Anthropologists, writes Paul Stoller, are ‘sojourners of the between’(p.4): between languages, cultures, and apprehensions of reality.

Stoller, Paul, 2009, The Power of the Between: an Anthropological Odyssey, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Like Stoller, I have found that when we are engaged in fieldwork, we don’t really fit in, but when we return home, we are never quite the same again. Some travelers can experience something similar if they are conscious, aware travelers, staying for several months in a different culture, imbibing more than the tourist brochures tell them, being open to new ways of seeing the world and being in it; feeling, smelling, tasting, sensing another way of life, another set of beliefs. Sometimes what we have taken for granted for so long is all turned upside down. We progress a little further on the road to being more aware of the world around us, and of ourselves, becoming transformed in either subtle or startling ways, never to be quite the same again. We have crossed the abyss.