ABSTRACT
Anthropology is a lot like espionage, a shifty business carried out by individuals regarded by the general community with suspicion, and who are in their own eyes nothing so much as persons manqués, ever on the margins, desperately seeking acceptance but knowing deep in their souls that they belong nowhere: agents with language skills thoroughly trained and prepared by special tutors, dropped into a foreign environment and given the task of finding out important, often secret, information. To achieve their aims they employ a variety of techniques and methods, the primary one being to work themselves into the confidence of significant individuals who have the required information and elicit it from them. At the same time, very much aware that that what they are told may not correspond to the reality of the situation, not to put too fine a point on it, may be downright lies, deliberate ploys to mislead, bluffs and counter-bluffs, they must constantly observe and monitor the fit between what they hear and the events which they witness. Often the work requires learning how to decipher obscure messages, recognising code-names and painstakingly assembling disparate and discrete pieces of data into a unified whole in order to make sense of the wider picture. Understanding is never easy.
