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Changing Field Sites and the Comparative Perspective in Anthropology

The contributors to this volume describe how and why they changed field sites and what the changes meant for their personal and professional lives. Two themes stand out. First, several contributors, mostly women, describe how doing fieldwork in a new place had something to do with their personal lives: loving and grieving for a life partner (Virginia Dominguez), adopting a child (Linda Seligmann), caring for aging and ill parents (Maria Lepowsky), worrying about personal safety for self and family with the breakout of political violence (Alma Gottlieb), and aging (Edward Bruner). None of them made this choice lightly, and some write eloquent and moving accounts of how they balanced work and family. Second, the contributors reveal what the comparative perspective in anthropology has come to mean to them at an advanced stage in their careers. Most reject the older positivistic logic of the comparative method as practiced by structure functionalists, structuralists, and Marxists, according to which one should aim to carry out a systematic comparison of cultures to come up with laws of human behavior. Paul Stoller, in his afterword, quotes from Wittgenstein and summarizes this volume by saying that the contributors strayed from the “straight highway” (p. 159) and took meandering paths to reach their destinations. The authors characterize their experience in different ways. Some represent changing field sites as moving to a new situation that is nearly the inverse of the first. Virginia Dominguez shifted from studying the meaning of race in New Orleans and Surinam to wondering, when she turned to Israel, how a people with a long, rich, and well-documented history “could still not be sure what they were” (p. 26). Alma Gottlieb left the Beng in the Cote d’Ivoire to study the diaspora of Cape Verdeans, some of whom have Jewish ancestry. Her shift meant going from a small, isolated, and oral culture to doing fieldwork in a big European city with a hidden and widely dispersed community with a richly written history. Others stress the continuities between their old and new