Death and rebirth in fieldwork: a case study

Cultural anthropologists have spent a great deal of time and effort analyzing rites of passage among small-scale tribal peoples. They have devoted considerably less effort however to the study of their own principal rite of passage, the experience of fieldwork. In a series of earlier studies (Wengle 1983, 1984, 1986), the author has explored certain psychological changes that anthropologists experience while doing fieldwork. In this paper, I provide (1) a description of the subjective meaning of fieldwork conceived as a rite of passage and (2) an illustration of the major themes contained in this description through an analysis of a recently published personal account of fieldwork (Cesara 1982).