Introduction

The panellist seemed to be saying that the work of scholarship is about collecting data, applying methods, refining ideas and in general contributing to the accumulation of knowledge. As Grimshaw and Hart argue: ‘it might be said that, compared with the other sciences and humanities, anthropology has remained in important ways an anti-discipline - taking its ideas from anywhere, striving for the whole, constantly reinventing procedures on the move’. Nevertheless there is an opposite tendency with which anthropologists struggle: the move to formalize these informal procedures, and to institutionalize the anti-discipline - in short, to keep anthropology going as a university-based subject. Fieldwork-based ethnography was too limited. Complementary techniques and sources were required, such as films, novels, archives and journalism, to express the intertwining of different ways of knowing the world. The study of this historically situated progression is critical to the proper understanding of the creative impulse of humanity.