Autoethnography

Definition

A form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context. It includes methods of research and writing that combine autobiography and ethnography. The term has a dual sense and can refer either to the ethnographic study of one's own group(s) or to autobiographical reflections that include ethnographic observations and analysis.

Distinctive Features

In autoethnography there is both self-reference and reference to culture. It is a method that combines features of life history and ethnography. The term autoethnography has been used both by qualitative researchers in the social sciences, who emphasize the connections between ethnography and autobiography, and by literary critics who are mainly concerned with the voices of ethnic autobiographers. Autoethnography can be associated with forms of the following: first, native anthropology or self-ethnography – in which those who previously were the objects of anthropological inquiry come to undertake ethnographic research themselves on their own ethnic or cultural group; second, ethnic autobiography – in which autobiographers emphasize their ethnic identity and ethnic origins in their life narrative; and third, autobiographical ethnography – a reflexive approach in which ethnographers analyse their own subjectivity and life experiences (usually within the context of fieldwork). For literary critic Mary Louise Pratt (1992), autoethnography is a mode of self-and group representation on the part of colonial or postcolonial subjects that is informed by representations of them by others who are more dominant. In literary theory, autoethnography is frequently viewed as a form of counter-narrative.

Memoirs, life histories and other forms of self-representation are analysed as autoethnographies when they deal with topics such as transnationalism, biculturalism or other forms of border crossing, and local cultural practices. Ethnographers make use of such texts to explore these issues in the context of life experiences and cultural constructions of these. Ethnographers have also adopted the term autoethnography to label forms of self-reflexivity. For example, Arthur Bochner and Carolyn Ellis (2002) are sociologists who advocate an ‘emotional sociology’ that incorporates personal narrative as a method to avoid the objectification of more scientific methods of research by erasing boundaries between the self of the researcher and that of the researched. Anthropologists such as ReedDanahay (1997) use the concept of autoethnography to analyse the uses of self-writing among anthropologists and among ‘natives’.

Evaluation

Autoethnography, as a method of research and writing, requires reflective and critical approaches to understandings of social and cultural life and the relationship between the self and the social. Autoethnographic texts are most compelling when they synthesize objective (outsider) and subjective (insider) points of view, rather than privileging the latter. Because there is such a wide range of work currently labelled ‘autoethnography’, ranging from creative nonfiction to ethnic autobiography to the testimonials of postcolonial subjects, the task of evaluation is challenging and depends in large part on the intent of the writer/researcher. Questions are frequently raised about authenticity and voice in such [Page 16]texts, regarding the authority of the speaker. Personal accounts of fieldwork are, for example, often used to evoke the ‘ethnographic authority’ (Clifford, 1983) of the ethnographer. Autoethnography calls attention to issues of power, and can be most effective when it foregrounds the complex and nuanced relationships between researcher and researched, dominant and subordinate, in the context of individual experience and socio-cultural structures of beliefs and control.

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