Introduction

Modern anthropology has been founded on the idea that its practitioners should experience another culture “in the raw.” Fieldwork has become a sacred rite by which graduate students are initiated into the academic fraternity of those who have themselves experienced what it means to struggle toward an understanding of how other peoples think and behave. Like most students of anthropology, I kept a personal journal during my stay in the Oni valley, and it is the three diaries completed there that provide the material for this book.