Breath-taking
Himalayan travelogues are full of stories. For the most part, those stories fall into a specific genre, one that I tend to …
Jathilan Dance: Experiencing the Spirits
yelling, crawling and rolling. Later, they begin to show some animal-like behavior: hissing, roaring and moving on all fours. This is my …
Ethnographic Poetry and Academic Writing: A Reflection
“Whatever your eye can see, it’s vecik.” This line resonated with me while I was conducting my fieldwork in Taiwan with the …
Holding Belief in Suspense
Some months ago, I went for an early morning run with a mate at my fieldsite. After a short trot together, she …
The Fallible and the Untrustworthy: Writing Culture as the Unreliable Narrator
The notion of the Unreliable Narrator is, for me, not a critique of the perceived moral failings of the anthropological project, but …
Blurred lines and dead chooks in fieldwork
My own fieldwork experience, like many others, demonstrates a blurring in what is ‘professional’ and ‘personal’, what is ‘leisure’ and ‘work’, whether …
Balancing Acts: An Ethnographer’s Thoughts on Studying Religion
Anthropologists sometimes study sensitive topics and it is therefore not uncommon for ethnographic work to attract serious criticism along such lines. In …
Other People’s Clutter
perhaps the most perplexing item she had kept from her time was the empty casing of an artillery shell from World War …
I did it for the data
As an ethnographer of porn, I entered the field with some hard limits and never crossed them. I never ended up doing …
Eating Iran: From the delicious to the inedible
I was having second thoughts, but pressed on safe in the knowledge that I was performing an act that would raise my …
On Being Declared Missing in the Himalayas
Neither the Fulbright Commission overseeing my work nor the US Embassy in Kathmandu could contact me and, in the interim, the three …
Anthropologists and Dragons
I surprised myself by not hesitating. Spinning around, I headed straight back toward one of those that had followed us into the …
On the Heartbreak of Leaving the Field: Falling in love and going home again
My heart was broken not by leaving individual people, but by leaving something much bigger. It takes us too long in anthropology …
Post-Bureaucratic Stress: Reflections on getting a police check in Vietnam
Bureaucracy is so deadly dull because it’s so mundane. But, as Steve Woolgar points out in his book Mundane Governance, the Latin …
The village idiot: Language learning for anthropology fieldwork
In preparing for fieldwork, I took a class on language training with Piers Kelly. While Piers was talking more specifically about learning …
When the world invades “the field:” emotion, introspection, and ethnography
It’s been years since anthropology set aside the fantasy of “the field” — a bounded research site, where the locals, and the …
Beyond Stereotypes: Success, failure, and the complexity of women’s education in Iran
During my 15 months of fieldwork in Iran, the gripe that a bachelor’s degree was now equivalent to that of a high …