ABSTRACT
A problem which lurks uneasily in the prefaces of most anthropological monographs and worries, or should worry, all fieldworking anthropologists is that the way anthropologists conceptualize the societies they have studied in their ethnographic accounts almost always seems alien, bizarre, or impossibly complicated to the people of those societies. Perhaps this would not matter if ethnographies claimed only to be description from the outside; however, most accounts attempt, at least in part, to represent a society and ways of thinking about it from the insiders’ point of view. Perhaps, then, we could get rid of the difficulty by saying that this disturbing lack of recognition was just a problem of vocabulary; after all, most people in most parts of the world are unacquainted with the technical terms and literary conventions of academic anthropology. But one has to face the fact that, if this were all there was to it, anyone who was reasonably good at paraphrase would surely be able to cross the communication gap and produce a nontechnically worded ethnography with which informants would largely agree. Clearly, this is not often the case. The problem of lack of validation by the people with whom anthropologists work begins, then, to look like a very serious one.
