Beyond the Global: Intimacy and Distance in Contemporary Fieldwork

In this article, I reflect upon the meaning of the "global" in contemporary debates concerning the nature of cross‐cultural dialogues. I argue that the "global" is made up of competing dialogues, positions, and meanings that are themselves often set in opposition to one another. Drawing upon my own research among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea, I discuss how the existence of competing perspectives in contemporary fieldwork situations complicates our discipline's traditional maxim of "noninterference."