La construcción de Yusof Bin Abdullah. Vicisitudes de un antropólogo en Malaysia

Although chance, anecdote and im-provisation are elements inherent in an-thropological fieldwork, they are rarely seen as central methodological issues. In this article the author discusses, through a series of anecdotes and unusual events, his own experience as an ethnographer in Malaysia. The text uses irony to cap-ture the subtlety, density, complexity and emotional quality of fieldwork in a dis-tant place largely unexplored in Spanish anthropology. The technical, formal and logistical details of solitary fieldwork (and their relative successes and failures) are interwoven into this narrative recount-ing the construction of the ethnogra-pher: the initial search for and access to a field site, adoption into a local world, and fieldwork in a distant place: a tra-ditional area in coastal Malaysia. This article is also a tribute to those people, without whom none of this would have made sense, and an exercise in relativistic ethnographic self-criticism that struggles to avoid (successfully or not) the pitfalls of Orientalism, ethnocentrism and all the prejudices that surround but also distin-guish the celebrated (but less common than imagined) practice of Malinowskian fieldwork.Keywords: Malaysia, fieldwo