ABSTRACT
Introduction This article1 complements one I wrote as I was starting my fieldwork in Japan in 1984 (Goodman 1984). In that paper I suggested that, since fieldwork is a very subjective experience, it is important to give the reader some background against which to judge the validity of any anthropological account. As the educational ethnographer Peter Woods, in a somewhat extended metaphor puts it: ‘We need to know something …of how these neat accounts were arrived at, something of the journey, of the time spent at sea, how the storms, icebergs and monsters were negotiated, means of navigation devised, changes of course mapped out’ (1986:114). I am particularly keen to sail this course in the case of my experience of writing up my fieldwork, since I was surprised to discover that I ended up taking a position almost completely opposite to that which I had presented in the first articles I produced after my return from Japan.
