ABSTRACT
This essay reflects upon a historian’s fieldwork experience in northwestern Sichuan as a journey of discovery about gender and ethnicity. It demonstrates that the personal and the academic are often inseparable when historians step out of the archives and undertake ethnographic work. Personal differences among ethnographers in terms of their gender, ethnicity, age and other backgrounds elicit different local reactions and place pre-existing local politics into sharper focus. They allow an ethnographer to develop not only historical insights into the larger academic themes of religion, state, and society, but more significantly, her own sense of multiple identities, as a Han Chinese woman, a female traveler, a foreign-trained female scholar, and perhaps many more.
