Trucho Malvinas Vets: authenticity as metacommunicative competence in identities at Fieldwork.

ROSANA GUBER

Estocolmo

Conferencia; Seminar on Latin American Studies; 2006

Institute of Latin American Studies

Lies, accounts and performance aimed at deceiving the audience, still haunt the researcher’s mind. Whether one chooses quantitative or qualitative (even ethnographic) means, researchers imagine methodological devices (triangulation, re-interviewing, being there, rapport) to eliminate distortion from researchers and respondents, and get true statements and categories from our social subjects. In this paper I take advantage of an “identity lie” (or a fake identity) which came up while I was working on Malvinas war vets in Buenos Aires (1992). By mirroring veterans’ identities on my own identity as an anthropologist, I show that lies are part and parcel of the ways in which both vets and I learn to talk and act about “Malvinas”. By means of this reflexive twist, deceptive informants appear to challenge our methodological assumptions, not just because they alter the reliability of our accounts, but rather because they illuminate the very core of our identities at work.