Abstract

Twentieth-century field research in the human sciences has repeatedly rendered specific communities and people as subjects of study. As scientists layered field upon field in the same spaces, subjects have gained their own forms of expertise. This essay examines the history of research in Terra Indígena Pimentel Barbosa, in what is now Central Brazil, to argue that fields are composed of human relations and that historians of science have the moral responsibility to recognize that fields are almost always someone’s home. As we constitute our own fields, we accrue obligations of reciprocity, both with the scientists we study and with the communities that were their subjects. To study the past, we must attend reflexively to the futures we make possible.