Almost immediately after my return from the field, this script was a first attempt to organise, categorise, and type up my hand-written ‚raw‘ field notes. They were gathered in the course of my fieldwork during 2005–2006 in Manbir, a village with a major Ho population in Mayurbhanj, Odisha, India. This ethnographic collection of data is about observations, everyday routines, myths, rituals, and recorded and transcribed interviews, a bureaucratic step and prerequisite before finding their way into a proper thesis. How best to represent the Ho’s specific and unique way of being in the world? Organised by themes—from ancestors to stones, from ritual friendship to life-cycle activities—some sections are already partly developed, others remain as they were written in the field. Together, they form the groundwork from which my final research focus eventually emerged.