Autoethnography

Autoethnographic inquirers use their own experiences to garner insights into the larger culture or subculture of which they are a part. Autoethnography combines an autobiographical genre of writing with ethnographic research methods, integrated through both personal and cultural lenses and written creatively.

ETHNOGRAPHY first emerged as a method for studying and understanding the OTHER.

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Fascination with exotic otherness attracted Europeans to study the peoples of Africa, Asia, the South Sea Islands, and the Americas. In the United States, for educated, White, university-based Americans, the others were Blacks, American Indians, recent immigrants, and the inner-city poor. To the extent that ethnographers reported on their own experiences as PARTICIPANT OBSERVERS, it was primarily through methodological reporting related to how they collected data and how, or the extent to which, they maintained detachment.

In contrast, an autoethnographic inquiry asks the following: How does my own experience of my own culture offer insights about my culture, situation, event, and/or way of life? Autoethnography raises the question of how an ethnographer might study her or his own culture without the burden or pretense of detachment (Patton, 2002). What if there is no other as the focus of study, but I want to study the culture of my own group, my own community, my own organization, and the way of life of people like me, the people I regularly encounter, or my own cultural experiences?

David Hayano (1979) is credited with originating the term autoethnography to describe studies by anthropologists of their own cultures. Autoethnographies are typically written in first-person voice but can also take the forms of short stories, poetry, fiction, photographic portrayals, personal essays, journal entries, and social science prose. Although autoethnographers use their own experiences to garner insights into the larger culture or subculture of which they are a part, great variability exists in the extent to which autoethnographers make themselves the focus of the analysis; how much they keep their role as social scientist in the foreground; the extent to which they use the sensitizing notion of culture, at least explicitly, to guide their analysis; and how personal the writing is. At the center, however, what distinguishes autoethnography from ethnography is self-awareness about and reporting of one's own experiences and introspections as a primary data source. Carolyn Ellis (Ellis & Bochner, 2000) has described this process as follows:

I start with my personal life. I pay attention to my physical feelings, thoughts, and emotions. I use what I call systematic sociological introspection and emotional recall to try to understand an experience I've lived through. Then I write my experience as a story. By exploring a particular life, I hope to understand a way of life. (p. 737)

BOUNDARY-BLURRING INQUIRY

Many social science academics object to the way autoethnography blurs the lines between social science and literary writing. Laurel Richardson (2000), in contrast, sees the integration of art, literature, and social science as precisely the point, bringing together creative and critical aspects of inquiry. She suggests that what these various new approaches and emphases share is that “they are produced through creative analytic practices,” which leads her to call “this class of ethnographies creative analytic practice ethnography” (p. 929). Other terms are also being used to describe these boundary-blurring, evocative forms of qualitative inquiry—for example, anthropological poetics, ethnographic poetics, ethnographic memoir, ethnobiography, evocative narratives, experimental ethnography, indigenous ethnography, literary ethnography, native ethnography, personal ethnography, postmodern ethnography, reflexive ethnography, self-ethnography, socioautobiography, and sociopoetics (Patton, 2002, p. 85).

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