Writing about culture for Rosaldo thus involves rethinking such cherished social science categories as "objectivity," "distance," and "thick descriptions" in terms of more indeterminate qualities such as subjectivity, engagement, and emotional force. In doing so, he seeks to interrogate the supposedly disinterested claims of classical ethnographic accounts (from Malinowski to Geertz) by recalling anthropology's historic association with colonial and post colonial projects. By historicizing anthropology as a discourse permeated by and dependent on other discourses-of other disciplines, ideologies, and most important of all, of native informants-Rosaldo's work is allied with recent developments in critical theory that regard culture as a "busy intersection...where a number of distinct social processes intersect. The crossroads simply provides a space for distinct trajectories to traverse, rather than containing them in complete encapsulated forms" (17).