ABSTRACT
Ethnographic research is primarily concerned with detailing all the possible factors that contribute to a particular range of social and cultural phenomena, usually within a relatively small population. Smallness of scale, obviously, is an artefact of qualitative research methods - within the space of one or two years of fieldwork, there is a limit to the number of people can get to know really well. Rites of inversion and initiation, for instance, are concerned more commonly with the temporary violation of authority relations, sexual mores, kinship obligations, and so on, rather than with the violation of intuitive ontological knowledge. One of the most striking discoveries of the brain sciences is the diversity of potential patterns of neuron firings in the brain. Humans possess approximately a hundred billion nerve cells, and the number of potential firing patterns is greater than the number of particles in the known universe.
