As an anthropologist, I am attracted by those subjects that seem most resistant to ethnographic study and committed to anthropology's unique contribution to contemporary legal, political and epistemological debates. Ethnographic subjects that interest me include bureaucracies and institutions, law, markets, theories (from law to economics, science and gender) and modern knowledges of all kinds. This interest emerges for me out of my engagement with the remarkable contributions of feminist anthropology, the anthropology of science, and Melanesian anthropology to the anthropology of the contemporary. My first book, The Network Inside Out, concerned knowledge practices among UN bureaucrats and NGO activists working on "gender issues" in the Pacific. There, the problem was a set of practices (networking, debating the nature of a "gender perspective") that overlapped with anthropology's own methods of analysis. A more recent edited collection, Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge, concerned how to bring documents and documentary practices into view as ethnographic subjects, and what these subjects might tell us about the state of anthropological theory and its engagement with kindred disciplines at this moment. After my ethnographic work in Fiji, I conducted two years of fieldwork among financial regulators and lawyers in Japan and expect to return for further fieldwork in the near future. A first book to come out of that project, due for completion this year, is an ethnographic rendition of legal theory. For more about my views on the anthropology of law, see a short essay recently published in the Anthropology Newsletter and posted at http://www.aaanet.org/apla/fromf2.htm.

Annelise Riles is the editor of Political and Legal Anthropology Review, the journal of the Association of Political and Legal Anthropology. The journal is housed in the department of anthropology.