We begin with three descriptive accounts of unanticipated participa-
tion in events that directly confronted ethnographers with dimensions
of life that drew them beyond the parameters of their immediate re-
search agenda and taken-for-granted epistemological assumptions. In
the process, we discover how anthropologists transcended their initial
predilection for this or that theoretical perspective and came to work
and to learn beyond the vantage point from which they thought they
would carry out all their research. They learn that the substance of
their fieldwork brings them to participate in events that are beyond
their “capacity to understand and to control” (Toelken 1996 , 1 ).
In the opening chapter, “On Puzzling Wavelengths,” Peter Gardner
shows how even seasoned anthropologists run headlong into experi-
ences they deem paradoxical, extraordinary, shocking, or baffling. He
found himself confronted with a series of these in the course of study-
ing “Northern Dene” during the 1970 s in the Canadian Northwest
Territories. He shares four of these experiences, leading the reader
closer and closer to the paradoxical and puzzling: recourse to the
state of drunkenness to solve problems of communication; cases of
extraordinary communication with dogs to perform unprecedented
and totally untended tasks in medical emergencies; manipulation of
what the Dene call “power” to alter the course of events; and his get-
ting into trouble after he, himself, stumbled upon a wholly new way
of seeing—thereby perceiving things that he knew had to be impos-
sible for him to see.
Petra Rethmann’s chapter, which follows Gardner’s, is entitled “On
Part One
Beyond Our Known Worlds