ethnos, vol. 71:2, june 2006 (pp. 233–264) © Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis, on behalf of the Museum of Ethnography issn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. doi: 10.1080/00141840600733710 We Are Not Alone: Anthropology in a World of Others Fred Myers New York York Y University T he theme of this essay, as of my anthropological history, is ‘Anthropology in a World of Others.’ My beginning seems a long time ago, as far in the past of the pre- sent as the Diary of a Country Priest by George Bernanos seemed to me as a student in the Religion Department of a late-1960s rural Massachusetts liberal arts college. Canberra still had the look of a British colony. It was still the Australia of instant coffee, and not the ‘flat white’ or ‘long black’ of more recent, cosmopolitan days. Some of these memories remain visceral; I can never fly into Alice Springs and feel the crisp sunny days of a desert winter without a pang of the anxiety, of recognition and expectation, of my first fieldwork. In a similar fashion, I can no longer think about my career of research and writing without engaging with the (or should I say ‘my’) historical locations and the horizons that shaped my understandings of the Western Desert Aboriginal people I came to know in the early 1970s. My research began at a significant time. It straddled an anthropologi- cal moment marked by disputes about kinship and descent theory and an Australian political period dominated by policies of directed assimilation subsequently eclipsed by the period of Aboriginal land rights and self-deter- Key Informants on the History of Anthropology Myers.indd 1 06-04-21 13.48.50