As part of my studies in cultural anthropology, I conducted fieldwork in the Algerian Sahara, thousands of miles from Helsinki, rode trains and buses all day for a week and found a place to stay in a village in an oasis, first on the Arab side and then on the Berber side - to compare and contrast the effects of living on the two sides of the village was actually the purpose of my visit.

One of my youthful romantic notions of the explorers of yore was the state of ‘going native’ –to forget, as it were, one’s background and become just another member of the local community. Impossible of course, but certainly worth the attempt, I thought. I didn’t quite achieve that in the week-long celebration of the birthday of the prophet Muhammed, where the local youth partied with enormous ghetto blasters on their shoulders while I tried my best to conceal my modest cassette recorder so as to be a proper researcher and not interpose my instruments between myself and the research subjects so the situation would remain as natural as possible. Nevertheless, when I got to know people, and finally on New Year’s Eve when my darker-skinned friends and I were thrown out of a hotel for Western tourists for the fifth time before the doorman realised I was a foreigner, and when I thanked him and said that I’d rather spend the night somewhere else with my friends, I got that flash of insight under the desert stars: this is studying, or work, you could really do for a living.