Fieldwork fascinates us, at least those of us who have done fieldwork. Whenever two or more fieldworkers gather, they begin to exchange fieldwork stories. But as those of us who have worked with oral narratives know, people tell stories for reasons. Our stories are more than “just stories.” By telling stories, we try to come to terms with an experience and to convey to others what it was like. Why do memories of fieldwork preoccupy fieldworkers so? If fieldwork stories belong to a genre, they are bildungsroman. Fieldwork allowed fieldworkers to reexperience the intense education of childhood, but with an adult consciousness. They entered the field as children and were educated by the people with whom they lived. Even the most basic skills that our parents taught us when were toddlers — eating and personal hygiene — had to be relearned in the field. The education of fieldwork is such a powerful experience because it is a total experience: physical, social, and cognitive. Here I address the cognitive or intellectual aspect of fieldwork. But, even as I focus on fieldwork as an intellectual experience, I must note that the cognitions acquired during the fieldwork take on special power because they derive energy from those physical and social experiences.

The dichotomy between the hedgehog and the fox lies at the core of this essay. Isaiah Berlin translates the Greek poet Archilocus: “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (Berlin, 1978: 22). The fieldworker's knowledge is the knowledge of the fox. Berlin elaborates: “There exists a great chasm between those who relate everything to a single central vision” — the hedgehogs — and those whose “thought moves on many levels,” who “seize upon a vast variety of experience” without seeking to fit it into any “unitary inner vision” (Berlin, 1978: 22). This is the fox's perspective, and it is this perspective that gives fieldwork its value and its future.