The notion of culture as crossroads rather than a set of reified values directly relates to the methodological import of this book. Rosaldo carefully elaborates the pragmatics of doing an ethnography on the "borderlands." Here, the border is not simply the mark that separates linguistic, social, and political categories; it is also a zone of exchange, conflict, and there invention of personal and collective identities. An ethnography of the border would thus stress difference and transformation rather than stability and stasis in a particular society. Ethnographers who write on the border occupy multiple perspectives, implicated in the very processes about which and in the conditions within which they write. It is their task to approach culture as heterogenous, in process, and openended.