Another great quote from an essay entitled, The Charlatan and the Magus:

The very idea of objectivity is a trick; the researcher imagines he is in a sort of condom that gives infinite sensitivity to what he is studying, yet perfect protection against contaminating the subject.

This is an idea that I’ve found again and again in anthropological and scholarly discussions of things like shamanism, religion, the occult, etc. Namely, that the researcher isn’t allowed to actually participate in whatever is being discussed, because that compromises his “objectivity”. This has always annoyed me greatly because not participating is just as subjective as participating and ought to be recognized as such.