what did it consist as activity?