In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-Of-The-Way Place

I found Tsing's book to be very informative about the Meratus culture of Indonesia, as well as very pertinent to the recent battling between the postmodernist and femminist thought schools within ethnographic literature. She manages to use a combination of more traditional Enlightment techniques (statistics, generalizations, strong authoratative voice) as well as postmodernist techniques (polyvocality, poetry, socio-historical context for the culture, relativism to its surroundings). The reading is easy, and fun, because she puts a bit of emotion in her book too. Overall, I think it is an important contribution to the ethnographic literary circle.