ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the implications of doing fieldwork in our own culture, close to our homes, and the difficulties we had balancing competing personal and professional responsibilities. Almost all fieldworkers complain of loneliness and isolation. Ethnographic research taxes the soul. It requires one to forge new paths with strangers. In the beginning, one is virtually always ill at ease; fieldworkers complain of feeling unsure of the pathway and long for the intellectual and social companionship that some are able to share with spouses and children but rarely with a collaborator or colleague. Janet Theophano and Karen Curtis broke with tradition. They worked as part of a research team studying the relationship between food and ethnicity in an Italian-American community. The practice of the "twice-told tale"— conveyed to each of us in turn—was explicitly recognized by community members.
