A Thrice-Told Tale : Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility / Margery Wolf.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wolf, Margery, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethnology--Methodology.

Ethnology.

Taiwan--Social life and customs.

Taiwan.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 153 pages)

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

A Thrice-Told Tale is one ethnographer's imaginative and powerful response to the methodological issues raised by feminist and postmodernist critics of traditional ethnography. The author, a feminist anthropologist, uses three texts developed out of her research in Taiwan—a piece of fiction, anthropological fieldnotes, and a social science article—to explore some of these criticisms. Each text takes a different perspective, is written in a different style, and has different "outcomes," yet all three involve the same fascinating set of events. A young mother began to behave in a decidedly abherrant, perhaps suicidal manner, and opinion in her village was sharply divided over the reason. Was she becoming a shaman, posessed by a god? Was she deranged, in need of physical restraint, drugs, and hospitalization? Or was she being cynically manipulated by her ne'er-do-well husband to elicit sympathy and money from her neighbors? In the end, the woman was taken away from the area to her mother's house. For some villagers, this settled the matter; for others the debate over her behavior was probably never truly resolved. The first text is a short story written shortly after the incident, which occurred almost thrity years ago; the second text is a copy of the fieldnotes collected about the events covered in the short story; the third text is an article published in 1990 in American Ethnologist that analyzes the incident from the author's current perspective. Following each text is a Commentary in which the author discusses such topics as experimental ethnography, polyvocality, authorial presence and control, reflexivity, and some of the differences between fiction and ethnography. The three texts are framed by two chapters in which the author discusses the genereal problems posed by feminist and postmodernist critics of ethnography and presents her personal exploration of these issues in an argument that is strongly self-reflexive and theoretically rigorous. She considers some feminist concerns over colonial research methods and takes issues with the insistence of some feminists tha the topics of ethnographic research be set by those who are studied. The book concludes with a plea for ethnographic responsibility based on a less academic and more practical perspective.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Preface

Contents

CHAPTER ONE. Ruminations with a View(point)

CHAPTER TWO. The Hot Spell

Commentary

CHAPTER THREE. Fieldnotes

CHAPTER FOUR. The Woman Who Didn't Become a Shaman

CHAPTER FIVE. Writing Ethnography: The Poetics and Politics of Culture

References Cited

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

ISBN:

9780804788243

0804788243

OCLC:

1178769035