The field, as the site where legitimate anthropologic knowledge is being produced, has been, in the last years, a largely debated site of contention. George Stocking Jr., analysing the malinowskian enterprise, calls it a ?myth-making process? (Stocking, 1983: 108). With his analysis of The Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Stocking unveils the traces of an ?euhemeristic foundational myth? where ?the divinized heroes are not the Trobriand natives, but ?the European Jason that brings back the Golden Fleece of ethnographic knowledge? (Stocking, 1983: 109).

For more than four decades ?Malinowski?s mythical charter functioned to sustain the ethnographic enterprise, helping several generations of aspiring ethnographers to ?get on with the work.? By the time his diaries were published, however, changing colonial circumstances had fundamentally altered the ethnographer?s situation; and in the context of a protracted epistemological malaise (heightened no doubt by their publication), it has seemed necessary to many anthropologists to examine more systematically all that was so casually subsumed by that deceptive innocent charm phrase: ?the ethnographer?s magic?? (Stocking, 1983: 112).

With the waning of the (structural) functionalist theories and the problematisation of the field as the place where anthropological knowledge is being constituted there is a certain resurgence of interest in the possibility of spelling a neo-Boasian, non-alterity anthropology.

We do not intend to present here the enormous debate concerning the ambiguity of ethnograhic fieldwork, indigenous anthropology, ?the ethnographic present? as literary genre etc. Our main concern in these debates is a critique of the reproduction of a paradigm of alterity even in the most self-reflexive anthropological discourses. The possible appearence of an anthropology that transcends this division, becoming, in Matti Bunzl?s terms, a ?neo-Boasian anthropology? or a ?historical ethnography of secondary explanations[1]? (Bunzl, 2004: 441) could offer us a possible way out the methodological and theoretical deadlock binding power, knowledge and display in any ethnographic-museistic approach.

Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson have been quite radical lately in uncoverring the ideology of the ?malinowskian field tradition.? In editing, in 1997, Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science they have arguably presented a strong critique of the normative construction of fieldwork. This normative construction, that creates a ?hierarchy of purity of field sites? by a clear cut separation between ?home? and ?field? (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997: 12), has been challenged most effectively by those threatened by it, by ?native anthropologists? (Jackson, 1987,  Messerschmidt, 1981, Geană, 1999).

[1]The ?rationalization of customary behaviour whose origins were lost in tradition, but that were highly charged with emotional value? (Stocking, 1974: 6 apud Bunzl, 2004: 439).