ABSTRACT
Anthropologists have encountered migrants since the beginning of the discipline, but that does not mean that they have been prepared or able to insert them into research agendas. The chief contributions of anthropology are likely to involve offering certain complexities of perspective. The story of anthropologists burying themselves in the local' is surely a familiar one, if at times somewhat exaggerated. A similar sentiment has also been invoked to explain why ethnographers have been relatively slow to examine activities such as pilgrimage and tourism, both of which have challenged ideals of bounded communities while also intersecting at times with migrant practices. This chapter deals with the Baumann's approach which reveals both the virtue but also the arbitrariness of working within spatially delimited fields, and there are of course huge problems in determining the salient limits of home' and host' contexts for migrants. Migration scholars including anthropologists also face particular temporal challenges when defining fields of study.
