ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a personal account of George and Louise Spindlers' enduring, situated, and endangered self in their field experience. The Splidlers' spent significant portions of their childhood and adolescence in natural surroundings far from cities. Louise spent in gold mining camps in the Sierras and George in the woods of northern Wisconsin. They both romanticized, idealized, and identified with these environments and with the indigenous peoples who lived there. The Spindlers managed their situated selves effectively and maintained a working balance between objectivity and involvement. Though no lasting damage was done to either dimensions of their selves in their fieldwork anywhere, they do felt that the kinds of relationships they have described for their own case also affect the choices, relationships, and results of fieldwork by others.
