ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author argues that critiques made of ethnography, both as fieldwork and as text, as well as the response of feminism to those critiques. Diane Wolf has asked the author to return to some of these thoughts as she encounter them in the fieldworkers. In her early fifties, the author became an insider with a tenured position at a midwestern university full of students who were aware of the ferment going on in anthropology and in feminist studies but not sure what it meant. The author addresses head-on what she think is troubling many feminists as they contemplate fieldwork, namely, power differences and how disruptive they are for feminist notions of proper working relations. Subaltern studies, postcolonialism, and searching out new examples of orientalism have become a major academic industry on which many careers rest. Even a carefully situated feminist methodology could not totally eliminate the unequal outcome of a fieldwork encounter in individual terms.
