This is one ethnographer's response to the methodological issues raised by feminist and postmodernist critics of traditional ethnography. The author uses three texts developed out of her research in Taiwan to explore some of these criticisms.

The first text is a short story written shortly after the incident, which occured almost thirty 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, reflexity, and some of the differences between fiction and ethnography. The three texts are framed by two chapters in which the author discusses the general 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.

1. Ruminations with a view(point)
2. The hot spell
3. Fieldnotes
4. The woman who didn't become a Shaman
5. Writing ethnography: the poetics and politics of culture
Index.