ABSTRACT
Doing fieldwork has become an increasingly problematic exercise as atten-
tion has become focused as much on the researcher as on the object of their research in anthropology. Of course an element of reflexivity has
entered all of the sciences, natural as well as social, during the past three
decades, but it has perhaps been particularly pertinent in a discipline like
anthropology where the anthropologist is the main, sometimes the only,
research tool. The anthropologist David Pocock (1971: 84) has pointed out
how: ‘The observation of the sociologist (by which he meant the quali-
tative sociologist), no less than the myths of the primitives he studies, are
determined by his own society, by his own class, by his own intellectual environment.’
