Bitef

labot (1799-1885), who led the French Brigade during the planning of the Suez Canal. From informations sent by Edgar Geballos: Talabol in the Mayan language of the Yucatan means to reach the sea shore (Tal’bot), or to come to agitate the body (Talah bot). 3. Kirsten Hastrup: The Challenge of the Unreal (Museum Tusculanum Press, Copenhagen 1987). The empirical material in anthropology, or its ’object’ if you wish, is to a large extent brought home by individual anthropologists. Fieldwork is the distinctive method to collect it, but anthropology is the means to carry it home, as it were. Thus, already when leaving the field we are directly confronted with the question of what ’empirical’ should mean. Where and what is reality if it can be transplanted from context to text? As we know,"fieldwork is a very strong personal experience which transcends the limits of the known reality. Thus, in the process of fieldwork the very concept of reality will of necessity change. The unreal becomes empiri-

cal through personal experience; the distinction between materiality and unreality dissolves when the unreal materializes itself. In the field we arc directly confronted with extraordinary events, be they instances of mind-reading, appearance of ghosts, powers of healing, or alien ways of seeing and knowing, We are not normally supposed to include our experience of the irrational in our scientific reports in other than strictly scholary terms. However, in many instances the quality of ethnographic description stems from an admittance of the truth of unreality. To illustrate the point I shall render a brief report from my own fieldwork in Iceland. Staying for some months during the autumn on a farm, I once took part in an expedition to collect stray sheep in a rather rough mountainous region. At a certain point in time 1 was left on a rock ledge to hold an ewe, I had a beautifully clear view down towards the flat coastal lands where ’my’ farm was situated. At the time I felt almost existentially connected with this landscape wich I had

learned to ’read’ both historically and economically. Suddenly, a dense fog came rolling down from the upper mountains and with it an icy cold. In the subarctic area you know never to trust the sun, and I was prepared to meet the cold, but in the long run not even woolen clothes could prevent a degree of fear from creeping in. It was not so much a question of fearing to get lost, even though I knew that I could never descend alone. It was a kind of fear related to the place where I found myself. 1 am not referring to the physical or natural place; I am alluding to that cultural place where the alien reality becomes experienced and not only observed. In that particular place the fog was a very specific veil over the Icelandic landscape, or which I had become a part. And there, a nebulous human figure appeared in the mist. I knew instantly that it was a man of the ’hidden people’ {huldufólk) who visited me in the small space of vision left to me and my ewe by the fog. Ever since the Middle Ages huldumenn have been known to seduce Icelandic wo-

menfolk, and especially shepherdesses in mistry mountains. Apparently he did not touch me, but who knows if he did not seduce me in one way or the other without my sensing it? when the fog lifted, and I was finally rejoined by my own people, the only thing that remained clear in my mind was the real experience of the materialization of the unreal. It is impossible to verify whether Kirsten actually saw a huldumadur , and with all the weight of modern Western rationality it could be claimed that she was a victim of hallucinations (owing to fog, fear, and too much reading, probably). However, if rationality makes room for doubt, there is no reason to question that the shepherdess experienced a specific Icelandic reality, which for ever will leave an imprint upon the anthropological representation of the empirical context of sheep-rearing in Iceland. Her experience is a clue to my presentation of the ethnographic reality. Once we have experienced the unreal and sensed the limits of the known, we are faced with the pro-