The idea for this collection of papers first came to mind in the course
of a conversation we had at the annual meeting of casca (Canadian
Anthropological Society/Société canadienne d’anthropologie), in Mon-
treal, in 1994. Bruce and I were meeting for the first time, soon af-
ter the publication of Being Changed by Cross-cultural Encounters:
The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experiences. As we talked, we
shared the conviction that experiences such as those presented in Be-
ing Changed and those described by Bruce in his chapter in this book
deserved more attention since they challenged widely held assump-
tions about how fieldwork actually unfolds when one is deeply in-
volved in the lives and environments of one’s hosts.
This initial conversation led to the organization of a symposium on
this topic at the 2000 casca annual meeting in Calgary, Canada. As a
title for this event we chose Ethnographic Objectivity Revisited: From
Rigor to Vigor. The description of the symposium read as follow:
The title of this symposium is borrowed from a paper by J. Fa-
bian published in 1991. In this paper, Fabian wrote that “much
of our ethnographic research is carried out best when we are ‘out
of our minds,’ that is, while we relax our inner controls, forget
our purposes, let ourselves go. In short, there is an ecstatic side
to fieldwork which should be counted among the conditions of
knowledge production, hence of objectivity.” Contributions to the
symposium will explore the contents, preconditions, and ethno-
graphic relevance of ecstatic experience—including experiences ofAcknowledgments