ArrivalThis short essay, written for a Cultural Anthropology series on proficiency in fieldwork, uses the plot of the sci-fi movie Arrival to describe a myth that is shared in anthropological fieldwork training and in learning how to code. In both domains, there is a common assumption that learning how to do something (to speak a language, to program a computer) grants a form of unmediated access to new fields of experience; this conflation of proficiency and access is mystifying. Instead, we might think of the acquisition of proficiency not as fieldwork’s precondition, but its substance.