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Dancing Lessons from God
done it, and then you can’t possibly explain it.” Those who empha-
size scientific rigor in their research justly react against such a stance.
We do not need that kind of mystification. We can explain childbirth
and teach techniques to help prepare people for it, and we can explain
and provide tools and techniques to help researchers with fieldwork.
I refer to putting back the mystery and the magic in another sense. It
is the human mystery, in the sense that Gomes ( 1996 ), a theological
scholar, posits as being at the basis of the existence of life, and of re-
lationships. If one is ever to truly understand experience, life, and re-
lationships, these are things that must at some point be seen not just
as facts (to be collected around their peripheries) but as forms of a
mystery that one must enter into. Since anthropology is, at heart, try-
ing to understand the meanings humans have come to have about life
and experience, perhaps we can also recognize the validity of field ex-
periences that arise from a willingness to move out of our minds, and
instead to enter into that mystery.
Some scientific views of anthropology assert that ethnography is
not about the ethnographer. I would agree that there can be a prob-
lem when ways of telling shift overly emphatically from the ethno-
graphic eye to the ethnographic I. However, ethnography is also about
the reflective understandings gained through the experiences of the
ethnographer, and therefore, in some sense, the ethnographer is not
only the teller but an aspect of the telling, and, in the end, of what is
told. This is true even for specific data-collection methods such as in-
terviews. Despite arguing for scientific cultural anthropology, Aunger
recognizes: “In the case of interviewing, the data collection situation
involves recognition that there are two active participants, the inter-
viewer and the informant (each of which has a number of relevant
characteristics)” ( 2004 , 42 ). Some anthropologists, such as Bernard,
argue for the importance of specific systematic method use, claiming
that “anthropology has always been about methods” ( 1998 , 9 ). In
contrast, Wolcott makes the case that, at its historic beginnings, there
was little emphasis on methods in anthropology, and that shifts in the
concepts of methods and the nature of methods used have long been
part of the anthropological engagement ( 1999 , 41 – 42 ). He prefers an
understanding of ethnography as process, and even argues for the use
