A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism & Ethnographic Responsibility // Review

Reviewed by Marian Bredin Graduate Program in Communications McGill University Montreal, QuebecMargery Wolf's contribution to recent debates in feminist anthropology and postm odern ethnography is provocative and imaginative, if somewhat limited in scope. The " tale - thrice" told is an account of her field work in the village of Peihotien in Taiwan in 19 60. She presents her readers with three separate textual renderings of the events surrounding the unusual behaviour of a young mother, the debate among the villagers about the meaning of the woman's actions and their ultimate refusal to accept Mrs. Tan in the role of tang - ki o r shaman. Providing readers with a fictional account of these events, with the verbatim fi eld notes from the period and with a related essay published in American Ethnologist thirty yea rs later, Wolf interweaves these texts with her own commentaries on the nature of ethnographic authority and responsibility in relation to other postmodern and feminist positions.In the commentaries, Wolf makes two key criticisms of the postmodern trend in ethnography and of the largely male - dominated wave of "experimental" ethnographic texts. First, she suggests that the conjunctures of power and knowledge and the discursive strateg ies of authority that the postmodernists have so recently discovered in the ethnographic canon, h ave long been the target of feminist critiques in anthropology and other disciplines. Once th ese discoveries are described in postmodern terms they are given much greater credibility and presti ge than is usually granted to comparable feminist work, of which the postmodernists remain largely ignorant. Secondly, she finds the experimental ethnographic mode flawed in the extent to which it further mystifies the production of ethnographies. Despite the stated purpos e of multiplying points of view and introducing other voices, Wolf argues that the resulting "exp erimental" text, with its refusal of realist tropes, is comprehensible only to an initiated few. Feminists who "speak" postmodernism can translate in either direction, but the experimental wo rk itself is inaccessible to the majority of readers, whether feminist or anthropologist.Part of Wolf's stated project in A Thrice - Told Tale is to resist some of the self - reflexive, even self - indulgent, excesses of the postmodern trend in ethnography. She set s out to demystify the processes of ethnographic production, in keeping with a feminist t radition of denaturalizing or de - centring the powerful discursive regimes of patriarchy. Presenting her audience with three different texts and three different forms of ethnographic vo ice and authority, she uses the commentaries to expose her own position within each of the texts, a nd her relation to her informants and her intended audience. In this respect she is employing w hat Janice Boddy has referred to as a "redescriptive tactic,"(f.1) in which the feminist anthropo logist takes up a critical position outside a discourse from within it, de - centres its categorie s and dislocates herself in relation to it. In her layering of these three texts, Wolf allows us to see how meanings become possible and how other meanings might become equally possible.Wolf makes the construction of the authoritative voice of the anthropologis t apparent to the reader by allowing her to create her own juxtapositions and arrive at her own in terpretations of the various texts. The juxtaposition, for example, of the short story written i n 1960 while working with her husband, with the 1990 academic article, reflects Wolf's transi tion from "anthropologist's wife" to "anthropologist." This narrative shift marks the aut hor's own mastery of anthropological discourse. While Wolf acknowledges both narrative positions as part of her "self," I wondered what the choice of one over the other at different moments me ant for Wolf as an anthropologist and a feminist? …