statement, but our focus is on understanding society as something that, as
Fredrik Barth has said,“happens between people”. By keeping our empiri-
cal attention at this level we can avoid takingflight into abstractions. This
in turn does not mean that we restrict ourselves to the sphere of descriptive
work. It does mean that whatever theory we adopt should be shown to
apply cogently to our data rather than beingflourished or waved at the
data, foisted upon the facts, or added seductively to them by contiguous
word magic. What we would like to add to this position is a further
element, particularly recognizable today, a sense of‘engagement’with
issues. Engagement is not the same as‘activism’. Activism implies a degree
of partisanship. Engagement by contrast implies an open-ness of assess-
ment but an attention to political and moral issues that any piece of
contemporary research can potentially be implicated in.
When Buddhist writers refer to the mind and mindfulness, they are
talking about raising levels of consciousness, and saying that this con-
sciousness should apply to daily practice. Attention paid in the‘now’
time to whatever action we are taking can give us a greater appreciation
for such actions and improve the ways we do them, as well as the ways we
interact with others who are involved. The same idea can be applied both
to the conduct offieldwork and to the writing of our account built on
fieldwork. Engagement means we do our best to give meaning andfind
meaning in people’s actions and the processes that they give rise to. It may
lead us in the direction of an aspect of grand theory (structuralist, Marxist,
functionalist, cognitivist), but it is free to take theory in any other direc-
tion that is illuminating, or even to combine parts of theoretical
approaches to illuminate different facets of the material. Such a‘free’
approach to theorizing is, of course, anathema to adherents of‘one theory
tofit all’viewpoints, but our argument is that we must be constrained by
and faithful to our observations, but we must not be constrained by a
theoretical straitjacket. Consider what happened to Marxist theory in the
1960s and subsequently. Marxist theory was used to dismantle the rem-
nants of structural-functionalist theory, but over-reached itself subse-
quently by claiming an exclusive dominance and pushing out every other
theory. One of us (AJS), while teaching and serving as Head of
Department in University College London, took a considerable interest
in the trends towards Marxist theory and produced work using parts of it
(e.g., Strathern 1981 ; reissued 2009 ). His enthusiasm, however, waned
when he saw how Marxist anthropologists were intolerant of other posi-
tions, and were basically working with political activism to take over
90 BREAKING THE FRAMES