ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on how anthropologists collect, record and analyse field data in the process of creating academic knowledge. First, what are ethnographic techniques and practices of knowledge-transaction intended to elicit? Echoing Williams, the author would answer that they seek ‘some reflective social knowledge, including history’, that commands assent ((1985) 2006: 199)— what ethnographers might call baseline ethnographic data. Second, how is knowledge transacted through these ethnographic practices? The ethnographic focus in this chapter is self-narratives. Any technique of knowledge in a fieldwork situation has at least this prerequisite: the ethnographer’s placement within a local system of relations from which a baseline of shared understandings can be established. Like many other anthropologists, throughout the author's fieldwork, the author was in a permanent state of high alert, in thrall to everything the author observed and experienced. The Kewa people of the New Guinea Highlands are indefatigable verbal negotiators.
