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WHAT IS IT LIKE to be an anthropologist or, more specifically, a woman anthropologist? Here we see highly trained and qualified women anthropologists examining their own efforts to live and work in alien cultures in many parts of the world. New chapters have been added to this ground-breaking volume, and each contributor is, in one way or another, a pioneer. All have chosen to devote their lives and energies to the understanding of worlds not their own. All have felt it important to explain what they do, why they do it, and how they feel about their work.

Cultures vary widely in their perception of a woman engaged in anthropological field work. Each of these women has had to deal with the influence of her gender, as well as the subject of her study, on the mechanics of establishing a living-working relationship with people of another culture. The diversity of their responses to the presence of a foreign woman at work in their midst gives the book an invaluable cross-cultural perspective, as does the great variety of reactions and strategies on the part of the authors themselves. Besides providing rare insight into field work in general, Women in the Field mirrors the difficulties and delights of any person thrust into an unfamiliar culture.

Peggy Golde is a clinical anthropologist and a practicing therapist in northern California. She is co-editor of a recent book on clinical anthropology.

Contents Preface to the Second Edition "PEGGY GOLDE Introduction JEAN BRIGGS Kapluna Daughter LAURA THOMPSON Exploring American Indian Communities in Depth PEGGY GOLDE Odyssey of Encounter LAURA NADER From Anguish to Exultation RUTH LANDES A Woman Anthropologist in Brazil HELEN CODERE Field Work in Rwanda, 1959-1960 NIARA SUDARKASA (née GLORIA A. MARSHALL) In a World of Women: Field Work in a Yoruba Community ERNESTINE FRIEDL Field Work in a Greek Village CORA DU BOIS Studies in an Indian Town HAZEL HITSON WEIDMAN On Ambivalence and the Field ANN FISCHER Field Work in Five Cultures Field Work in the Pacific Islands, 1925-1967 DIANE C. FREEDMAN Wife, Widow, Woman: Roles of an Anthropologist in a Transylvanian Village The Return of Redwoman: Field Work in Highland New Guinea Selected Bibliography, compiled by Srila Sen Supplemental Selected Bibliography, compiled by Stephen E. MacLeod

 

Introduction

PEGGY GOLDE

In the field of anthropology there has been little public discussion of the subjective aspects of field work, perhaps because it would have been considered unessential or irrelevant to the communication of information about other cultures, the central scientific task. This attitude could adequately serve the discipline in the past, while it was still small enough for graduate training to rely on close personal exchanges to rectify gaps in the literature and when anthropologists were oriented toward building an alliance with the sciences and attempting to separate from the humanities. The growth of anthropology, both in the number of anthropologists and of independent departments in universities and colleges throughout the country, has resulted in wider audiences and the possibility of commitment at an earlier stage in college education. Consequently, there is need to make the work of the anthropologist more vivid as a career choice to an ever growing number of young students.

The student often reads an ethnography as a fait accompli with no clear idea of how the picture of another culture was achieved, and with an inadequate grasp of the process of interaction between researcher and community members and of the problems, pitfalls, and procedures of the anthropologist as "photographer." When, as a first-year graduate student, I read Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (1954), I recognized something I had been missing in most anthropological works. The fictionalized description of becoming acclimated to life in an African village, which included the author's transitory emotional reactions as well as more deeply felt and enduring responses, was alive and compelling; it served as a constant reassurance when I subsequently engaged in my own field work. The impact of the book on me was the stimulus for this volume and provided evidence of the potential value of such a volume for students of anthropology. As I wrote to the contributors to this collection, our book could "present in an open, direct, and immediate fashion a variety of models that the students could, as it were, try on for size."

This volume was conceived in 1965, influenced not only by Bowen's work, but by other books as well: Margaret Mead's An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (1959); Reflections on Community Studies, edited by Vidich, Bensman, and Stein (1964); and Sociologists at Work, edited by Phillip E. Hammond (1964). Since that time still other works have appeared that have exposed to view the researcher's self, notably Stranger and Friend by Hortense Powdermaker (1967) and A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term by Malinowski (1967).

Beside the need to present personal and human reactions to field work, the second issue to which this volume is directed is how the characteristics of the ethnographer may indirectly and inadvertently affect the process of research. Several recent works in the field of psychology examine the influence of the experimenter on the results of his research (Rosenthal, 1966; Friedman, 1967), and their publication signifies to me a changing attitude, a 'growing recognition of the value and importance of considering social-science research as the process and product of interaction between the questioner and the questioned and of the need to subject this process to scrutiny. In the same vein Powdermaker notes, "A scientific discussion of field work method should include considerable detail about the observer: the role he plays, his personality and other relevant facts concerning his position and functioning in the society studied." (1967, p. 9). Facts about the observer-observed interaction have relevance not only for field work methods, but, as the subsequent chapters will illustrate, for theories of cultural dynamics as well.

Given this over-all task, what is the rationale for focusing on women and excluding the field experiences of men? First, sex is the simplest variable to hold constant. If our goal is to analyze and evaluate the influence of the researcher on the data being studied, it would seem most economical to begin by looking at a shared characteristic inherent in the researcher---one that is highly visible or unusual and consequently likely to be noted and responded to. Femininity meets these criteria best precisely because response to it is likely to be clear and direct; all cultures, having two sexes, can be expected to have developed attitudes about women, and in most nonliterate cultures it is an unusual event to be visited by a woman who engages in activities not associated with the usual women's roles.

I envisioned this book as an informal cross-cultural study of attitudes about the sex of the "outsider" who eventually becomes, through a set of mutual adjustments, an "insider." I hoped it would provide data to partially answer the question, "Is there any theoretical knowledge to be gained from examining the responses of a variety of culturally distinct human groups to the common stimulus of the female stranger?" The latter part of this introduction will be concerned more specifically with how this collection speaks to the question of the common aspects of the response.

Second, I assumed that simply growing up as women in American society would have made the contributors aware of the kinds of subtle and conflicting pressures that may be exerted on women. Their own personal adaptation as professionals would have demanded that they develop heightened sensitivities about sex role, and I believed that this awareness, including an acceptance of "perceptiveness about feelings" as appropriate to the feminine role, would make the assessment of the influence of sex easier for women than it would have been for men. I also hoped that if these assumptions were correct, the resulting information about the consequences of gender might sensitize male anthropologists to the problem and implications of sex roles and provide data they could use to contrast and compare with the responses they themselves elicit as researchers. Systematic comparisons of this kind are necessary if we are to establish the extent to which aspects of responses and roles are determined by the sex of the investigator, not only because of the nature of the responses of the society being studied, but because of sex role training, attitudes, and biases transmitted to each sex in our own culture. Therefore, I also hoped that the volume would emerge as an ethnography of ethnographers, with each participant acting as a "native informant" reporting on her subjective view of her own world, values, and aims and on how her work might reflect her sex identification as well as her professional training. Through these accounts the reader would be provided the opportunity of meeting and getting to know a number of anthropologists in a special way; in these pages the reader would be able to sense the kind of people they are, how they have reacted to their own experiences, and to discover aspects of a basic outlook they may share.

Before dealing explicitly with some of the commonalities exhibited in the chapters, I would like to include here a good part of the original letter of invitation sent to the contributors; it provides a concise way of presenting the aims of this collection and serves as a frame in which to gauge its success in achieving these aims.

It is my hope that each contribution will portray the subjective impact of moving into a new culture, presenting an individual sightline on a unique experience. At the same time, the pooling of these reminiscences may illuminate the recurring problems, choices, and solutions that are common to the encounter between the woman as a stranger and a foreign culture.

Ideally each narrative would move back and forth among different levels, interweaving three separate but related kinds of materials and reference points: (1) personal and subjective, (2) ethnographic, and (3) theoretical or methodological.

First and foremost the account should be personal, tracing the inward history of the field experience, perhaps beginning with prior expectations, apprehensions, hopes, and ambitions. It might encompass the chance happenings, the frustrations and rewards, the unsought insights, the stumbled-upon understandings, the never-resolved misunderstandings---whatever characterized the sequence of the human interchange between you as outsider and those with whom you made your home. It might include answers to the questions your friends and acquaintances were most interested in when you returned: "What was it like? Was it difficult making friends? Weren't you lonely? Were you ever frightened? What did you do for fun? How did you arrange a place to live?" I do not intend that you search for the sensational or the exotic; on the contrary, it is my belief that a realistic description of the trivia of daily living can give an intimate picture of the process of adjustment to another culture and, simultaneously, a sense of the characteristic profile of that culture. It is also my feeling that the best way to transmit what it means to be an anthropologist (how we do our work, how we respond to the strange and different and come to understand it, how we balance objectivity, distance, and respect with our own personal values) is to describe the process from the self's point of view, thus enabling others to "live" vicariously through the experience.

Obviously, in the course of such a narrative, many ethnographic details perforce will enter. What happened to you happened in a particular locale, in a given context, and it would be meaningful to try to make explicit when the bits of interchange were influenced less by the impact of you as a person than by forces existing within the culture, such as traditional attitudes toward women, the existing social structure and norms of managing novel situations, the history of previous contacts, the current political climate, or whatever might have been relevant to your experience. These are meant to be only suggestions of the kinds of factors that may have intruded, that may have shaped the course and nature of your relationships, and the kind of work you could and could not do.

Last on the above list, the theoretical or methodological aspect, may well come last in your write-up as well, in the form of generalizations, conclusions, suggestions for future research questions, or an explicit contribution to role theory, field technique, what-have-you. My hope is that the task I have set will result in a human document, meaningful in its own terms, but also as a systematic self-conscious scrutiny of how the chief instrument of research, the anthropologist herself, may alter that which is being studied and may be changed in turn. There is need for more open speculation and consideration of such issues as: how were my data affected by the kind of person I am, by my sex or other apparent attributes, and how did my presence alter, positively or negatively, the flux of life under observation? Through the attempt to analyze the rapport-building process and the creation of your role, the natural history of adjustment and acceptance that characterize field work may become visible.

As this letter indicates, I hoped that one of the consequences of gathering these accounts would be to illuminate common responses to the female ethnographer that might stand as generalizations or that might be framed as hypotheses for future testing. However, my attempt to present an array of work situations and a wide representation of geographical locations has worked somewhat against the achievement of these theoretical objectives. On the other hand, the variety does accurately convey the range of research activities within the field of anthropology that women may engage in, and despite the diversity, several recurring themes appear that can be identified and that deserve comment and further consideration. Some of these themes have been made explicit by individual authors, some are based on my own interpretation of the combined data. These themes, as I label them, are protection, initial suspicion, conformity, reciprocity, and culture shock.

"Protection" refers to the motive that underlies specific behavior triggered by the perception of female sex identity. At the core of this behavior seems to be an assessment of the vulnerability of the woman seen in terms of relative physical weakness, lesser resourcefulness in confronting unforeseen hazards, or openness to sexual attack. Protection arises as an issue even before the ethnographer takes up residence in a new community; it is first clearly seen in the reactions of the several worlds---academic, political, administrative---she passes through before arriving at her final destination. Protection also operates in varying degrees, depending on the circumstances, after she moves into the new culture.

To perceive vulnerability is to simultaneously perceive provocation, for if to be vulnerable is to be susceptible to exploitation, this very defenselessness is perceived as a potential challenge to take advantage of it. Protection, then, has a double aim---the direct need to insure the safety of the woman, and the protection of others through the prevention of situations that might provoke others to exploit her. Protection is expressed as apprehension that the woman may get into difficulties from which she will not have the skill, knowledge, or leverage to extricate herself. In other words, one facet of the perception of the woman reflects her presumed naïveté as an "innocent abroad" who may become a dupe for those who will be ready to capitalize on her incapacity and inexperience. Provocativeness also contains a sexual element per se, a dimension that has both passive and active faces. In the frame of some cultures, the fact of a woman's accessibility may be considered provocative in itself, while in others it may be imagined that her sexual interest will lead her actively to tempt men into liaisons. (The field worker who is physically attractive in terms of the prevailing aesthetic standards of the community she is studying will pose a greater threat and will suffer these suspicions to a greater degree.) Perceptions of provocativeness are manifest in the exaggeration of dangers by those who act as gatekeepers to the field. Once in the field, gossip and rumors, insinuations of wrongdoing, overt and disguised sexual encounters initiated by men, and active attempts to control and limit the woman's freedom of movement are further expressions of this attitude. (See contributions by Golde, Nader, Landes, Weidman, Fischer.) Such behaviors not only reveal these attitudes, but they also serve as mechanisms of social control. They contain a message that may be manifestly solicitous, but at the same time constitutes a veiled warning to both the field worker and the community that the limits of tolerance may not be pushed too far.

The techniques devised to actually provide protection or simply to symbolize it, reduce either the woman's accessibility or her desirability. These include finding a man or men whose role enables them to serve as protectors; moving in with a family; taking or being assigned an already existing role that minimizes or neutralizes sexuality or is a traditionally protected one, such as "child," "sister," "grandmother"; working chiefly with the women and children of the community or living in the field with a husband or a team of fellow workers (Thompson, Marshall, Friedl, Fischer, Mead). The vulnerability associated with femininity is less an issue for the older woman or for those to whom has been ascribed high status or power (Du Bois, Fischer, Mead). Age implies a decreased interest in sex as well as a lessening of desirability, while status and power function as built-in protection. The theme of protection in these essays is most elaborated in the accounts of those women who were relatively young, unmarried, or alone when they did their field work (Briggs, Golde, Nader, Marshall, Weidman, Fischer, Mead); they express their concern for their own well-being and also about the responsibility they inadvertently thrust on the local authorities. Insuring her own safety means freedom from anxiety about it, and this seems to be the issue for the female anthropologist. In arranging her household, and recognizing that she cannot be self-sufficient and that she requires help in managing her daily life, she surrounds herself with symbolic "chaperones" because they serve as shield and reassurance both for her and the community.

Protection has positive as well as negative implications; the same feeling can contribute to bonds of attachment between the anthropologist and the community. When, in crisis situations, the community demonstrates responsibility, protectiveness, and possessiveness toward the ethnographer, it is not only a source of deep emotional gratification for her, but it is also an observable demonstration to everyone involved of the extent of its commitment.

Initial suspicion is a more expectable response to an outsider than is ready, congenial, unequivocal acceptance. If a community is conceived as a system of defined roles and organized relationships based on predictable behaviors, then it is likely that any intruder would be initially perceived as a potential threat to the order, and in turn, that defensive behaviors would be set in motion to preserve the integrity of the system. The stranger is threatening on two counts: first, she is strange, unknown, different, unprepared for; and second, she can neither be relied upon to behave in familiar ways nor trusted to respect people's needs and feelings. A strange woman may be less frightening than a man because her attributes of womanhood already suggest a good deal of information, as I have outlined above, and because a man would be presumed to be more potentially aggressive.

To anticipate critics who may suggest that I am being ethnocentric in these statements about the relatively unthreatening image of the woman, I cite D'Andrade (1966), who writes, in his review of the cultural expressions of sex differences, "The cross-cultural mode is that males are more sexually active, more dominant, more deferred to, more aggressive, less responsible, less nurturant, and less expressive than females." However, he does qualify this statement by pointing out that it is not universally applicable, since "occasionally the trend is actually reversed" (p. 201). For biological reasons alone---childbearing, lesser strength and size---one may expect the majority of societies to shape the woman's role as less aggressive than that of the male. Other supporting evidence can be found in Barry, Bacon, and Child (1957), who found cross-cultural differences in the socialization of male and female children. Their study, based on ethnographic data from 110 societies, revealed that girls are trained to be nurturant, responsible, and obedient, while boys are trained for self-reliance.

The community's defensive behaviors are reflected in early questioning of the researcher's motives, in rumors that represent attempts to explain her presence, in petty and large resistances of all kinds, and in the accusation that she is a "spy"---that is, a person who obtains information, without revealing her own identity and goals, that she will ultimately use against people (Golde, Nader, Landes, Du Bois, Friedl, Weidman, Fischer). These accusations and suspicions have frequently been explained as reactions to an ambiguous figure or as the result of prior negative contact with foreigners. I do not discount the operation of such factors, but whatever historical reality and present ambiguities may exist, these creations can also be viewed as mechanisms for the defense and preservation of a group. They operate through the behavior of members of the group who act to protect and conserve what is familiar and what constitutes the group identity.

Clearly, some threat, real or imagined, must be perceived before this kind of behavior would be set in motion; and the fact that Margaret Mead reports a lack of suspicion of women anthropologists working in New Guinea may suggest that the people felt no threat because they were so proud and certain of their identity or because the status of European women was such as to preclude such behavior. Another seeming exception is described by Gloria Marshall; she found no suspicion of her in the community in which she lived, rather, she was first treated as an honored guest (as are all strangers to Yoruba society) and later as "a child who had come home." However, it must be noted that she resembled her hosts physically and observed the traditional respect forms; she comments that "the fact that I was black seemed to be more important than my nationality in determining the way they responded to me." The community members were able to reduce the threat implied by this foreign woman's residence by convincing themselves that she really was not a stranger at all; despite the fact that she could not trace her genealogy, they seemed to want to believe that she was "undoubtedly a Yoruba."

The third theme, conformity, is differentiated from initial suspicion in that the latter relates to the perception of the stranger, whereas conformity centers on the problem of the stranger who has become familiar but does not always conform to expectations. After the researcher has been accepted to some degree, the unstated message of the host community is, "If you want to live with us, act like us." The dilemma for the anthropologist lies in balancing the community's need to absorb and control her with her own need for independence of action. Because she has a task to accomplish, some of her behavior will almost certainly lead to flouting some of the culture's traditional expectations of women's behavior. Since women in most cultures are permitted less leeway than men, less deviance in their role performance, any nonconformity on the part of the female researcher will seem noteworthy. Obviously the degree of disruption produced by nonconforming behavior will vary with the culture and the variety of its available roles; what is of more interest is how the researcher overcomes these obstacles and fulfills her goals, despite the pressures put on her, and how the community resolves the issue of her nonconformity.

Though the researcher may try to create a role for herself that is to some extent new to the host society, any viable creation must be an amalgam of the new with previously existing duties, activities, and expectations. The society then can adapt by making the field worker the sole exemplar of the innovated role, or it can simply assign her an existing variant or deviant role. Ruth Landes talks about the availability in urban Brazil of the variant roles of "artist" or "prostitute" in which she was cast; but in the end the deviant role of "Communist" seemed to have more explanatory power in accounting for her behavior and in justifying the actions taken by her hosts. Jean Briggs describes aspects of the deviant roles between which she moved: "mentally retarded" and "child." Since her behavior did not always fit what was expected of a "daughter," her "family" had to look for other explanations or pre-existing models to make her behavior meaningful to them. Similarly, both Hazel Weidman and Laura Nader were at times suspected of being "men" because of dissonant aspects of their appearance or because they exhibited certain inclinations and qualities usually associated with men; the only way to make sense of these anomalies was to entertain the belief they might actually be men. The deviant role "crazy" was not applied to any of these women, as far as we can tell from their accounts, probably because they were generally competent, were recognized as coming from another culture, and brought recommendations from the outside world that signified they were valuable and responsible.

It seems clear that the greater the extent to which the anthropologist can remain outside the existing system of roles and expectations, the freer she will be to pursue her own goals; to the extent that she attempts to conform to a structural role, as did Ernestine Friedl and Jean Briggs, she becomes more constrained. The judicious balancing of demands---which to recognize and which to reject or ignore---is a problem all anthropologists must face, but paradoxically, again it may ultimately be less problematic for women than for men. The appearance of the woman in the field may initially be more difficult to understand and rationalize, because of the disparity between her behavior and that of the women in the community, but once this hurdle has been overcome, she may have more freedom of movement among age and sex groups within a culture than would a man (Nader, Du Bois, Mead).

However, easy access to people does not imply easy access to information and experiences. There are hints of this difficulty in Ann Fischer's account, when she describes the different information she and her husband were given by informants. Ernestine Friedl, and Margaret Mead as well, describe interactions of their husbands with village men in which they could not join. Gloria Marshall points out that she was never permitted to witness ceremonies normally barred to women.

A further aspect of deviance associated with sex is marital status. If the field worker is single, the community will be concerned about why she is not married; if she is married but her husband is not with her, people will wonder about that situation; if she is with her husband, attention will focus on why she has no children. These questions are irksome rather than troubling, but they do require the researcher to search for explanations that are meaningful to informants. On the other hand, these questions themselves constitute useful information because they reveal implicit expectations, areas of concern, and the specific nature of the discrepancies between the people and the ethnographer. The stranger is not perceived merely as threatening, but also as an object of curiosity and attention; this curiosity is directed toward learning about another life and to establishing just how human the researcher is, how many traits she shares with the local people. Such questions provide the opportunity of exchanging many kinds of information (including photographs), which give the people some means of elaborating their image of the researcher and making more real the background from which she comes, all of which tend to reduce psychological distance.

The theme of reciprocity, implicit in these essays, is the least well-documented in the following chapters; it is so unconscious, so deeply entrenched in all of us, that it remains unrecognized unless it becomes dramatized by events. The issue for the ethnographer is, "How can I repay these people who give me so much?" while the issue for the community is, "What does she give that makes up for the trouble she causes, for the fact that she is not like us and cannot contribute what we are accustomed to expect?" Reciprocity in some form can be the anthropologist's means of demonstrating her value, her importance, her membership in the community, and of counteracting the negative effects of her differences. Some of the researchers gave lessons in English, others did favors, provided medicine, gave food, drink, or material goods (Golde, Nader, Codere, Marshall, Weidman). Whether female anthropologists feel the need to "repay" to a greater extent than do males cannot be determined from these chapters. On the one hand, it could be argued that reciprocity would be less of an issue for women from our culture because they are more accustomed to being protected as part of their role. They do not feel an obligation to make some kind of return, nor would it be expected. On the other hand, their very dependence on the largesse of others may make them more sensitive to the costs involved and may heighten the urgency to "make it up."

Culture shock, the last theme, is a familiar one to anthropologists. In an article written in 1951, Cora Du Bois wrote, "Some twenty years ago, I remember first chatting with colleagues about the peculiar emotional state we anthropologists developed when we were working in the field" (p. 22). She described this state as "culture shock," a term which she credits to Ruth Benedict (private communication); by 1940, it was so well accepted by social scientists that it needed no citation.(3) Du Bois describes it as a syndrome "precipitated by the anxiety that results from losing all your familiar cues," which includes frustration, repressed or expressed aggression against the source of discomfort, an irrational fervor for the familiar and comforting, and disproportionate anger at trivial interferences. Kalervo Oberg (1954) paraphrases Du Bois when he states that culture shock is the anxiety that "results from losing all our familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse." He isolates and describes stages in the process, and though he is writing about visiting technical personnel in a foreign country rather than about anthropological field work, there seem to be emotional parallels. The first, or "honeymoon," phase, lasting from a few days to weeks or months, is characterized by fascination with the new. This positive attitude is succeeded by a hostile and aggressive phase, which is a reaction to the difficulties of adjustment and to an imagined lack of understanding and concern on the part of others. This second stage Oberg labels the "crisis," the point at which the visitor may so reject the entire experience that he returns to his home. If, however, the visitor traverses this crisis phase and begins to acquire the language and to find his way in the new culture, the third, or "recovery," stage is entered. The fourth and final stage, that of "adjustment," is achieved through learning the cues that guide behavior and accepting the alien customs. He observes that "Understanding the ways of a people is essential but this does not mean that you have to give up your own. What happens is that you have developed two patterns of behavior" (p. 11).

Aspects of culture shock are clearly revealed in the accounts of first field experiences included in this volume (Briggs, Golde, Nader, Weidman, Fischer). It is generally the initial encounter that most exemplifies the frustration, anxiety, paranoid-like perceptions, inner complaints, and depression characteristic of the syndrome. Laura Thompson writes that there is never again "anything like one's first field trip;" and perhaps that is when the lesson-heightened by novelty, impressed through high arousal-is irrevocably learned. That lesson, the learning of culture, is not an intellectually dispassionate one, nor is it even necessarily mediated by words; it is direct intuitive learning that seeps through all the senses, as it did when we were children being socialized into our own world. Field work can be a replication, condensed in time, of childhood learning, with its attendant anxieties, mystification, impotence, and occasional and gradual mastery. We might label this "initiation anxiety," expecting to find perplexity, feelings of powerlessness, unsureness, and strain accompanying the process of being inducted into any ongoing, structured situation that is new, whether it be going to college, taking a new job, moving to a new place, or joining a new group.

Culture shock is certainly due in part to an inadequate set of meanings with which to interpret the behavior of others, but the concept includes the notion of threat to one's own system of meanings and values, and consequently to one's own identity. There is discomfort and anxiety in trying to balance a different way of seeing the world with one's own established perceptions, particularly if these "two patterns of behavior" are incompatible.

The severity of the experience of dislocation will thus depend not only on the individual and his previous exposure to total novelty, but also on the degree to which the new beliefs, values, norms, and style of behavior conflict with the individual's own core values and emotional profile. The conflict may be experienced in its more extreme form as abhorrence, disgust, anger, frustration, intolerance, oppression; or it may emerge as impatience, bewilderment, disapproval in its milder form. Conversely, the same range of feelings may inadvertently be triggered in others reacting to the field worker's behavior, so that she has to deal with their disapproval without always understanding its source. It can happen that what one has deeply accepted as proper, valuable, correct for oneself may be disvalued by another culture; what one disvalues for oneself may be preferred by that culture. This opposition can produce profoundly disturbing reactions.

Ann Fischer reacted negatively to the unfavorable status of women in Japan, and in New England she feared offending the sensibilities of women who didn't like being asked too many questions. Laura Nader was oppressed by the attitude of inferiority she observed in the Talean townspeople and found respite with the people of Juquila, whose self-esteem and pride were more consonant with her own notion of how people should be and feel. Jean Briggs, identifying with the needs and feelings of the Eskimo, burst out angrily at those she thought were trying to exploit her friends, forgetting the importance of repressing overt anger; she was behaving in terms of her own needs, her own definition of what was honorable behavior, but the Eskimo disapproved her explosiveness as "annoying" and "improper." Hazel Weidman felt impatience with Burmese ways, with its ideal of interpersonal behavior that inhibits the expression of feelings that might trouble another. The breakdown in communication resulting from this inhibition led her to feel betrayed and deceived in a relationship with a Burmese that she had thought was based on openness and honesty. The verbal ambiguity she discovered in Burmese responses caused anxiety because she was uncertain how to interpret their meanings; but even when she learned to play the game, she did not like the rules.

As Ruth Landes and Margaret Mead suggest, the anthropologist, through field work, lives more than one life. It is just this "total human experience," in Helen Codere's words, this total immersion, this giving over of oneself to a differently organized reality, that leads the women writing here to attribute to this experience pervasive and compelling consequences. Note the phrases they use indicating that what happens in the field is ultimately related to the self: Weidman speaks of the "conflict about a self," Landes describes the lure of field work as the "lure of self," Nader mentions "knowledge of self," Du Bois writes that field work requires a "continuing willingness to immerse one's self in an infinitely varied series of life ways," and Codere talks about a "change in character that comes about in so total and intense a learning experience." All the women share an essentially positive evaluation of their experience, even those who wrestled with painful ambivalence, feeling they had been beneficially augmented and altered, both as people and as anthropologists, by their journey into an alien world. It is this attitude which may make possible the final goal of ethnography, in Malinowski's words,

. . . to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him [1961, p. 25].

Equally clear in the following chapters is a strong commitment to an intellectual problem, an investment in discovery that includes the self but is aimed at a target defined more broadly than Malinowski's goal. That target is the uncovering of principles, of regularities, of relationships between events, forces, attitudes, meanings and consequences. The anthropologist is first and foremost a scientist---using the particular to illustrate the general, focusing on a particular group of human beings to understand the processes that operate in any human group, analyzing the specific situation with its unique constellation of characteristics in order to place it on some continuum of other instances. The ultimate target of the discipline of social anthropology is the ability to explain human behavior and what we call social facts or phenomena. This means the ability to grasp the structure of what is, the development of that structure, the factors that keep it the way it is or cause it to change, and ultimately the ability to predict the conditions under which specifiable changes will take place.

The ability to relate one's own research to a larger body of findings, and to evaluate its significance and accomplishment in terms of the larger goal described above, differentiates the anthropologist from the novelist or the journalist. Progress toward that goal is measured not only in the accumulation of data, but also in the development of new techniques for getting information and new strategies for studying old problems. This interplay of problems and methods is well illustrated in the chapters of Codere, Du Bois and Thompson. Codere, faced with the challenge of chronicling a revolution and its consequences in East Central Africa, had to devise techniques that would permit her to tap attitudes formed within the context of a dynamic and fast-moving social phenomenon. Questionnaires, diaries, life histories, and a photographic projective technique were among the means she utilized.

Du Bois' project, like Codere's, was not cast in the traditional mold of the anthropological study of a small homogeneous group, but was an attempt to capitalize on a fortuitous set of characteristics. In her "natural laboratory" in Bhubaneswar, a newly-established capital city located in a small area populated by traditional villages, she found a perfect setting in which to study confrontation of modern and traditional lifeways. Recognizing that no single investigator could hope to grasp the intricacy of the multifaceted subject, her research became the fulcrum of a training project for graduate students, each of whom could benefit from and could contribute to the total study.

The anthropologist's search for new means includes learning and adapting techniques from other disciplines. Thompson's description of her multidisciplinary project to study the impact of United States government policy changes on six Indian tribes documents a search for means to establish the connections between culture and personality, to spotlight the relation between covert cultural meaning and external, observable behavior. Children's games, school performance, language, and culture-free psychological tests became windows through which she could view the ethos of a people.

The chapters by Fischer and Mead have been placed last because they are not oriented to one locale or one research problem but instead compare field experiences that varied in space, time, and circumstances. Their chapters reflect and summarize the entire collection, providing a controlled comparison of cultural responses to a researcher-female-stranger, synthesizing from their own experiences a number of the issues and observations discussed by the other contributors. The peoples they studied also represent the two extremes of the continuum of human societies described within these covers: from the people of New Guinea, the most technologically primitive, to the peoples of Japan and the United States, the most technologically advanced.

This collection was not meant to be merely a book that opens to view the subjective impact of living in an alien culture, through it may be read as such, nor is it merely about the field techniques used by anthropologists to reveal the anatomy of another culture, though it will provide insights into that process. It is not solely an attempt to examine systematically the effect of the researcher's sex on the role she plays in the community being studied, though this was one of the stated goals, nor is it only a documentation of cross-cultural attitudes toward women, though the dedicated reader directing his attention to that issue will discover a wealth of pertinent information. The collection cannot be described by any one of these separate categories because, I hope and believe, it overlaps them all.

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