Thrice-Told Tale

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 aberrant, perhaps suicidal manner, and opinion in her village was sharply divided over the reason. Was she becoming a shaman, possessed 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 behaviour was probably never truly resolved. 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.