Millie Creightonof phrases such as ethnographic techniques, or ethnographic research,
rather than references to ethnographic methods.
Anthropology has been the discipline long teaching that different
human beings have different valid ways of understanding what it
means to be human. Perhaps the time has come to accept the possi-
bility that anthropologists might validly have different ways of under-
standing what the anthropological project means and how it should
be carried out. If so, it should be possible to embrace an anthropol-
ogy that admits to different ways of seeing and allows different ways
of telling. Anthropology is somewhere among and between the sci-
ences, the social sciences, and, yes, the humanities. If there is an al-
ternate identity by which the discipline might be known, let it not be
the natural experiments discipline, the garbage can discipline, or the
leftovers discipline.^8 Perhaps there are new ways we could think of
anthropology’s central emphases on people and on place, whether
the field is geographically far away, or increasingly close to home (re-
membering that sometimes places closer to home can be more diffi-
cult to get to than places far away).^9 Perhaps, as anthropologists have
long argued is the case within cultures, it is possible to have engage-
ments in magic and science at the same time. Perhaps it might even
be possible to recognize that anthropology is sometimes a discipline
of “Peculiar Traveling Suggestions,” otherwise known as “Dancing
Lessons from God.”
NotesIn completing this article, I ran up against the process of uprooting my usual life and ac-
ademic work in Vancouver to take up a year’s work as a visiting professor at Ritsumei-
kan University in Kyoto, Japan. Since I could not finalize the essay before departure, I was
left with the difficulties of securing the materials I needed to finish from my bookshelves
in Vancouver, or by struggling through Japanese academic bureaucracy to get the English
texts on ethnographic field methods that indeed were available somewhere in Japan, but
not always easily accessible. I am grateful to my colleague Patrick Moore for our e-mail
exchanges identifying newly emerging methods texts, and to Masa Kagami and Eirin Ka-
gami for shipping me materials that I needed while in Japan.
- I was a student of the three-week National Science Foundation “methods camp” in
Gainesville, Florida, in the summer of 1993. At that time, participants were chosen through
a competitive application process and were expected to be post-doctoral anthropologists
with teaching appointments at major universities. The year I participated, Steve Borgatti