It is arguable that the "gloom and doom" phase, particularly in North American Anthropology, could not have come at a more inopportune time.  The motivation in making this observation stems from the transformation of the realities that ethnographers research into more complex subjects, requiring new methods, broadened analytical frames, and taking us into new fora of communication and cultural and interpersonal interaction.  Ethnography has become more challenging and promises richer insights than ever before as a result of phenomena such as community building in cyberspace and the transnationalization of putatively local, Indigenous communities and issues.  In this paper I examine these subjects through reflections on my twenty-one months of field research among the Caribs of Trinidad (still underway), by moving back and forth between the description of a reconstructed indigenous ritual, and the field methods that are used in gathering the data necessary for the description.  In this ritual I see a renegotiation of symbolic capital that spans local, national, regional and global levels.