ABSTRACT
Talk about ethnographic field research conjures up proper sweaty westerners "going native" in varying degrees of disarray. Ethnography itself seemed a colony of anthropology, which continues to wage a losing battle to protect its disciplinary frontiers, in part by defining what proper ethnography entails. Social relations are ordered by the social construction of boundaries—political, economic, social, physical—over time and space. The contemporary social relations of production and reproduction, which are hierarchical and uneven, are oppressive and exploitative to most people in most places. Ethnographic work is a means of transgressing boundaries and thereby offers itself as a kind of politics. This chapter explores the contradictory relation to the larger political project of transforming oppressive and exploitative social relations and suggests a direction for field research that offers the possibility of more direct political engagement. It traces the projects in which the practical, theoretical, personal, and political dilemmas they have raised.
