When writing, ethnographers are faced with the hermeneutic task of interweaving their dialogues with scholars and their dialogues with their interlocutors in the field. This article is a critique of a long-standing tendency in anthropology to conflate social analysis in texts with social analysis on the ground. I am taking issue with a tendency to compare social theorists such as Heidegger or Bakhtin with the social analysts met during fieldwork. In this intellectual thought exercise, I compare structural functionalists with Samoan migrants to explore some of the differences between writing and practicing social analysis.