Abstract
Arriving at the Kathmandu airport in May of 1979 for my first overseas assignment at an AID Mission, I repeated a question that I had been asking myself since I learned of my Nepal assignment. How is an anthropologist who is trained as an Arabist, who has done major field work in the Middle East and Arabic speaking communities in the United States, going to function effectively in Nepal? Prior to my arrival, I had made fleeting rationalizations that my consultancy for the Ford Foundation in India in 1976 had given me a preliminary introduction to "Asian culture." But most of all I clung to the belief that anthropology, as the study of humankind, transcends the interests of any particular village, nation or culture, and that by virtue of its comparative/universalist perspective, teaches us how to evaluate facts about human nature in all societies.
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