Other Places and the Anthropology of Ourselves

Abstract

Asking for personal accounts of fieldwork forces a consideration of two important issues in anthropology: author-presence in ethnographic and analytic accounts and forms of ethnographic representation. Addressing both, I offer here an historical overview of my 1960s and 1970s fieldwork in the Pacific Islands country of Tuvalu in relation to (a) what I tried to accomplish at the time; (b) what actually worked out, what did not, and why; (c) what I have learned in the long run about the prospects of succeeding in those pursuits, including a sample of principles governing such narratives and how attention to them might facilitate the development of more robust and satisfying ethnographic accounts, especially when bound up in a mixed genre form I describe as an analytic memoir; and (d) comparisons with the fieldwork of Mariko Toshida, an award-winning current-generation researcher in the area.