Understanding skill, food and field

Abstract

Building on an epistemological reading of anthropology as a field-based social science, I argue in favour of ethnography, namely a reflexive field-based practice and a defining methodology for anthropology. I introduce the methodology of ‘comparing by context’ as a way of rigorously translating the experience of apprenticeship in the field into forms of social learning and of understanding. I argue that practising anthropology as an ethnographer is a matter of negotiating the pendulum between participant observation – a form of apprenticeship in the field – and anthropological understanding.