THE FIELD AS HERE AND NOW, NOT THERE AND THEN*

I would emphasize in all of this, the success of the fieldwork hinged not so much on a determination to ferret out "the facts " as on a willingness to leave some stones unturned, to listen to what my informants deemed important, and to demonstrate my trustworthiness by not prying where I was not wanted.... It may be precisely by giving up the scientific detective's urge to know "everything " that we gain access to those very partial vistas that our informants may desire or think to share with us.-Liisa H. Malkki, 1995 'Fieldwork is at once a political, personal, and professional undertaking. It pro-vides crucial reference points and evidence upon which knowledge claims are made. Careful consideration, though, is required ofone's own assumptions about the field, especially boundaries between here and there. I make three related arguments: that, as a researcher, one is always in the field; that by being in the field one changes it and is changed by it; and that field experience does not automatically authorize knowl-edge, but rather allows us to generate analyses and tell specific kinds of stories. I underscore the importance of field research as a basis for developing accountable analyses and theory with the caveat that the field is separate from the everyday spaces of home. In this essay I first examine essentialized notions of the field as bounded by time and place, drawing on the work of feminist geographers. With a clearer understand-ing of how the field may be conceptualized, I draw on my fieldwork to illustrate po-litical and practical considerations. Finally, I illustrate how I have become part of the fields I purport to study and contend that, as field-workers, we are always in the field. INTERROGATING THE FIELD Gillian Rose has argued that fieldwork represents geographical masculinities in ac-tion (1993). Although the masculinist biases in geographical method and the pro-duction of geographical knowledge are well exposed, argument that fieldwork i