Anthropology in Wonderland, Or, The Virtues of Shifting Levels and Frames

Like Gulliver and a host of other storybook characters , Lewis Carrol l ’s Alice becomes both befuddled and enlightened when she encounters worlds in which the normal scale of things has been altered. In addressing this year’s A N theme of “What Don ’ / We Know?”, I will attempt to convince you that each of us can profit from a similar type of fantastic voyage. I suspect that when the editors chose this theme they envisioned articles that could be posted in copy rooms and department lounges, providing a fertile source of topics for grant proposals and dissertations. What is true of fish. however, is also true of unanswered questions: Dispense with the item itself, and only immediate needs arc met. Show how to find them, and future needs are met as well. Accordingly, an important step in the expansion of anthropological knowledge is the formulation of heuristics for exploring information and generating questions. One productive approach is to venture into a sort of Carrollian Wonderland by systematically shifting analytic levels.