Lost and Found in Translation: An Education in Narrative in Fieldwork and the Classroom

One of the most important questions I ask as both a cultural anthropologist and a university teacher is: How do people come to know what they think they know? In this article, I adopt a narrative approach to processes of learning and discovery in two very different locales, an indigenous society in the South Pacific, and a senior seminar on contemporary anthropological theory in a Canadian university. I show how I developed an exercise to “bring the field into the classroom” and how my students helped me to take what we learned in the classroom back to the field. In my conclusions, I discuss lessons I and my students learned about the link between experience and understanding, about the nature of interpretation, and about the role of reflexivity in the construction of meaning.