The name is absent

12

positioning. However, as it was, the threads, chains, paths, and conjunctions of
locations¹³ my study demanded I follow, and the concept-work I engaged in, were not
always related to or aided by MERIA. I maintain that the NGO was worthwhile and
productive as a field method, even now that I have returned from the field. Moreover, the
Roma community we worked with remains, without exception, grateful for our
involvement. At the time, however, I had to realize that my identity as an advocate had
to be second to my identity as an ethnographer; albeit one with responsibilities to his
longtime consultants.

WadingIn ...

On a warm Tuesday evening in November, about three months after I arrived in
Greece, I came home from a long day in Athens to find my front door locks shattered on
the ground. When the police arrived and the locksmith released the jammed bolt holding
the door in place I walked in to find everything ransacked, my laptop, camera, and voice
recorder missing, and a large sum of money gone. Panic gripped me as I stood in the
overturned room, the police dusting for fingerprints and my landlady quietly pacing the
hall. The only things left were my notebooks, some clothes, my passport, and a profound
sense of insecurity and fear.

In the week that followed I slowly overcame the paranoid need to check my door
twelve times a day, the anxiety that welled up inside me every time the elevator stopped
on my floor, and the need to hide even my most worthless possessions. I eventually
started to wonder who the thieves were, how many of them were involved, where they

¹³1 do mean to evoke Clifford and Marcus’s seminal text Writing Culture (1986), although I do not wish to
imply that multi-sited ethnography somehow conflicts with an advocate anthropology.

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