Today, it would be widely agreed that it has become increasingly difficult to conduct anthropological research in these terms. In ethnographic practice, as in theoretical debate, the dominant “peoples and cultures” ideal carries ever less conviction. Ethnographically, much of the best work today no longer fits within the model of a study of “a culture,” while the most challenging contemporary fieldwork cannot be contained within the stereotypical “among the so-and-so” mold. What would once have appeared as a logical impossibility-ethnography without the ethnos-has come to appear, to many, perfectly sensible, even necessary (Appadurai 1991). Theoretically, too, a move away from the “people and cultures” vision of the world, always a live concern for a small section of anthropologists, appears to have become a leading position within the discipline.