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me his bed and asking the camp doctor to look in on me. The doctor did not have the resources with which to test me for malaria or intestinal parasites, but he gave me Fansadar and Flagyl nonetheless. Orso showed me how to fire the AK-47 that he subsequently slipped under the bed. “We’ve had some trouble here lately,” he said, referring to incidents in which troops had taken him hostage and issued demands for larger rations and other handouts. As I slipped off to sleep, I wondered how a loaded weapon under my bed could bring me anything but trouble.
     
    I awoke every few hours to an audience of more than 100 mapiko masks that Orso had collected during his stay on the plateau. While sitting with me, Marcos and Mery identified several of the masks as ones used in initiation rites in specific Muedan villages in specific years. Several times a day, young men poked their heads into the tent, holding yet another mask in their hands and—confusing me for Orso—asking if I wanted to buy it. When Orso was there, he would analyze the mask and point out its “imperfections,” but he would buy it nonetheless, turning to me and saying, “I don’t want to offend.” When he asked if I knew of any university in the United States that had a museum that might be interested in buying the masks from him, I told him I did not. As I faded in and out of hallucinatory states, I wondered whether or not I was, in fact, Orso and, if not, how my work differed from his crass acquisition of Makonde artifacts.
    On the third day, with arms draped over Marcos’s and Mery’s shoulders, I fled the camp and took refuge with a family of British Bible translators living in Mueda town. Dysentery persisted for a week, but a steady diet of Earl Grey tea and bland foods and the attentive care of people who spoke my mother tongue allowed me to gather strength. I eventually drove Marcos and myself off the plateau and back to Pemba, where I caught the next flight to Maputo. In twelve days, I had lost twenty-seven pounds.
    Exactly two weeks later, I boarded a plane returning to Pemba. The Mozambican doctor at the U.S. embassy clinic suspected that I had had shigella, malaria, or possibly both. Having regained only two or three pounds, I was not yet ready, physically, to return to Mueda. I knew, however, that if I did not soon return to the plateau, I might never complete my fieldwork. When I fell ill, one of my greatest fears had been realized, but this fear was only one among many that defined my fieldwork experience. Convalescing in Maputo, my fears grew into obsessions with potential menaces awaiting me in Mueda—fatal vehicular accidents; financially or logistically debilitating vehicularbreakdowns; encounters with spiders, snakes, leopards, or lions; landmines (from either the independence war or the civil war); demobilized-troops-turned-armed-bandits; suspicious government officials (who might, for example, deny me access to my field site); extortionist police officers (who might confiscate my vehicle on the pretense that it was stolen); 4 encounters with hostile, drunken villagers; cerebral malaria; and so on, ad infinitum. Only by placing myself once more in the field, I knew, could I displace these imagined perils with an existence devoid of their realization.
     
    Within days of my return to Pemba, Marcos and I set off together for Mueda. Seeing the expressions on the faces of people astonished by my rapid return—or by my return altogether—filled me with disorientation but, also, with an exhilarating sense of madness. While I was in this state of mind, Marcos said to me, “Bwana, let’s go see Humu Mandia.” I protested that travel to the humu’s village of Nimu was not on our agenda—that it was, in fact, well out of our way—but when Marcos insisted, I relented despite not understanding the motive for his unusual rigidity.
    When we arrived at Mandia’s compound, we were warmly received. Although we had met Mandia once before in