ABSTRACT
Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight.
(Malinowski 1978 [1922]: 4)
This is how Bronislaw Malinowski described the beginning of his fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, which he undertook during the First World War. In this short sentence Malinowski tells us that anthropological fieldwork is an adventure, an unusual event separated from the humdrum of everyday life, characterised by the sense of heightened awareness of our surroundings we feel when arriving at an unknown place. Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone, not sure where to go or what to do next, hesitantly looking around, struck by how different everything is from what you know well and yet already searching for clues that will tell you what life is like in this alien environment. At this point you cannot help but compare all you see, hear and feel against the accumulated total of your previous experiences. Like all humans, you make sense of what you learn through contrast and comparison. Moreover, as an anthropologist, you are trained to search for and interpret difference, that is, to compare (Gingrich and Fox 2002: 20).
