ABSTRACT
Difficulties in establishing rapport may be due to culture-clash (a Christian among Muslims, a pacifist among soldiers), or personality, or tensions in the field setting, or all three. It is crucial not to take fieldwork problems which are structural personally (i.e. if you are a Turk in Greece or Greek in Cyprus, the problems go back a thousand years, and are not your personal inadequacies). Nor should the individual fieldworker blame herself for problems in the field setting which predated her arrival. Both sorts of tension are useful to generate data, though personally uncomfortable. It is also the case that any skill or qualification that a researcher has will have advantages and disadvantages. To do anthropological fieldwork in Spain, fluent Spanish would seem an essential qualification. Yet Susan Tax Freeman (1979:xxii) found it a mixed blessing:
I ar r ived in Vega de Pas with many blank notebooks, my earlier experience in Spain, and a compass. I rented a room in a family home above a busy tavern in the center of town, owned and run by the family, and I arranged to share my meals with them.
