ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author shares a few of her early fieldwork experiences amongst the Yakha and examines to what extent these experiences are comparable to those of women from other ethnic/linguistic groups who marry into Yakha households. Anthropologists fairly new to the field, as well as non-Yakha incoming brides, spend most of their time in households where the language of everyday family interaction—the language of the society they are trying to enter—is incomprehensible. The author suggests that the very attempt to do so raises interesting theoretical and methodological questions about the anthropology of experience. Learning how to do the right thing at the right time—performing well, behaving appropriately—is part of the early socialization Chandra Maya and Budhu Maya talked about which preceded language learning. It is also part of the experience of the early fieldworker setting out to be a 'participant observer'.
