title: Mementos, Artifacts and Hallucinations from the Ethnographer's Tent
author: Ron Emoff
description: "Resonant, provocative, and genre-bending, these pieces capture - and at times engender anew for readers - those moments of recognition, misrecognition, and indeterminacy frequent in ethnographic engagement. A lively and significant contribution and one that raises questions of real consequence with elan and principled imagination.."<br />-Don Brenneis, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz. <br />"What most recommends [this] is the quality and care with which the individual contributions have been produced.there is not a weak or superfluous piece among them.."<br />-George Marcus, Rice University <br />
zlib_text: Doorways in the Sand Chapter 6 It was the sound of the steam, whistling
  through, rattling the ancient pipes, that drew me across the fine line to the
  place where identity surprises itself. I balked immediately and tried to go
  back, but the heating system wouldn't let me. In close-eyed preconsciousness I
  clung to the transitory pleasure of being without memory. Then I realized that
  I was thirsty. And then that something hard and uncomfortable was indenting my
  right side. I did not want to wake up. But the circle of sensations widened,
  things fell together, the center held. I opened my eyes. Yes . . . I was lying
  on a mattress on the floor in the corner of a cluttered, gaudy room. Some of
  the clutter was magazines, bottles, cigarette butts and random articles of
  clothing; some of the gaud was paintings and posters that clung to the walls
  like stamps on a foreign parcel, bright and crooked. Strings of glass beads
  hung in a doorway to my right, catching what seemed like morning light from 