ABSTRACT
Bicheno displays, in this quote, a partiality for the hero of his story, Don John of Austria, who led the Christian fleet at the sea battle of Lepanto. Research is much more pleasant if you like some or all of the actors in the setting, and enjoy their company. It is possible to feel strong ties of attraction to or repulsion from historical figures as well as living informants, and the line between history and ethnography can be entirely ‘irrelevant’ when discussing relationships with actors in the research setting. Harkness chose to ignore any such distinction, and treat her long-dead informants as if they were living people:
I decided to treat both early modern science and the early modern scientist as terms in need of further detailed study. To do so I relied on the methods of multisited ethnography, and in particular the methods of the anthropologist George Marcus.
