Attentive visitor ...

... Man Without a Country - Magazine - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Naipaul is not an ethnologist or a professional historian and does not hold himself out as one. He obviously writes in the tradition of the attentive visitor, and his work is an assertion of the continuing importance of that tradition: seeing for yourself, talking to people, embracing the randomness of experience, putting faith in your perceptiveness and your hobbyistic research, drawing your own conclusions. This is an imperfect modus operandi but a transparent one.