Reflections on 'Babooning'.

I still look back on the fieldwork I undertook for my PhD as one of the most amazing periods of my life and an opportunity I was very fortunate to experience. Arriving in late 1996, I spent 14 months living on De Hoop Nature Reserve in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. South Africa was emerging from the shadow of the apartheid era at that time and, although its legacy was still clearly apparent, I fell in love with the country and its people. While the location of my current field site is now in the opposite corner of the country, my early fieldwork experiences ensured my research has remained situated in the Rainbow Nation ever since