ABSTRACT
Ethnography has changed. It has changed in shape and in purpose as its practitioners have engaged with different intellectual challenges and as the world they study has groaned, rolled over, and assumed a different posture in the bed of history. While loath to give up entirely the connection of anthropology with a focus on ‘others’ they have begun to acknowledge that there is something suspect about a professional desire to make one’s politics always somewhere else and to do with persons characterized as in some way ‘different’ from themselves. Yet, if they were once protected by a distance, whether geographically real or intellectually constructed, they are now unable to stand aloof from the people they study, raising the question of what the nature of the anthropologist’s political engagement should now be and how this might affect the way she or he does ethnography.
