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tradition deepened her connection to those she lived and studied with.
This led her to an avenue of investigation in discipleship among tabla
communities that she would not have looked at otherwise.
In their joint chapter, “ Field of Dreams; Fields of Reality: Growing
with and in the Field of Anthropology,” Jeanne Simonelli, Erin Mc-
Culley, and Rachel Simonelli demonstrate how learning and teaching
anthropology in the field requires a special set of skills and insights,
some of which can be gleaned from books, and others, as one of her
mentors said, are figured out when you get there. This chapter pro-
vides a vivid account of apprenticeship of anthropological fieldwork.
Throughout this examination, Simonelli, McCulley, and Simonelli
ask important questions. First, how has our perception of this pro-
fessional apprenticeship changed since the days when our “anthro-
cestor,” Malinowski ( 1967 in Kuper 1973 , 28 ), in a fit of depression,
saw the “lives of the natives as something as remote from [him] as the
life of a dog”? Second, how have we modified and crafted the experi-
ence of fieldwork to meet changing perspectives on what anthropol-
ogy is all about? Third, and most fundamentally, can we teach field-
work, or does it teach us?
In the last chapter, “Dancing Lessons from God: To Be the Good
Ethnographer or the Good Bad Ethnographer,” Millie Creighton of-
fers three significant segments of life stories heard from informants
who represent different aspects of marginalization in Japan. The in-
formation offered by these Japanese women concern a Hibakusha
(atomic blast survivor), a resident Korean, and a Burakumin (mem-
ber of a discriminated-against hereditary group). None of these sto-
ries were told in response to specific questions, nor were they directly
related to the specific primary research agenda of the author. To ad-
dress the contradictions between the model of rigor, under which these
stories might not have emerged, and the model of vigor, which recog-
nizes the validity of seemingly peripheral discoveries, Millie Creigh-
ton argues that ethnographic fieldwork is not just about the collection
of facts, but the meaningful interpretation of human experience that
is sometimes revealed in unexpected ways. Being the good ethnogra-
pher in terms of rigorous adherence to specific project goals can lead
to being the bad ethnographer in terms of long-term contributions of
knowledge from the field.
Apprenticeship and Research Practices
