ABSTRACT
The identity of anthropology remains, but the nature of its own game has changed. This is most apparent in the forms that ethnography increasingly takes between its key modes of traditional writing: the private archives of field notes and the finished genre of the ethnographic text. Writing beautiful texts, keyed to inventive narrative, analytic creativity, and reflexive awareness, as especially licensed by the Writing Culture exposure of the representational history of ethnography in anthropology, remains the standard in guaranteeing academic careers. Organizing a Center for Ethnography at the University of California has provided with an opportunity to think through and experiment with these forms of producing ethnography within and alongside the politics and dilemmas of establishing sites and conditions in the spirit of classic fieldwork. The impulse is to push the production of ethnography back into the experience of the field, but it needs its forms of pedagogy for so doing.
