ABSTRACT
Schwarz and Ryan have referred to the specific practices of visualization through which geographical knowledge is conceived, and in anthropology also we see significant links between the visual and the spatial – in both methodological and, as we shall explore, metaphorical terms. Of course the grounds and the perspectives of our discipline have shifted since the 1940s or even the 1970s, and are still moving. Anthropology’s understanding of its disciplinary uniqueness has rested in good measure on the appropriation of a particular vision of fieldwork, but the method itself was hardly invented by ethnographers. If fields have often been perceived as bounded spaces, spatial metaphors have formed a good portion of the ‘grounds’ on which ethnographic descriptions and theoretical assumptions have been based – starting of course with the notion of ‘the field’ itself. The chapter also provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
