Denise Nuttallother students and teachers. Experiencing dreams or visions served
to further my understanding of Indian cultural ways of being, so very
important to the cultivation of the guru–disciple relationship. I am
not a better tabla player or a worse anthropologist because I experi-
enced the spiritual side of tabla. Rather, these acts of embodied learn-
ing deepened my connection to those with whom I lived and studied.
These acts also led me to an avenue of investigation that I could not
have examined otherwise.
ConclusionApprenticeship, as a method, can indeed transform the fieldworker
into an apprentice. In the past, anthropologists spoke of such activi-
ties as highly undesirable or as making one liable to “go native.” De-
spite his deep fear of going native, Evans-Pritchard stressed that a
good anthropologist can’t help but be affected by experiences lived
during and after “the field” (Evans-Pritchard 1976 , 245 ). Recently,
other anthropologists have spoken of the necessity of documenting
and exploring their own transformations in the process of doing field-
work (Goulet 1994 , 1998 ; Guédon 1994 ; Mills 1994 ; Jackson 1989 ;
Stoller 1987 ; B. Tedlock 1991 ; E. Turner 1994 a). Rather than mar-
ginalizing their extraordinary experiences in the process of collecting
data to casual conversations within mainstream academic circles, they
have brought discussions of their field encounters such as dreams, vi-
sions, sorcery, etc., to the center of anthropological investigation. In
all these cases, the acquisition of cultural knowledge through experi-
ential engagements with others has created an effective technique for
furthering the anthropologist’s understanding of other ways of know-
ing, seeing, and doing. As such, focusing on extraordinary exchanges
among indigenous communities has become an additional instrument
in the anthropologist’s methodological toolkit and has also provided
a new theoretical ground (Goulet and Young 1994 ) for analyzing and
documenting other ways of knowing.
Following in the recent critique of the anthropology of the body
and the emerging anthropology of the senses (Jackson 1989 ; Stoller
1989 a, 1995 ; Howes 1991 ; Connerton 1989 , and others), I suggest