The publication of Malinowski’s fieldnotes sheds an interesting light on the relationship between field experience, literally speaking, and the writing of ethnography. Anthropological research is, in the final analysis, an endeavor to decode socio-cultural life, but in ethnographic practice it involves the discovery of codes embedded in the actual flow of everyday events and processes. In a field study in Dongshih, Taiwan, I encountered the complexity of lived experience in the wake of a massive earthquake. That particular complexity played out along the fine line between the legal and the illegal in people’s negotiation of everyday life, and it forced me to rethink my historical analysis of certain formal codes. During this crisis, the plight of one extended family with jointly owned land made manifest a whole range of unforeseen issues that prompted me to question various existing legal processes. Thus, the 9/21 earthquake of 1999 not only highlighted specific actions that challenged the legal system through social contestation, it also revealed underlying processes that regulate the complexity of social conduct.
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