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Embodied Knowledge
as a condition of ethnographically based knowledge; the aspect of the
tradition to change is that of the systematic exclusion of oneself out
of one’s ethnography, especially when it problematically concerns the
setting aside of events or of experiences that challenge our own epis-
temological, ontological, and ethical assumptions. This change, her-
alded by contributors (Fernandez, Breidenbach, Samarin, Janzen, and
Wagner) to the special issue of Social Research on charismatic move-
ments, edited by Fabian in 1979 , is well under way, as obvious in the
recent work of numerous colleagues.^2
The main objective of this book is to deepen our knowledge of the
ethnographic self in interaction with others, and within the field. Field
refers here to both the home environment of our hosts and to the dis-
cipline that defines our intellectual horizon in our pursuit of knowl-
edge. This quest is at the heart of all disciplines, including anthropol-
ogy. The research methods, qualitative or quantitative, that we draw
upon in our investigations are the means to discipline and sustain the
generation of reliable knowledge about a wide range of social insti-
tutions and practices. Systematic comparisons between cultures and
across historical periods enable us to identify differences and simi-
larities between and within various human populations. In this man-
ner, we seek to understand the impact of constraints, physical and in-
stitutional, on social behavior, and to grasp more fully the creative,
intersubjective, social dimension of all human lives. This has been
the case since the beginnings of the discipline, when, in eighteenth-
century Germany, “a sense of the environmental context of human
experience led to a fascination with non-Western cultures and the full-
blown pursuit of ethnography—a term coined for Germany by Au-
gust Ludwig von Shlözer” (Zammito 2002 , 236 ).
Given this book’s focus on the interaction between ethnographers
and their hosts as a condition of ethnographic knowledge, all contrib-
utors describe and discuss the work that they, as professional anthro-
pologists, and their local mentors, interpreters, and momentary life-
companions actually engage in as they interact in situ to “create their
indeterminate realities, and act in them” (Barth 1992 , 66 ). To be in-
volved or implicated with others in their world is to become both a
relatively incompetent and competent actor in coactivity with those
