Jean-Guy A. Goulet and Bruce Granville Miller1996 a) and other similar collections of fine essays, such as Construct-
ing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World
(Amit 2000 ). In common with contributors to such books, we chal-
lenge the notion of a “field” that exists prior to and independently of
the ethnographer actively interacting with others in their home envi-
ronment. Moreover, in a very practical way, we demonstrate how to
creatively engage the intellectual, ethical, and practical dimensions
of the challenge described in Figured Worlds: Ontological Obstacles
in Intercultural Relations, namely to elucidate the “ontological con-
ceptions upon which culture is ultimately based, and in the friction
between which, in a pluralistic world, conflict is generated” (Clam-
mer, Poirier, and Schwimmer 2004 , 1 ). In continuity with Fieldwork
Revisited: Changing Contexts of Ethnographic Practice in the Era of
Globalization (Robbins and Bamford 1997 ), of Auto-Ethnographies:
The Anthropology of Academic Practices (Meneley and Young 2005 ),
and of Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (Mad-
ison 2005 ), we extend the range of contexts in which to consider is-
sues of professional accountability and ethical decision making in co-
activity with others in their worlds.
In our field experience, transformative events lived with others in
their world cannot be wished away. Our hosts know this and we do
too. They expect us to take seriously what we have lived with them
and have learned from them. In other words, the expectation is that
we rise to the challenge of effective and respectful cross-cultural com-
munication. We are called to transcend our own ethnocentrism and
to explore forms of knowledge production and knowledge dissemina-
tion that serve the best interests of our hosts and our profession. This
is why the following chapters are all about ethnographically based
experiential knowledge and depict others and oneself in interaction.
These papers demonstrate the value of shifting “from participation
observation to observation of participation” (B. Tedlock 1991 ) and
of recognizing that “critically understood, autobiography is a condi-
tion of ethnographic objectivity” (Fabian 2001 , 13 ).
The significance of this recognition is best understood if we com-
pare and contrast the positions taken by Geertz and V. Turner in re-
spect to anthropological approaches to the study of religion and/or