Review by Choice Review
Wolf addresses the postmodern and feminist critique of ethnography using three versions of a Taiwanese peasant woman's story. Wolf, a well-known ethnographer of Chinese family life, first presents a fictional account of a village woman. A young, poor housewife with no relatives in the village has a nervous breakdown. Her neighbors wonder if she is possessed by important spirits, but in the end decide she is "just" mentally ill. The second retelling consists of Wolf's fieldnotes of the village women's deliberations about the victim's condition. The third version is Wolf's academic article explaining the outcome the unfortunate woman was denied the status of spirit-possession because of her peripheral role in the village kinship structure, as well as the anti-female bias of the culture. Along the way Wolf considers issues of postmodernism, reflexivity, and feminism in ethnography. How can one pretend to record objective "facts" when all understandings are contested and socially situated? How can one fail to expose the unequal distribution of power which subordinates women? This intelligent book concludes that the importance of telling the story so that the "natives" can understand it outweighs the importance of impressing academic elites with exotic erudition. Advanced undergraduate through professional. S. Plattner; National Science Foundation
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
