Authorship, research assistants and the ethnographic field

This rich special issue opens up a large set of questions about authorship that goes well beyond the question of research assistants in the field.I will first explore this issue, and then attempt to position the question of research assistants in a wider 'field'.I will argue that Middleton and Cons (and their contributors) are quite right to focus on research assistants in the field, because the neglect of this topic leaves a large gap in anthropology's self-reflexivity.More importantly, and this will be my final point, a focus on field assistants pushes the boundaries of 'the field' itself.This point, along with other emergent reconceptualizations of 'the field', has the potential to radically rethink the temporal and spatial configuration of fieldwork.