ABSTRACT
If anthropologists have recently been inclined to worry about fields and fieldwork, however, the author wonder if we should not look for some of the sources of unease in circumstances which have less to do with field technique as such. ‘The field’ has stood for a rich and at the same time demanding experience, and a central question underlying our worries may be whether some of the membership of the community now miss out on that experience, or cheat by circumventing it. Perhaps anthropologists always did, in a more private way, even in the past when elders tended to be secretive or at least vague about the field experience, and when first fieldwork was thus indeed like a rite of passage into professional maturity.
