ABSTRACT

Ethnography was once the almost exclusive domain of anthropology. Alma Gottlieb, then a doctoral student at the University of Virginia, set out to do fieldwork for fifteen months among the Beng people in a tropical rain forest in a West African village. As with most classical anthropological studies, she would have to rely on a translator or informant and try to learn to communicate once there. Although field workers often work alone, in this instance Gottlieb was accompanied by her husband, Philip Graham, a fiction writer then working on his first book of short stories. Within the field of cultural anthropology, she was interested in religion, especially indigenous religions and women's lives. In particular, Gottlieb describes some common problems facing fieldworkers: frustration, anxiety, and uncertainty in the negotiation of entry into the chosen site. For his part, Graham ponders the philosophical implication of fiction, reality, and the art of storytelling in a setting radically different from his native one.