ABSTRACT
The problem of this essay is that I need to do some fieldwork but don’t know where to go. For quite some time now I have been stalled in an ethnography-stopped, stuck, dead in the water. And since I am convinced that the technology called the essay can take me places I have been unable to imagine, I have decided to attempt a nomadic journey, to, in fact, travel in the thinking that writing produces in search of the field.1
Nomadic inquiry2 is quite appropriate for an armchair ethnographer unsure of her destination. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) explain that nomads are not defined by movement as is commonly thought since they do not inhabit and hold space: “Of course, the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is only seated while moving [think of] (the Bedouin galloping, knees on the saddle, sitting on the soles of his upturned feet, ‘a feat of balance’)” (p. 381). Like the nomad, I intend to travel while seated, and this particular writing excursion commences with the story of an ethnography (St.Pierre, 1995) I began several years ago in Milton, a small town in Essex County3 where I grew up, a deliciously beautiful and fertile portion of the southern Piedmont.
