1. Earlier versions of this essay were presented as papers at a session on “Fieldwork in Modern America” at the seventh biennial convention of the American Studies Association, Minneapolis, Minnesota, September 1979, and a session on “The Reflexive Anthropologist” at the seventy-eighth annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Cincinnati, Ohio, November 1979. I should like to thank my faculty colleagues and students at the University of Maryland for their help and suggestions during the preparation of this article.

2. On fieldwork in anthropology, see Pelto, Pertti J., Anthropological Research: The Structure of Inquiry (New York: Harper & Row, 1970)Google Scholar; Pelto, Pertti J. and Pelto, Gretel H., “Ethnography: The Fieldwork Enterprise,” in Honigmann, J., ed., Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973)Google Scholar; and Spradley, James P., Participant Observation (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980).Google Scholar

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7. Spradley, James P. and McCurdy, David, Anthropology: The Cultural Perspective (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), p. 6.Google Scholar

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9. Spradley, James P., You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970)Google Scholar, Crocco, Margaret Smith, Adolescence as Artifact: An Ethnography of a Psychotherapy Clinic for Children and Adolescents, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1976Google Scholar, and Ryan, Joseph M., Life in the Spirit: Cultural Values and Identity Changes Among Catholic Pentecostals, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1978Google Scholar. Horwitz, Compare Richard P., Anthropology Towards History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

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11. Spradley, Compare and McCurdy, , A nthropology: The Cultural Perspective, pp. 42–70.Google Scholar

12. Mechling, Jay, “In Search of an American Ethnophysics,” in Luedtke, L., ed., The Study of American Culture (Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1977), p. 272Google Scholar. Wise, Compare Gene, “Some Elementary Axioms for an American Culture Studies,” Prospects (New York: Burt Franklin, 1979), IV, 517–47.Google Scholar

13. Mechling, , “In Search of an American Ethnophysics,” p. 252.Google Scholar

14. Wallace, Anthony F. C., “Driving to Work,” in Spradley, James P., ed., Culture and Cognition (San Francisco: Chandler, 1972), p. 311Google Scholar. That essay was first published in 1965 in Spiro, M., ed., Context and Meaning in Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1965).Google Scholar

15. Wallace, Anthony F. C., “A Day in the Office,” in Kimball, S. and Watson, J., eds., Crossing Cultural Boundaries (San Francisco: Chandler, 1972)Google Scholar, and “Driving to Work.”

16. Wallace, Anthony F. C., Culture and Personality (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 35.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., p. 312.

18. Ibid., p. 315.

19. This possibility receives unexpected support from two of the critics of cognitive anthropology. Questioning the possibility of understanding another person's thinking, David Kaplan and Robert Manners observe that “no one has direct access to anyone else's mind” (Culture Theory [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972], p. 185Google Scholar). But by their clear implication one does have direct access to one's own mind.

20. Wallace, , “Driving to Work,” p. 325.Google Scholar

21. Hayano, , “Auto-Ethnography,” p. 103.Google Scholar

22. While there are rules for breaking some of these rules, that is, circumstances in which the general rules can be appropriately violated, deviance beyond these boundaries, by self or others, is subjectively disturbing. Compare Scheff, Thomas J., ed., Labeling Madness (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), pp. 5–6Google Scholar; Goffman, Erving, “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” American Anthropologist, 58 (1956), 473–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Goffman, Erving, Relations in Public (New York: Harper & Row, 1971)Google Scholar. For a cross-cultural comparison, see Irvine, Judith, “Strategies of Status Manipulation in Wolof Greeting,” in Bauman, R. and Sherzer, J., eds., Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

23. Each of the major factors includes the following subfactors: II, alter's identities vis-à-vis ego, includes (1) friend-acquaintance-opponent; (2) basic university identities (such as janitor, professor, student); (3) age; (4) sex (including “attractive” or not); (5) other identities (such as job outside university, race, connections, through a third party). III, assessment of alter's personality, includes (1) easygoing, friendly, for example, as against formal, dour, reserved; (2) any other pertinent personality attributes (such as sensitive, paranoid, aggressive, boring). IV, assessment of own current circumstances, includes (1) in a hurry as against lots of time; (2) alone or with someone; (3) front and attire (impressive versus inappropriate); (4) other (such as carrying a heavy load). V, assessment of own current mood or psychological state, includes (1) happy, euphoric, for example, as against depressed, exhausted; (2) any other pertinent mood-psychological state factors (absorbed in important thought, lonely, and so on). VI, alter's apparent demeanor and circumstances, includes (1) alter alone or with someone; (2) alter's location and movement (for example, close and looking your way, running the other direction); (3) alter's greeting behavior (such as extending hand, waving frantically, does not seem to see you); (4) alter's seeming mood or psychological state (such as crying, drunk). VII, interpretation of current status of relationship, includes (1) past interactions (such as inadvertently slighted during last meeting, owe them money); (2) immediate and future intentions (such as have a message for them, want to ask them a favor later); (3) current emotional orientation, including ego's reading of alter's emotional orientation to ego (feeling warm toward, annoyed with, and so on); (4) timing (how recently you saw them—for example, three minutes ago—when you expect to see them again, and so on). For factor I, see Table 1. It should be noted that the factors listed here could easily be combined in different ways, broken down further, and so on. This is simply one way of organizing them that seems to cover many of the basic rules people use.

24. Wise, Compare, “Some Elementary Axioms for an American Culture Studies,” pp. 533–34Google Scholar, and Mechling, , “In Search of an American Ethnophysics,” pp. 248–49, 260–61.Google Scholar

25. Goffman, Erving, Behavior in Public Places (New York: Free Press, 1963), p. 69.Google Scholar

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29. On the neglect of inner conversation with speculations on its history and significance, see Steiner, George, “The Distribution of Discourse,” in On Difficulty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar. For a discussion of literary renderings, see Humphrey, Robert, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1954).Google Scholar

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35. On the Sufis discussed here, see Caughey, John L. and Mahar, J. Michael, “Ritual Remedies at a Sufi Shrine,”Google Scholar paper presented at the seventy-sixth annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Houston, December 1977. Subhan, Compare John, Sufism: Its Saints and Shrines (New York: S. Weiser, 1970).Google Scholar

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37. On the ethnographic aspect of this problem, see Jules-Rosette, Bennetta, “The Veil of Objectivity: Prophecy, Divination, and Social Inquiry,” American Anthropologist, 80 (1978), 565CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a general discussion, see Murphey, Murray G., Our Knowledge of the Historical Past (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972).Google Scholar