ABSTRACT
Anthropological fieldwork is considered to be a narrative by some anthropologists, whereby the anthropologist seeks intimate knowledge behind the scenes, behind the masks and roles, behind the generalities and abstractions, and the anthropologist's task involves finding some convincing ethnographic access to life narrative. As an anthropologist researching magical thinking, Gregory Bateson came to understand how magical meaning was relational and depended on selection, combination, intentionality, and context. Along with the work of Bateson, Levy-Bruhl's notion of participation as a social psychological perception of the world based on a mystical mentality, the emotional association between persons and things in contact with a non-ordinary spirit reality was especially helpful in doctoral research. The social psychological perception is named as "the dragon". Within the concept of the dragon, people can see the abstract qualities of whole-making, intentionality, unity-in-multiplicity, and "shape-shifting", the blurring of subject and object, which are characteristic of magical thought.
