Ethnographers sometimes talk about their use of the 'ethnographic present' in their writing. In classical ethnographies, the accounts that were 'written up', often some years after the field notes were 'written down', disguise the fact that communities had changed, or even disappeared in the spaces between words. There is slippage in the process that suggests a timelessness, and insulation from social change and presents the world as stable, cultures as continuous and enduring and an image of 'other' societies as distant from our own actions.