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When not very long ago I was asked by an interviewer who must have run out of more incisive questions

while I first became interested in social science,

I took the worthy way out and I quoted Seawright Mills on the need to connect

private troubles to public issues, but in reality I gave up the crude behaviourist psychology into which I was inducted at Birkbeck College and opted

for a life in sociology because of feudalism. Or more specifically, a study of feudal society

by the Marxist historian Mark Block. What Block achieved among many

rather more structural insights was to give his readers an idea of what it had been like to live

at a time when death was always close at hand, death at an early age from

natural causes or death inflicted by invaders who arrived suddenly and without warning.

And with that unpredictable death came the prospect of hell.

That prospect wrote Block was an ever-present reality.

It was the most potent influence upon behavior.

Well, it was the first time, despite all or my novel reading that I'd ever had a

full sense of a consciousness other than my own and it was only when I properly

studied sociology that I learned there was an entire mode of investigation which set itself the task of capturing

the density of such other worlds and modes of apprehension, an investigative method called

ethnography. Only then did I also learn of the devotion of its practitioners, the

sensitivity they were required to employ in order to gain access to another world, the months

and years they had to spend watching and listening to their subjects, and the ethical problems of involvement and assimilation they needed to resolve.

And more recently, I learned about the additional strain placed upon would be ethnographers by the lack of

...