ABSTRACT
One of the motivating factors behind the author's interest in pursuing anthropological research was the opportunity to focus on children’s perspectives: their ways of seeing the world, their experiences, their cultures. As any ethnographer can attest, one of the most important criteria for conducting ethnographic fieldwork is gaining rapport and establishing trust with those with whom research will be conducted. This chapter discusses the ethnographic encounters of the author with children in central India. These ethnographic encounters eventually carried the author inside the classroom setting. While the teachers welcomed him into the school, it was initially difficult for him to convince them that his research was specifically to do with children and their perspectives and experiences. The author's aim was to try to ‘get at’ the meanings that children gave to supernatural illness causality and to see how these meanings cohered with local adults’ understanding.
