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Buggers in the Field: Researchers as Tricksters in the Universe of Social Sciences

This collection of essays by Klaus-Peter Köpping is a playful treatise on a basic issue—knowledge construction in anthropology. It is filled with humor, irony, sarcasm and many other ways of touching upon the reality of how knowledge is created in-between the researcher, the ‘native’ and ‘the society’. The latter of course should occur in the plural as the anthropologist’s efforts to make sense relate to two societies (at least). The questions raised about anthropology’s ambivalent relations with its subject matter are similar to those in other social sciences, and hence need elaboration. The picture that emerges from Köpping’s essays about anthropology’s honored rituals of ‘fieldwork’ is multi-sided. It entails the anthropologist’s diligence—as well as boredom and frustration. The well-documented negative comments about the people the anthropologist studied (made by Malinowski in his private writings) have tortured anthropology’s self-image of benevolence and acceptance of ‘primitive societies’. Anthropologists are not just positive heroes who diligently work ‘in the field’ to bring the understanding of unknown