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Abstract
This article discusses the two ends of the life-history process: the reasons for its undertaking and the research assumptions these engender, and the impact of the published account on readers. In doing so, I draw on my own experience in the research and writing of Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling woman (Gmelch, 1986/1991) and upon the responses of Traveller and non-Traveller readers to this life history. (Ethnographic research; life-history interviewing, editing, and narra-tive construction; literary criticism)

After discussing anthropology's concept of "culture", the author points out that in Asia as elsewhere in the contemporary world, an essentialist appeal to primordial roots and common cultural heritage serves to mobilise tremendous energies. He attempts a brief characterisation of Bali in cultural terms. (DÜI-Sen)

Attempts to elicit women's autobiographies among the Kwaio (Malaita, Solomon Islands) yielded little, seemingly confirming views that women's voices in tribal societies are "muted," women's views perspectival and partial. Further efforts yielded rich, insightful, self‐accounts from 15 Kwaio women. The historical, ethnographic, and sexual‐political contexts of these self‐accounts are examined. What women can and will say about themselves and their society can never, I conclude, be taken as direct evidence of what they know and don't know, or of "women's status."

The boundary between a speaker's knowledge of a language and his/her knowledge of the world poses deep and still unresolved analytical problems. Semantic systems and pragmatic rules build on and presuppose basic cultural assumptions about cosmology, time, causality—about the world described and manipulated by language. For a Western language, those assumptions are shared by speaker and linguist and need not be analyzed. But a non‐ Western language, such as Kwaio (Solomon Islands), may incorporate a very different model of the universe. Assumptions about ancestors and causality, magic and mana, infuse and motivate semantic systems and pragmatic rules. The challenges of articulating linguistic and ethnographic analyses are explored. [language, pragmatics, semantics, world view, sociolinguistics]