ABSTRACT
The anthropological literature is full of stories about how the ‘natives’ understand what an anthropologist is and what he or she requires of them. Relatively scarce are accounts of how the anthropologist is conceived in the public discourse of the Western cultures that produced anthropology. As anthropologists turn once more to the study of Western cultures, we must begin to explore the disjunctions between what we believe we are doing and what the rest of the natives think we're up to.
