 Anthropologists look at the structure and function and the rules and procedures by which people organise themselves and live in the world. Looking at how economics, politics, culture, kinship and cosmology are entangled in people's everyday lives. There are many methods of long-term immersive fieldwork which often involve both participation and observation combined. Because it's so effective at exploring what Bordier calls silent traditions, i.e. the cultural aspects of life that we find very hard to talk about because we take them for granted in the form of assumptions. And they ask actually what does that experience look like? What are the relationships through which people kind of make sense of their lives with others? And thereby anthropology encourages awareness of different ways of thinking, different ways of looking, different ways of living and making meaning of ourselves and the world around us. Anthropology has been described as the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities. Balancing subjective understanding and objective analysis of the matter makes ethics and anthropology different from other social sciences. I think anthropology is very tuned in to the fact that actually our data and our knowledge is produced collaboratively and it's a kind of an intersubjective experience that takes place within the ethnographic encounter with other people. Being ethical as researchers is a continual ongoing process of negotiation as it is between any group of people. So in international coalitions discussion is needed within a collective to work out what the group finds ethical in a way that doesn't necessarily impose, for example, UK ideas about what ethics amounts to. And this kind of ongoing continual negotiation is also important for asking each other whether or not you're living up to your promises and if you're not what you can do about it. Reflexivity is a really interesting concept. It helps the individual to pose and revisit already held positions and attitudes. Anthropology isn't a laboratory science, it isn't a test of a hypothesis and determining an answer. It's an ongoing dialogue or conversation and encounter with a set of complex and messy and sometimes contested realities. It's about acknowledging that we live in a world of inequalities and that we are shaped by our histories, our geographies, our experiences. In any conversation, anthropologists have to ask themselves, who am I speaking to? How am I speaking to them? What's being said and who's saying it? How does that affect me? How are my own beliefs and knowledges affected by this? How do they cause me to see this differently? What different views are coming across here and how do I understand the reasons for those differences? You can't stand outside that process because it involves getting into processes relating with other people. So to do good research, you need to make your own involvement and your impact on the research, how your thinking affects the way you see and the way other people see you. You need to make all that part of the inquiry so you know what kind of impact you're having on your own inquiry. Anthropologists use different kinds and forms of data. Data such as text, audio, video and other forms are first transcribed into the language of the field or the language of the community the anthropologist is studying. And this data is finally translated into the language of the researcher or the language that the researcher is using. At one point this would have been to shore up the colonial enterprise. It has also turned its attention to development and to development discourse and praxis, as well as to decolonising. I think a really exciting trend within anthropology is how might it benefit the lives of those with whom we study? How might it contribute to policy change, for example, or advocating for more inclusive democracy or in the case of the global comparative ethnography of parliament's politicians and people, you know, how might parliament and parliamentarians maximise the opportunities to engage with various publics? This is tricky. It's different from other fields of observation, exactly because of this collective character of decisions made inside it. And here I'd argue that actually it doesn't. The parliaments and those that work in them have distinct cultures, have rhythms and rites and rituals that order activity. And in this they're not really any different from other fieldsites, other cultures, other societies. They're no different from groups of villages in the Indian Himalayas, for example, or people going to work in gold mines in South Africa, or taking up, for example, Wall Street bankers. They are a collective institution that brings together people who think in different ways. In many cases, they're thinking opposite ways. You know, they have parties from a complete opposite side of the political spectrum and so they represent everyone but at the same time they represent no one because you want to find someone who agrees with parliament all the time. So it's an institution that it's bound to disappoint, it's an institution that it's bound to have people don't necessarily agree with it. If you see them from outside it seems that all political actors have the same amount of power and influence but we know that this isn't true. So when you are looking inside the parliament you have to understand how the distribution of power is operating and where people are acting to get more power, where the relationships are being more conflictive in the way they are distributing power. So this is a very different point of view from other institutions that have a single command, for example. It might need a communication skill, it's slowly maybe needed in the case of research by anthropologists. One thing we have to bear in mind when we study parliaments is that this institution is a collective political actor, which means all decisions are not made by just one person, one group or one segment of society, instead of this decisions are made in a complex relationship of different interests, opinions and demands. The parliaments are also highly sensitised and sensitive environments, you know this is where the work of legislating goes on. Parliaments are institutions of paradoxes, they are public but they are private, they belong to the public but at the same time they are part of an elite. And so the collective of the institution and the fact they bring different people from very opposite sides, they all work together makes it a very unique type of institution. For an anthropologist to understand how parliament works or what parliament is or how parliament operates, really needs to get to know the people within it and get to understand the subtle side of politics. Access can be even more difficult and herein lies a tricky problem. If you want access to scrutinised powerful people they might worry about whether or not you're going to criticise them and of course you don't want to promise that you will portray them in a rosy tinted way because that will compromise your scholarly integrity and your aspiration towards academic freedom. So there is a tension sometimes between securing access and academic freedom. And bearing in mind that often what the anthropologist will see on the news or what he's seen outside is probably not what actually happens within parliaments because parliaments do have a very paradoxal nature between what's shown outside and what actually happens or the reasons why things happen within the inside, it's a place full of performances for lots of different reasons. The structure of parliaments is very difficult to be understood from just one perspective because of this is very interesting to have some kind of comparison and different ways of looking the same phenomena.