When I embarked on my first major anthropological research venture – the field work for my Ph.D. dissertation – I had had no formal training in the logic and structure of social sciences research. Many of my peers have described a similar lack of methodological preparedness in the years of their doctoral candidacy. Our generation of anthropologists, trained in the 1950s, learned the descriptive and theoretical contributions of our predecessors, but not how these anthropological contributions were achieved. We were not unconcemed about how field research is carried out – in fact we were almost frantic to find out – but we were assured by our teachers that we could learn the mysteries of field work only through personal immersion in the practically indescribable but romantically alluring complexities of the field. Much of the lore about field research that we picked up informally in our graduate-student days was concerned with the gentle arts of rapport building and role playing in field situations. We were not so much concerned, nor were our mentors, with rules of evidence, questions of “representativeness,” “validity,” “reliability,” and the many other related elements of scientific inquiry with which our friends in other social sciences seemed to be preoccupied. I can recall no discussion or even mention of the idea of “operationalizing variables” in those halcyon days.