What does a move from a village in the West African rain forest to a West African community in a European city entail? What about a shift from a Greek sheep-herding community to working with evictees and housing activists in Rome and Bangkok? In "The Restless Anthropologist", Alma Gottlieb brings together eight eminent scholars to recount the riveting personal and intellectual dynamics of uprooting one's life - and decades of work - to embrace a new fieldsite. Addressing questions of life-course, research methods, institutional support, professional networks, ethnographic models, and disciplinary paradigm shifts, the contributing writers of "The Restless Anthropologist" discuss the ways their earlier and later projects compare on both scholarly and personal levels, describing the circumstances of their choices and the motivations that have emboldened them to proceed, to become novices all over again. In doing so, they question some of the central expectations of their discipline, reimagining the space of the anthropological fieldsite at the heart of their scholarly lives.

"Much in the way of the development of new topics, new questions, and new variants on the classic method of anthropological fieldwork has depended on the nature and experience of a now characteristic break with the investments of early-career fieldwork projects. Alma Gottlieb's collection is the first in-depth treatment of these 'moments' in anthropological careers, which are crucial to the understanding of new developments, forms, and interests in anthropological research generally." (George Marcus, University of California, Irvine)"

Alma Gottlieb is professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also the author of The Afterlife Is Where We Come From and Under the Kapok Tree and coauthor of Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa, all published by the University of Chicago Press.