"The writing is not always elegant, but the core ideas are very important. As the ethnographer travels in space, he also travels in time, back towards the primitive, the pre-modern. Yet the condition of successful fieldwork demands what Fabian calls "Coevalness," that is, an acceptance of the mutual "presentness" of both field-worker and the people studied. But then, the conventions of social science require that "otherness" be reintroduced in books and articles, denying the "Coevalness" that made the fieldwork possible in the first place. Since Fabian's time and space are fungible, it does not take much experience to realize that his arguments apply equally well to early medieval historians, with similar problems, and pose similar problems."