This article examines the challenges specific to short-term intercultural treatments and recently developed approaches to intercultural treatments based on notions of cultural knowledge and cultural competence. The article introduces alternative approaches to short-term intercultural treatments based on ethnographic inquiry adapted for clinical practice. Such approaches allow clinicians conducting short-term intercultural treatments to foreground clients' indigenous conceptions of selfhood, mind, relationship, and emotional disturbance, and thus to more fully grasp their internal, interpersonal, and external worlds. This article demonstrates the uses of clinically adapted ethnographic inquiry in three short-term intercultural cases.