ABSTRACT
Some years ago, we were getting short of storage space in our apartment in Stockholm, so I decided no longer to put off excavating a large closet where I realized a number of things might have accumulated over time which perhaps no longer needed to be there. Far in the back, I recognized a large box, which contained my field notes from my first anthropological research project, in Washington, DC, about twenty years earlier. In the same box, moreover, were several dense pages of more theoretical queries, which clearly I had jotted down for myself on my way home. They were on the stationery of M/S Kungsholm, the passenger ship which had taken me back from the USA to Sweden that time (when going by sea was still a very ordinary alternative to flying).
