ABSTRACT
Like other researchers in the biological sciences, primatologists employ empirical methods to collect systematic data that permit quantitative analyses of behavioral, ecological, and evolutionary hypotheses. We are not ethnographers trained to study or write about human cultures. During the course of our primate field studies, however, we spend years, sometimes decades, living and working in close proximity to local people whose lives we also come to know. Perhaps this is why the ethnographer’s challenges of conducting fieldwork far from home, often in a secondary language acquired solely for that purpose, resonate so closely with my own experiences in a small rural community in southeastern Brazil over the past 30 years.
