provisional nature of their interpretation of events (e.g., Humphrey 1993) Post-modern texts The post-modernist response to the reflexive turn has been to accept and celebrate the complex, ambiguous, messy nature of the social world and ethnographic research, and self-consciously to abandon attempts to provide neat, ordered narrative accounts written in an authoritative voice (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995) Post-modernist and feminist critiques of modernist ethnography have thus led to experimental pieces employing a variety of literary and textual devices, some more avant-garde (and impossible to read) than others. Some have used the technique of 'author- oth narrator and pro- tagonist in her story about chronic illness and the loss of a loved one. Carol Rambo Ronai (1995) provides what she calls a layered account of her "retrospective participant observation'. Paget (1995) others attempt collaborative texts that are proud to be honestly messy and fragmented (Brewer 2000). Crucially, a post-modern ethnography evokes rather than repre- sents. It 'emerges through the reflexivity of text-author-reader and privileges no member of this trinity' (Tyler 1986: 153), and is frag- mentary because it is conscious of the fragmentary nature of the post-modern world. It might take any form, Tyler suggests, but never be completely realised. In other words, all attempts at writing the post-modern text are doomed to failure (or imperfection) because you can only transcend consensus by being imperfect! Thinking about how and what we write As I have said above, l do not mean to suggest that ethnographers should abandon any attempt to write with authority, or to write in the accepted style of their genre. Hammersley and Atkinson (1995) rightly warn against experimentation for the sake o it, and even Marcus (1994), one of the early protagonists of the writing