Millie Creightonin the humanities from a discussion of anthropology, believing that
anthropology should be “science” and that science is removed from
the humanities (and perhaps humanity) and its field methods. How-
ever, as I argue in this essay, anthropology and its engagement as a
human science in search of the meanings people find and make in life
is one that intersects with many fields, and thus Dickens’s literary de-
nouncement of a “facts only” approach to life or to an understand-
ing of it can help expose possible fault lines in some methodological
approaches of contemporary anthropology.
Often there are difficulties doing research in the field because there
are inevitable contradictions between what happens, and what the
models of good ethnography suggest is supposed to happen. After
many years of doing ethnography, one comes to expect this and to
develop a high level of ambiguity tolerance. One realizes that field-
work about human life, like human life itself, does not always flow in
a straight and linear fashion. Some anthropologists have attempted
to document this disjunction between the realities of fieldwork, and
what the models suggest will or is supposed to happen. This was a
major theme of Rabinow’s ( 1977 ),Reflections on Fieldwork in Mo-
rocco, and Rosaldo once dared to re-label the anthropological re-
search method of participant observation as “deep hanging out” (Re-
nato Rosaldo quoted in Clifford 1997 , 188 ). The extent to which this
disjunction between what actually happens and the models’ projec-
tions of what should happen is problematic at any given time and is
tied to shifts in an understanding of what anthropology is, or should
be, within academic research. One of those periodic shifts, rendering
it more problematic, urges us—after a long period of reflexivity—to
return to a more positivistic, systematic, and scientific understanding
of ethnographic research.
This renewed call to abide by the canons of good science is often ob-
vious when reading revised specifications for research grant applica-
tions. When doing so, I often feel disheartened. In recent years, there
seems to be a tightening of this trend, with increasing emphasis on
things such as the following: that the research must involve a clearly
specified plan; that it must stick only to that plan; that the researcher
must do only what is stated in the plan; and that monies can be spent