ABSTRACT
BY T H E T I M E I C A M E along to graduate school in the early 1960s, anthro-pological monographs had long adhered to a fairly uniform and apparently natural format (despite minor differences between the British and American versions). In the words of James Boon, there was a strong “stylistic taboo on authorial viewpoint . . . Its order of contents was physical surroundings firmly first, religion vaguely last, kinship and social organization determiningly at the core” (1982:14). At the tail end of the period that George Stocking calls “the classic period of Anthropology,” which he places between 1925 and 1965 (1992:357), my classmates and I were still being trained to do Social Science. Narrative, hermeneutics, and history-among-non-literate-peoples were pretty much off everyone’s radar screens.
