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Dancing Lessons from God
to carry on, on my own, after that. The Ainu exhibit was happening
just that week at the Sapporo airport, with presentations, exhibits,
artists, artisans, musicians, and performances. While viewing this ex-
hibit, an Ainu gentleman there noticed how avidly I was taking notes.
He asked me about this, and I gave him a name card, explaining who
I was, what I was doing, and why the exhibit was of particular in-
terest to me. He said he lived in Sapporo and would give me a ride
there if I waited until he was ready to leave at the end of the day. I ac-
cepted the invitation and was pleased to learn that he was an officer
in the Sapporo branch (the main branch) of the Utari Kyo ̄ kai, other-
wise known as the Ainu association.^5
I ended up spending the next few days associating with this man
and his family. I was able to attend the Ainu language classes, part
of the revival movement, offered at the Sapporo headquarters. I was
taken to visit a small bar run by an Ainu woman, interacting with the
mostly Ainu guests there. I spent a couple of days at a series of Ainu
shops run for tourists, one of which was run by his wife. There, I was
taught how to do Ainu embroidery, play the Ainu mouth harp, and
help out at the shops run by the local Ainu artisans and merchants.
On this particular occasion, I was willing to set out without a pre-
cisely clear idea of exactly where I was going, and it seemed to make all
the difference. How much I would have lost in experience gained, if I
had not gotten on a bus whose exact route I did not know. The wealth
of this experience even allowed me to wonder if perhaps there is a god
of fieldwork out there. Are peculiar traveling suggestions not dancing
lessons from god? Sometimes it is good advice to get on the bus.
Yarn # 3 Ethnographic Unquestions of Participant Observation or
“Listen Carefully to Answers to Questions Never Asked” Advice
Everybody does it. Asks questions, that is. Journalists do it; detectives
do it; researchers do it. Why then do ethnographers feel so guilty about
doing it when they might be asking questions on sensitive topics, or
when a discussion might lead to their asking questions they had not
anticipated? Wolcott ( 1999 , 56 – 57 ) discusses the contradictions in-
volved in our question asking. He notes that we may be unduly lim-
ited by cultural beliefs in our own backgrounds regarding what is and
