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Peter did his primary research among the Dou Donggo for two years in the early 1980s, with several subsequent shorter visits. At the time the Dou Donggo numbered around 20,000 people, living in the highland massif that sweeps up on the west side of Bima Bay, a spectacular natural harbour in the eastern end of the island of Sumbawa. Sumbawa lies about midway in the long arc of islands stretching from Sumatra to Timor in Indonesia; it is the second major island east of Bali. The eastern half of Sumbawa is called Bima (although that is not the local name) and is mostly occupied by a much larger ethnic group who call themselves Dou Mbojo and are usually referred to as the Bimanese by outsiders. As part of the ancient Javanese Majapahit empire, Bima was a Hindu kingdom. When that empire collapsed in the early seventeenth century, Bima and her people became Muslim and today are known as among the most fervent Muslims in Indonesia (a country where perhaps 85 per cent of the population confess that faith). The Dou Donggo, however, had remained outside the Bimanese kingdom while it was a Hindu kingdom, and became part of the Muslim Sultanate of Bima only much later and by treaty rather than by conquest. They were able to retain their relative independence in part because they had a reputation as fierce warriors and in part because their mountainous territory was relatively easy to defend (Dou Donggo means ‘Mountain People’). Although they became part of Muslim Bima, the Dou Donggo retained certain political privileges and did not, by and large, accept Islam, but held fast to their indigenous religious beliefs and practices. It was their stalwart refusal to accept the religion of their suzerain and neighbours that first interested Peter in the Dou Donggo. He set out to see what role this might have played in establishing an ethnic boundary between the Dou Donggo and the Bimanese, despite the fact that they share a common language (Nggahi Mbojo). By the time of Peter’s first survey trip to Donggo (as the district is most sensibly called) most Dou Donggo had accepted either Islam or Christianity, although as the local Roman Catholic catechist put it, ‘The people are 70 per cent Muslim, 30 per cent Catholic, and 90 per cent kaffir [pagan].’ Studying religious beliefs became a major focus of Peter’s fieldwork as did studying the way the people went about resolving disputes. When Peter returned to Donggo in 1981 for a two-year stay, he was accompanied by his wife, Anne, who was, to put it mildly, a real trouper. They lived in the village of Doro Ntika, the oldest and, with a population of about 3,000 spread over several hamlets, the largest of Donggo’s traditional villages. Conditions were quite primitive: Doro Ntika had no running water, no electricity, no paved roads. The houses, on the other hand, were comfortable, built of teak and resting on stilts 1.5 metres high or more, with roofs of thatch, tile, or galvanized iron. The local economy was in something of a transitional period. Formerly the people had had a relatively self-sufficient subsistence by means of the cultivation of swidden rice, maize, and millet, supplemented with bananas, coconuts, and other fruits together with products gathered from the mountain forest (including the most wonderful honey!). Swidden agriculture depends on burning tracts of forest, cultivating the land for a year or two, and then allowing the forest to regenerate. Increasing population densities, however, had put too much stress on the land to allow for complete forest regeneration, and much of the land was taken over by growths of weedy shrubs, much reducing its fertility. Increasingly the people of Doro Ntika were shifting to the cultivation of wet rice in terraced paddy fields and the cultivation of cash crops such as peanuts and soybeans for sale in lowland markets. Although the population was growing rapidly because of the introduction of modern medicine, diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and dysentery still took a heavy toll, especially among the infants and children of the village. Despite the difficulties of life in these circumstances Peter and Anne found the Dou Donggo to be warm, generous, and ever ready to tease and joke. With the help of a rather roguish village headman, Peter and Anne were able to borrow a house which they furnished with goods available in Bima Town – including a kerosene stove that created a minor sensation, as everyone else in the village cooked over wood fires. Doro Ntika is built on a high ridge between river gorges; the houses are built on terraces cut into the steep sides of the ridge. In time Peter and Anne acquired two ponies which they used for transportation and to carry water up from the river. From time to time they would go down to Bima Town to collect their mail and replenish food supplies not available in Donggo. While there they stayed with the family of Haji M. Djafar Amyn, who were exceptionally generous hosts, so Peter and Anne were able to get an intimate look at life also among the lowland Bimanese. With the exception of several vacations to Bali and other parts of Indonesia, Peter and Anne lived there for two years. It was an unforgettable experience. 1. The rugged terrain of the Mixteca Alta, with the archaeological site and town of Yucuita in the distance. Yucuita is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the Americas, going back to 1350 BC . John did his primary field research among the Mixtec of Santiago Nuyoo in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. His longest period of fieldwork lasted from 1983 to 1986, but he has returned almost every year since. Mixtec speakers, who number just over 400,000, are the third largest indigenous group in Mexico. In the sixteenth century the Mixtec were divided into dozens of small kingdoms whose ruling élite patronized one of the finest artistic traditions in the New World. We know a great deal about pre-conquest Mixtec life from the large corpus of Mixtec books that survived and because Mixtec scribes continued to produce works using the native script for almost eighty years after the Spanish took over. After their conquest by the Spanish, the Mixtec suffered a catastrophic demographic collapse, as millions of people throughout the Americas succumbed to Old World diseases and the abuse they suffered at the hands of colonialists. Although the Mixtec population has grown since the end of the sixteenth century, it is still not the size it was before the arrival of the Spanish. The Mixteca, the homeland Mixtec speakers share with several other indigenous groups as well as communities of mestizos and Afro-Mexicans, is ecologically diverse, having a broad coastal savannah, tropical forests, high, pine-forested mountains, fertile river-beds, and arid deserts. The Mixtec live scattered across the landscape in small towns and villages. Santiago Nuyoo, the village where John has done most of his fieldwork, has a population of about 3,000 people, with about a quarter of its inhabitants living in the town centre and the rest distributed among five hamlets. Nuyoo and its neighbour Santa María Yucuhiti sit at the head of a narrow canyon, with beautiful waterfalls flowing down the canyon sides. The landscape is extremely rocky and there are almost no level plots (Nuyootecos will often say goodbye to one another by calling out ‘don’t fall’). But owing to its relatively low elevation and abundant rainfall the area is known as the ‘garden of the Mixteca’. Oranges, mangoes, and zapote grow wild, rare orchids cling to the trees, and a pine forest covers the surrounding mountains. Nuyootecos specialize in the cultivation of maize, almost all of it grown through swidden techniques; they also grow cash crops, principally bananas and coffee. Although wage migration has been a fact of life for the Mixtec for hundreds of years, since the 1950s increasing numbers of Nuyootecos have left the Mixteca: at first they travelled to Veracruz and Morelos to find work harvesting coffee and other crops; then in the 1960s they began to travel to Mexico City where they worked in bakeries, factories, and in the service economy; and finally in the late 1980s, a few men made their way to the United States where they worked on a ranch in Texas. John’s research focused on how Nuyootecos maintain a strong sense of community in the face of these changes and dislocations. Although John’s wife, the archaeologist Laura Junker, did not live with him during his initial period of fieldwork (she was pursuing her Ph.D. in anthropology), she did spend several months in Nuyoo. Later, after their children were born, the whole family came to the Mixteca to visit. Like the Dou Donggo, the Mixtec enjoy a good joke, and despite the numerous photographic essays of indigenous Mexican people that portray everyone with grim, determined, or overwhelmed looks on their faces, when they are among themselves Nuyootecos turn out to be great pranksters and masters of understatement. John realized he had finally got the measure of them after meeting a group of men on a path outside town. They asked him what kind of food he and his wife were going to serve at an upcoming fiesta they were hosting. John and Laura were able to afford to serve choice cuts of meat, but they were, at the same time, outsiders with strange tastes. John managed to deliver his reply, ‘we are going to slaughter a couple of thin and mangy dogs’, with so little change of expression that the men all paused before going off hooting with laughter. John owes much of what he knows about the Mixtec to the Pérez Sarabia, Pérez Pérez, and Modesto Velasco families, who took him in, allowed him to live with them, and by asking him to be the godfather of one of their children, made him a relative. 2. Ñañuu Esperanza Sarabia of the Pérez Sarabia family grinding corn in the early morning hours in her kitchen. Ñañuu, ‘mother of the community’, is a title given to those women who, along with their husbands, have served in the major civil and religious offices of the town government. No short introduction, much less a very short introduction, could hope to do justice to the breadth and complexity of contemporary anthropological studies. At the end of the twentieth century the Royal Anthropological Institute had over 2,300 members; the American Anthropological Association had over 11,000 members. France, too, was the home of a rich and deeply influential school of anthropology. Most exciting, perhaps, has been the growth of anthropology in Latin America and in former European colonies, prominently India and New Guinea. Each of these nations, along with industrial nations such as Australia and Japan, has begun to develop its own intellectual traditions and research agendas. Obviously we could not provide you with a survey of anthropology that would begin to cover all the perspectives and projects these anthropologists engage. Instead we have tried to focus our very short introduction on those ‘big’ questions that have occupied the attentions of anthropologists since the beginnings of the discipline: what is unique about human beings? how are groups of people – family, class, tribe, nation – formed and what holds them together? what is the nature of belief, economic exchange, the self? how are we to go about researching and understanding such things? and rather than try to provide you with a sense of what the ‘cutting edge’ of anthropological theory is today – a picture sure to become obsolete as soon as it is published – we have chosen to acquaint you with the ideas at the roots of the discipline, and with the thinkers whom all anthropologists share as intellectual forebears.