A new ‘hands off’ approach to writing ethnography adopts various textual strategies to let the diversity and complexity of the ethnographic subject shine through (Marcus & Fischer, 1986a). Writers/ethnographers may ‘put themselves in the picture’ in order to lessen their distance from their ‘subjects’ and to rupture the fiction of authorial invisibility.  Or there may be an attempt to foreground the heterogeneous perspectives of ethnographic participants, through an attention to ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’. Whilst the traditional stance of authorial control aspires to the possibility of objective interpretation, experimental writing self-consciously embraces a more relativist subjectivity. It foregrounds the in-escapability of the self/other relation as a de-authenticating mechanism.