ABSTRACT
Anthropologists are expected to conduct empirical research with at least one technical and one theoretical presumption in mind. Their interpretations should come only after an extended stay among ordinary members of the foreign culture under study and should question the established wisdom within and beyond the particular society. Under these premises I approached the Punjabi urban Sweepers of Lahore in 1968-1969 (Pfeffer 1970), though altogether I spent some seven years in this province of Pakistan. In 1980-1981, I explored the other South Asian regional focus of my research, highland Orissa (now Odisha), for half a year. Thereafter I regularly visited most of the tribal regions of the Eastern Ghats and the southern extensions of the Chota Nagpur Plateau in the spring months — February to April — of the subsequent two decades.
