Shelley Mallett’s ethnography, Conceiving Cultures, is valuable and interesting because it makes the reader think hard about the process of fieldwork and the (post)colonial structures and histories that shape this unique kind of social interaction. Although the text is interspersed with insightful theoretical discussions of personhood, conception beliefs, and the anthropology of experience, and although it contains interesting ethnographic details about Nuakata, a small island in the Massim area where other such illustrious ethnographers as Malinowski and Annette Weiner worked, it is really an ethnography about doing ethnography. Those who are about to embark on their first stint of fieldwork, or those who have just returned, will be particularly absorbed, entertained, and comforted by Mallett’s frank and intensive analysis of her own fieldwork process. I would recommend this text for graduate courses on fieldwork, methods, or ethnographic representation.

Mallett has a gift for the microanalysis of dialogic moments, even when those moments involved silence on the part of the women she attempted to interview and converse with, and she does not shrink from exposing her naïve hopes, her missteps, her epiphanies, the limitations of her data, or her ethical quandaries. Moreover, the ethnography is largely organized chronologically, so the reader is privy to each step of Mallett’s process, from trying to formulate a research topic, to establishing relationships with her interlocutors in “the field,” to how she chose to represent her conversations and observations once she returned home.

Mallett states in the introduction that she is informed by debates over whether there can be a “feminist ethnography,” and she takes to heart the feminist injunction that ethnographies should be “accessible, self-critical, and mindful of the theoretical and narrative strategies they employ” (p. 34). Mallett’s ethnography is every one of these things, sometimes to a fault. For example, after devoting 11 pages to the story of her arrival on Nuakata, Mallett informs the reader that she is fully aware of the critique made of arrival tropes in establishing ethnographic authority, and having struggled with this critique, decided that to forego this discursive step would be “a potentially disingenuous gesture to nonconformism, a denial of the ethnographic process” (p. 50). In another instance Mallett takes the reader through her first experience of a funeral on Nuakata, her painful feelings of voyeurism, her self-disgust at having eagerly anticipated the event as a source of data, and her ultimately faulty decision not to attend future funerals unless acquainted with the deceased or his or her kin. As she says, “Confronted with people’s real, tangible loss, their wailing and tears … I questioned my right to be there. ... By what violent act of abstraction had I hoped for a death, imagined the bereaved as disembodied representatives of distinct mortuary rituals…?” (p. 222). This persistent stepping back to analyze her own decisions is generally thought provoking but sometimes feels like a tempest in a teapot. Indeed, Mallett’s study raises the unresolved, and perhaps irresolvable, question about reflexivity in an ethnographic text: when is it useful and necessary and when is it too self-involved?

I have not said much about the ethnographic content of Mallett’s book for two reasons. First, I think Mallett’s book is most interesting and valuable for its analysis of the fieldwork process. This is not to suggest that the data analysis is inadequate; rather, her analyses are quite robust, but somewhat ad hoc. That is to say, certain ethnographic domains—conception beliefs, mortuary rites, a Maternal Child Health clinic—are analyzed richly, but it is unclear how these domains and events are meant to work together as one overarching argument or topic. The introduction is packed with astute theoretical discussions of ethnographic representation, the social construction of gender, phenomenological accounts of the subject, and Marilyn Strathern’s theorization of Melanesian personhood, but in the end it is unclear what exactly Mallett seeks to argue. Mallett’s fieldwork was cut short by illness in her family. Perhaps as a result, her text has an odd quality of being analytically rich, but somewhat thin ethnographically. This reader is still pondering whether it may actually be to our advantage that Mallett had to work with the data she had, forcing her to focus her intellectual energies on the process of her research as much as on its outcome.