This fascinating book is the result of multiparty fieldwork, unfolding over more than two decades. It is a valuable, inspired documentation of cross-cultural collaborative research that will prove especially engaging and informative to all of those who, working across disciplines, grapple with the thorny issue of representing the voices of indigenous peoples and minorities. Readers who are interested in ethnic relations in China will delight in how the book succeeds in situating the special problems faced in the authors' research in the context of contemporary global discussions.

The book presents a rich account, in their own telling, of the research undertaken by the three main authors. In the process, it also offers one of the richest, most multifaceted accounts anywhere of Nuosu history, culture, and relations with others. The Nuosu are among the most important and numerous of the peoples who make up the officially recognized Yi nationality; they inhabit the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in China's Sichuan Province. Historically, they were fiercely autonomous. In modern China, as the Nuosu lands were incorporated into the body of the state, they became the focus of highly charged debates over Nuosu “slavery,” caste systems, and similar topics. The Nuosu also became known internationally through writings ranging from Lin Yueh-hua's famous ethnography (translated as The Lolo of Liangshan [New Haven, Conn.: HRAF Press, 1961], using the older “Lolo” ethnonym now discontinued in China), to more recent works, such as Stevan Harrell's Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).

This book expands on these accounts in dramatically novel ways by offering distinctly self-reflective personal accounts of the paths trod by the scholars involved, intersecting and converging in the Liangshan mountains. Parts I and II take the reader through the formation of their research interests and their increasingly “implicated” attempts to do research. There is a formidable wealth of weighted and detailed reflection here (illustrated by numerous photos), ranging from childhood schoolyard arguments over whose burial customs were the most abhorrent (Yi cremations? Han entombments?), the “chasing” of surviving ritualists as ethnographic informants, and the emotions and ethnopolitics enveloping both local and foreign scholars, to fund-raising for local schools, and so on. The final part III, set in America, takes up the recent touring exhibit Mountain Patterns, itself a collaborative endeavor directly grappling with the collection of contemporary artifacts and asking how to represent the Yi to the world. It was co-curated in 2000 by Stevan Harrell, Ma Lunzy, and Bamo Qubumo (Bamo Ayi's sister), whose involved meditations on the exhibit project are gathered here. There is also a chapter on the emergence of international Yi studies conferencing, which—along with the growth of Yi academics inside China—has emerged as an important factor in Yi identity overall.

The last section also includes a remarkable account of fieldwork in contemporary Seattle churches, undertaken independently by Bamo Ayi while branching out from the shared focus on Nuosu culture. The ongoing Yi–American exchanges have also facilitated separate research (not represented here) on Native American cultures in the United States by Pan Jiao, another Nuosu scholar. Such ethnographic research by sophisticated scholars emerging from within what was once merely the passive object of outsider scientist's investigations (e.g., the Nuosu culture in southwest China), is a striking illustration of the multifaceted outcomes of the evolving, open-ended collaboration that is the book's overall story. There are certainly other examples of (and there is now even a Chicago Guide to) “collaborative ethnography,” in the sense of anthropological research emphasizing joint efforts, trust, and reciprocity, but these examples, as well as the contents and the innovative organization of the book, together appear to bolster the authors' claim that “as far as [they] know,” this book is “unique in the literature on anthropological field research” (p. xii).

True to the spirit of the work, the authors leave the conclusions up to the reader. Even the most explicitly theoretical-reflective final chapter by Harrell declines to stake any singular claims on the possible implications this work brings to bear on the famous debates over fieldwork ethics, the Other, and so on, preferring, rather, to offer food for thought. But it is a generous serving indeed. To take just one example, this work will significantly enrich our perspectives on the currently ongoing reconsiderations of the “human subjects” regime, originating with medical and other sciences, which governs social science research at so many universities and other institutions. It seems to me that the poverty and insufficiency, for anthropology and related disciplines, of its consent-form ethics (and the one-directional science paradigm that underpins it) becomes abundantly clear when set against the backdrop offered by this book, with its complex web of interests and reciprocities blurring the divisions between scholar and research object in the rich tightly interwoven “fabric of ethnographic collaboration” so aptly captured in the title of this remarkable book.