ABSTRACT
Anthropology today has moved away from studying ‘a people’ as a bounded culture, and anthropologists no longer find it appropriate to speak about ‘migrants’, ‘Italians’ or other social categories as bearers of a culture. Culture is not something already given, but rather something that is continuously generated and negotiated in the society (Liep and Olwig 1994:12). This new perspective on culture implies among other things that anthropology has reconceptualized its field of research. Fieldwork is no longer conducted in ethnographic islands studying a local population, and the previous images of cultures as systems of meaning or as texts are obsolete (Hastrup and Hervik 1994:2). The ethnographer is no longer considered an objective and neutral person distantiated from the field of research. Rather, fieldwork can be understood as an inter-subjective experience in which the ethnographer invests herself and becomes a part of the field of research. In my chapter, this perspective of culture and fieldwork form the background of a study of policy in a hospital setting.
