The question that refuses to go away and hounds the peripatetic scholar throughout the length of his fieldwork is how to deal with the unfolding and all-too-human drama of the face-to-face encounter. In the cases I have mentioned earlier ( Part I ), the exigencies of the immediate present demand a response that can only be described as human and humane. But on other occasions, the reaction of the scholar no matter how hard he attempts to maintain his sense of objective distance may border on the judgemental.

The scholar who conducts fieldwork is already forced to toil with the burden of culturally-conditioned responsibility at times peppered with guilt weighing heavily upon his shoulders. Even where and when such awkward historical entanglements can be gracefully circumnavigated, there remains the other question of the obvious gulf of knowledge and the corresponding hierarchy of power that accompanies it.

The post-modern scholar a sensitised and sensitive specimen of the homo academicus species is cognisant of the fact that his academic concerns may seem unworldly and irrelevant for the subjects of his research. What, pray tell, is the relevance of 'Translocality' to a foreign madrasah student who does not even know if he will remain free when he returns to his home country at the end of his studies, and who reads in the papers that religious students such as him are damned as potential terrorists?