Upon arriving in the highlands of Burma or the sad tropics of Brazil, one expects to have an adventure. Even if one will be creating vast, indecipherable kinship charts, even then, one can hope for pleasures and dangers of an unimagined variety. But these were not places I was going. It was late summer, 1986, and I was returning to Boston, a city I had known for more than ten years, well loved and very familiar. I was not studying ghost dances in Bali, shamanic healing in Nepal, headhunting in New Guinea, or sexuality in the Trobriand Islands. Rather, I was setting off to study women therapists in a hospital in Boston. Middle class, white, suburban fed. Not women I had ever been interested in. In fact, not women I knew anything about. Occupational therapists. Who were they? For me, this was a job, which was almost the whole point. The strong spark of interest I felt was primarily at the salary (steady income) and the hope that I would be able to carry out an ethnographic study of my own design. There was the odd fact that this profession had the idea of funding an ethnographic study of its clinical reasoning and had sought me out to conduct it. It is not often a group wants to hire an anthropologist to come and study them. I was intrigued.