ABSTRACT
Gregory Bateson opens his 1936 ethnography, Naven, with reflections on how to transform the chaos and diversity of fieldwork experience into meaningful ethnographic writing.
Since . . . it is impossible to present the whole of a culture simultaneously in a single flash, I must begin at some arbitrarily chosen point in the analysis; and since words must necessarily be arranged in lines, I must present the culture, which like all other cultures is really an elaborate reticulum of interlocking cause and effect, not in a network of words but with words in linear series. The order in which such a description is arranged is necessarily arbitrary and artificial, and I shall therefore choose that arrangement which will bring my methods of approach into sharpest relief. I shall first present the ceremonial behaviour, torn from its context so that it appears bizarre and nonsensical; and I shall then describe the various aspects of its cultural setting and indicate how the ceremonial can be related to the various aspects of culture.
