From the point of view of historians and sociologists, ethnographers are often seen as making generalisations based on skimpy data – little more than a few personal experiences. During his enfant terrible phase, Edmund Leach made the same charge against the pioneers of modern fieldwork:

I avoid the charge by denying that I am saying anything generalisable, that is, anything about the essential nature of cultural difference. On the contrary, my goal is to show how ethnicity was constructed in a specific region and under specific historical circumstances.

My method is unabashedly analytic; it makes no concessions to postmodernism. Its premise is that nothing about the process of ethnification can be taken for granted. On the contrary, working out how ethnicity works in different places is part of the business of ethnography, what, for want of a better word, we might call “ethnology.” Locating ethnic groups – “naming the tribes” – is a goal of research, not a preliminary.