In 1971, Donald Powell Cole came to the American University in Cairo as an assistant professor, the ink scarcely dry on his new PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. For twenty-nine years he has made his home in Cairo, currently residing in the old Bab el-Luk district downtown, a ten-minute walk from the university. Although he has done stints as visiting professor or researcher at the Universities of California-Berkeley, Chicago, Texas-Austin and Georgetown, and is active in the American Anthropological Association (in 1999 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the Association's Middle East Studies Section), his long expatriate status seems to give him a kind of insider-outsider perspective on anthropology, akin to, but not quite parallel to that many anthropologists ascribe to the fieldwork experience. Speaking with Don as a colleague about the discipline of anthropology is to encounter a discourse that is often ironic, sometimes arch, but never dismissive. If he chooses not to employ newer registers of anthropological theory (including the semiotically-influenced registers with which I am most comfortable), it is not from ignorance. Students in his classes are reading James Clifford and Arturo Escobar as well as Eric Wolf. Rather, if he is sceptical about claims of `newness' arising from current trends in anthropology it is, he says, because he has heard them before. Don argues compellingly that the central stuff of anthropology -- the long-term encounter between the anthropologist and those s/he represents, the cultural relativist position and the mapping of recursive links between the sociocultural and the political-economic -- remains at the heart of the discipline's contribution to human knowledge about itself. At the same time, Don remains genuinely interested in those changes or additions to anthropology that seem to him to hold promise in helping the discipline understand social change -- see his discussion of the value of `multi-sited ethnography' below. His long-time residence in one of the great urban centres of the Middle East has made him acutely aware of social change, not only that created by contacts with `the West', but also that created through the invention and reinvention of tradition. This, coupled with the attention to links between the local and `the wider world' at regional, national and transnational levels that has always marked his work, makes Don's thoughts on nomads, pastoralism and anthropology itself interesting and insightful. This interview was conducted in the spring of 2000 at a coffee shop in Cairo. Don and I had often discussed such topics before, so the questions were easy to formulate, the answers unhesitant. The two-hour interview was transcribed and edited to reduce repetition. Both Don and I went over the transcript, making minor changes and adjustments, completing thoughts left hanging, correcting a few dates and clarifying remarks that were intelligible at the time, but now seemed to us to require a fuller expression. That said, this remains substantially the text of the original oral interview and those who know Donald Cole will hear the rhythms and tone of his speech in the words on the page. MAP -- Your undergraduate and early professional work was in Latin America. Why switch? What drew you to nomads and to the Al Murrah? DPC -- How I came to spend eighteen months in 1968-70 doing ethnographic fieldwork among camel nomads in the Empty Quarter and other deserts in eastern Saudi Arabia is a long story, almost none of which was planned or designed in advance. I grew up in an old Anglo-Texan family in south central Texas and I went to the University of Texas at Austin with the goal of eventually going into law or perhaps the foreign service. As an undergraduate I became very interested in and involved with Latin America -- personally, politically and intellectually. I majored in Spanish and also took a lot of courses in government and in institutional economics. …