Autoethnography

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

The emergence of autoethnography as method, text, or concept was described by Carolyn S. Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner, and by Deborah E. Reed-Danahay as a manifestation of a recent reflexive turn in ethnography. Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, and Sara Delamont argued that a diversity of methods and points of view have characterized ethnography since its outset, and the exclusive focus of this turn on methodological innovation, change, and discontinuity gives a misleading account of the field. Nevertheless, anthropology has recently shown a widespread and renewed interest in personal narrative, life history, and autobiography as a result of changing conceptions of self-identity and relations between self and society.

Autoethnography broadly operationalizes three different conceptions of self: self as representative subject (as a member of a community or group), self as autonomous subject (as itself the object of inquiry, depicted in “tales of the self”), and other as autonomous self (the other as both object and subject of inquiry, speaking with his or her own voice). It displays three main intersecting qualitative research traditions: analytic, subjectivist experiential, and poststructuralist/postmodern.

Analytic autoethnography is a subgenre of analytic ethnography as practiced from realist or symbolic interactionist traditions. Here a researcher is personally engaged in a social group, setting, or culture as a full member and active participant but retains a distinct and highly visible identity as a self-aware scholar and social actor within the ethnographic text. Analytic autoethnography differs from analytical ethnography by its increased interrogation of the relationships between self and others and a developed awareness of reciprocal influences between ethnographers, their settings, and informants. Researchers' own feelings and experiences are included in the ethnographic narrative, made visible and regarded as important data for understanding the social world observed, yielding both self- and social knowledge.

Systematic, self-conscious introspection enables the disciplined analysis of personal resonance and the effects of the researchers' connection with the research situation on their actions and interpretations, in dialogue with the representations of others. Researchers are in a paradoxical position in [Page 44]the field: simultaneously insiders of the studied community and outsiders, members of another (academic) community, representing the “ultimate” participant in this dual role. Analytic autoethnography thereby reaffirms the distinctions between researchers and informants, observers and observed, or self and culturally different other prevalent in classical ethnography. It is also committed to an analytic agenda: Developing theoretical understanding of broader social phenomena, grounded in self-experience, analytic autoethnography remains framed by empirical data and aims to generalize its insights to a wider field of social relations than the data alone contain.

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