Twirling the needle: Pinning down anthropologists’ emergent bodies in the disclosive field of American acupuncture

Acupuncture, like many alternative health care modalities, allows for and encourages a bodily experience of transformation. Clients (as well as practitioners) often experience a new body in the making. Within the context of ethnographic work focusing on the emergent bodies of acupuncturists and their clients, this paper focuses on the third, and perpetually more hidden, member of this ethnographic triad: the anthropologist. How do anthropologists position themselves in relation to alternative health care? Where is the anthropologists’ body in relation to an alternative health modality like acupuncture? Certainly fieldwork is never solely a discursive venture. Where are our bodies when we are doing fieldwork?