Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

Abstract

Fieldwork has been, and remains, the defining mark of the discipline of anthropology. Or, more accurately, doing fieldwork has been, and remains, the defining requirement for becoming an anthropologist in the twentieth-first century. Originally, the linkage between fieldwork, ethnography, and anthropology had been an important innovation, when knowledge production about the rest of the world was being produced by armchair theorists, social evolutionists, and travelers in search of the exotic, or those forced to rely on their accounts. While this original coupling of being-there and a nascent body of conceptualization and theorizing was critical and salutary, gradually there developed a slippage between the conceptual advances of the discipline and the methods of research that were held to be the source of those advances. As the slippage deepened between the original motives for fieldwork and its increasingly taken-for-granted status, it became both a mandatory rite de passage and like such rites, not subject to public scrutiny Sooner or later the question was going to be posed: If the discipline of anthropology depended on participant-observation or ethnographic fieldwork, then why was it that so little attention had ever been explicitly paid to the nature