The Things We Carry

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point Tim O'Brien's famous essay, “The Things They Carried,” a fictional evocation of tangible and intangible items that Vietnam War soldiers hauled around with them in the field. “The Things We Carry,” by contrast, analyzes the theoretical ideas and various components of social identity that anthropologists bring with them to the communities in which they carry out research. This article focuses especially on the author's status as a young married male conducting fieldwork in the part of southern Spain known as Andalusia. Access to field data did not depend in this case solely on the social structure and prevalent ideology of the community itself. Rather, the social and intellectual attributes of the author—that which he carried with him—proved crucial in guiding the research outcome.