What is extraordinary about these and other anecdotes are the ways they foreground the "I" of the anthropologist. At stake in these narratives is no less there figuring of the relationship between the personal and the social, the ethnographer and the native informant, such that neither is seen to hold special purchase over the other. Anecdotes function like parables insofar as they open up a process of interpretation. Because they highlight their nature, both as stories that unfold in time and as artifacts that shape and are shaped by specific human agents, anecdotes form an important strategy for furthering the "remaking of social analysis." In them, Rosaldo finds ways of defamiliarizing the familiar, unhinging the domesticating power of conventional anthropological approaches, there by bringing the borderline character of cultural formations into prominent view. Moreover, such anecdotes allow him to illustrate persuasively the need to consider the position of the subject that speaks and the subject that is spoken to and about. To see subjectivity as simultaneously situated and mobile is to raise yet another series of issues regarding ethnographic representations: Who speaks in such accounts? For whom, for what purposes, and under what sorts of historical conditions? And under what forms of authority?