ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the framing of the anthropologist’s role in ethnographic fieldwork and in writing based on such fieldwork. The history of anthropology can be located in both natural science approaches and in travel, with the idea of going to some place to study some people being a very general foundation for what it means to do ethnography. The idea of participant observation, moreover, involves encounters with those people and some degree of personal experience in their way of life. And when we “get back home,” we write about those people and those encounters in ways that are meant to speak to and be read by a broad audience-which can include not only other anthropologists and other academics, but also the general public, policy makers, and the people we wrote about. Increasingly, anthropologists are conscious of the changing nature of what it means to participate and to observe in a contemporary world of globalization and migration, of virtual worlds and other new technologies, and of violence and human suffering. Questions have arisen about what we should be observing and how we should be participating under these circumstances.
