ABSTRACT
The practice of ethnographic fieldwork is first experienced as a social intervention before it is transformed into a textual invention. Fieldworkers do not only work in the field, however the field is understood; they also work it. In the process of inserting themselves into a community or accompanying a group in their movement they also encounter, delight in, collide with, adjust to, miss or misunderstand other people’s actions and reactions. They impact on the lives of the people involved in their study perhaps as much as those people transform the researchers’ views of things.
