Autoethnography

Autoethnography is related to ethnography, which is a recognized qualitative research method where a researcher uses participant observation and interviews in order to gain a deeper understanding of a group's culture, and can also help us to understand and/or theorize modes of human behavior within a group and across different groups. Often, but not always, the researcher is a member of the group in question rather than the traditional outsider ethnographer. As a variation of conventional ethnography (which has its roots in anthropology), autoethnography is now becoming more widely used (though controversial) in other disciplinary contexts, including performance studies, the sociology of new media, novels, journalism, and communication, and applied fields such as management studies.

In social research

While ethnography is a social science method of qualitative research that describes human social phenomena based on fieldwork, in autoethnography the researcher becomes the primary participant/subject of the research in the process of writing personal stories and ethnographic narratives. Similar to ethnography and its focus on the study of experience, autoethnography includes direct (and participant) observation of daily behavior; unearthing of local beliefs and perception and recording of life history (e.g. kinship, education, etc.); and in-depth interviewing: “The analysis of data involves interpretation on the part of the researcher” (Hammersley in Genzuk). However, rather than a portrait of the Other (person, group, culture), the difference is that the researcher is constructing a portrait of the self.

In different disciplines (particularly communication studies and performance studies), the term autoethnography itself is contested and is sometimes used interchangeably with or referred to as personal narrative or autobiography. An autoethography is a reflexive account of one's own experiences situated in culture. In other words, in addition to describing and looking critically at one's own experience, an autoethnography is also a cultural accounting. For example, Stacy Holman Jones wrote an article entitled "(M)othering loss: Telling adoption stories, telling performativity"(Text and Performance Quarterly 2005, 25, 113-35) where she talks about her own experiences with infertility and adoption as they are linked to cultural attitudes about transnational adoption, adoption, infertility, and how we talk about these issues at different moments in time. She does so in order to understand her own story but also to change some of the perceptions around these issues. In generating an autoethnographic work, most researchers attempt to more fully realize the ideal of reflexivity, which is the idea that the researcher needs to be aware of his or her role as a researcher. In embracing personal thoughts, feelings, stories, and observations as a way of understanding the social context they are studying, these researchers are also shedding light on their total interaction with that setting by making their every emotion and thought visible to the reader. This is much the opposite of hypothesis-driven, or positivist, research, but is not very far from traditional ethnography as practiced by anthropologists and sociologists. Autoethnographic methods include journaling, looking at archival records - whether institutional or personal, interviewing one's own self, and using writing to generate a self-cultural understandings. Reporting an autoethnography might take the form of a traditional journal article or scholarly book, performed on the stage, or be seen in popular press.

Anthropologist Deborah Reed-Danahay, for example, stresses that autoethnography is a postmodernist construct:

The concept of autoethnography…synthesizes both a postmodern ethnography, in which the realist conventions and objective observer position of standard ethnography have been called into question, and a postmodern autobiography, in which the notion of the coherent, individual self has been similarly called into question. The term has a double sense - referring either to the ethnography of one's own group or to autobiographical writing that has ethnographic interest. Thus, either a self (auto) ethnography or an autobiographical (auto) ethnography can be signaled by "autoethnography. (2)

Autoethnography and/as Narrative (Inquiry)

Autoethnography is also associated with Narrative Inquiry -- as well as autobiography -- in that it foregrounds experience and story as a meaning making enterprise. On one hand, some advocates of narrative inquiry argue for allowing stories to speak for themselves, but Clandinin and Connelly acknowledge that narrative researchers can and have had their work denied publication for being idiosyncratic and narcissistic. What, then, is the social significance of narrative inquiry? For Clandinin and Connelly the answer lies in the process of transitioning from field texts to research texts. Whereas the field text contains the stories, a research text involves analysis and interpretation and a researcher must consider the way narrative inquiries "are always strongly autobiographical. Our research interests come out of our own narratives of experience and shape our narrative inquiry plotlines ” (Clandinin and Connelly 121). “the way narrative inquiry illuminates the social and theoretical contexts in which position our inquires” 124). These research texts can take many different forms--hybrids of disciplinary genres.

Moreover, as Carolyn Ellis describes it, autoethnography uses the conventions of literary writing:

research, writing, story, and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political. Autoethnographic forms feature concrete action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection portrayed in dialogue, scenes, characterization, and plot. Thus, autoethnography claims the conventions of literary writing. (xix)

In a similar fashion, some literary writing also values research in the traditional sense. Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz, authors of Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, state that research (family sources, notebooks and journals, interviews, surveys, printed media, the internet, and personal experience) has a central role in creative nonfiction (143 & 155-159).

Benefits of Autoethnography

The benefits of autoethnography are the ways in which research of such a personal nature might give us insight into problems often overlooked in culture--issues such as the nature of identity, race, sexuality, child abuse, eating disorders, life in academia, and the like. In addition to helping the researcher make sense of his or her individual experience, autoethnographies are political in nature as they engage their readers in important political issues and often ask us to consider things, or do things differently.

Assesssing Autoethnographic Texts

Resonance

Donald Blumenfeld-Jones, professor of Ethics and Education, defines resonance as “the sense of commonality existing between an audience member’s life-experience and [. . .] the teller’s narrative” (32).

When discussing writing, in Robert Coles' The Call of Stories, William Carlos Williams said, “ [T] he more palpable the connection between the story and the reader’s story, the better the chance that something will happen” (120). For Williams, it was from his experience as a doctor that gave him his insight regarding the power of story. He felt that a story could reach and affect listeners/readers when the story resonated with them: “When I try to get them [patients] to take medicine or change their habits, I use my own life for a while; I tell them about my medical problems, or my wife’s, or I tell them about others I’ve treated, their struggles” (105).

It isn't possible for every story to resonate with every member of an audience, to hold true in every case, yet autoethnographic research does aim for validity and generalizability.

Validity and Generalizability

Carolyn Ellis writes, “In autoethnographic work, I look at validity in terms of what happens to readers as well as to research participants and researchers [. . .] our work seeks verisimilitude ” (124).

For Ellis, autoethnographic research seeks generalizability not just from the respondents but also from the readers (195) and intends to open up rather than close down conversation (22).

Narrative Truth

“When talking about their lives, people lie sometimes, forget a lot, exaggerate, become confused, and get things wrong. Yet they are revealing truths. These truths don’t reveal the past ‘as it actually was,’ aspiring to a standard of objectivity. They give us instead the truths of our experiences” (Devault 261).

Critiques of Autoethnography

Some qualitative researchers have expressed their concerns about the worth and validity of autoethnography. Robert Krizek contributed a chapter to [http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=60804 "Expressions of Ethnography"] in which he expresses concern about the possibility for autoethnography to devolve into narcissism. Krizek goes on to suggest that in autoethnography, no matter how personal, should always connect to some larger element of life. Nicholas Holt's [http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/2_1/html/holt.html "Representation, Legitimation, and Autoethnography: An Autoethnographic Writing Story"] describes the potential difficulties associated with evaluation of autoethnographic works.

Exemplars

A special issue [http://jce.sagepub.com/content/vol35/issue4/|issue] of the "Journal of Contemporary Ethnography" (Vol 35 No 4, August 2006) contains several articles on the diverse definitions and uses of autoethnography. An autoethnography can be analytical (see Leon Anderson), written in the style of a novel (see Carolyn Ellis's methodological novel "The Ethnographer's I"), performative (see the work of Norman K. Denzin, and the anthology "The Ends of Performance") and many things in between. Symbolic interactionists are particularly interested in this increasingly popular method, and examples of autoethnography can be found in the "Journal of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism" as well as in the "Journal of Contemporary Ethnography" and the "Journal of Humanistic Ethnography." It is not considered "mainstream" as a method by most positivist or traditional ethnographers.

In film

An 'autoethnography' is also a variant of the standard documentary film. It differs in that its subject is the filmmaker himself or herself. An autoethnography typically relates the life experiences and thoughts, views and beliefs of the filmmaker, and as such it is often considered to be rife with bias and image manipulation. Unlike other documentaries, autoethnographies do not usually make a claim of objectivity. An important text on autoethnography in filmmaking is Catherine Russell's "Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video" (Duke UP, 1999).

References/Bibliography

Blumenfeld-Jones Donald. “Fidelity as a Criterion for Practicing and Evaluating Narrative Inquiry”. Life History and Narrative. Eds. J.A. Hatch and R. Wisniewski. London: Falmer, 1995.

Carter, Duncan and Sherrie Gradin. Writing as Reflective Action.

Clandinin, D.Jean and F. Michael Connelly. Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research.

Coles, Robert. The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination. Houghton MifflinCompany: Boston, 1989.

Devault, Marjorie L. “Personal Writing in Social Research”.

Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. WalnutCreek: AltaMira Press, 2004.

[http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~genzuk/Ethnographic_Research.html Genzuk, Michael "A Synthesis of Ethnographic Research" Center for Multilingual, Multicultural Research. University of Southern California]

Hobbs, Catherine L. The Elements of Autobiography and Life Narratives.

Kutz, Eleanor. “Authority and voice in student ethnographic writing” Anthropology andEducation Quarterly. 21.4340-357, 1990.

Miller, Richard E. “Not just story collecting: Towards a critical ethnography.” ERICDocument Reproduction Service, ED 345 244, 1991.

Pagnucci, Gian. Living the Narrative Life: Stories as a Tool for Meaning Making.

Perl, Sondra and Mimi Schwartz. Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction.

Personal Narratives Group. Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and PersonalNarratives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Reed-Danahay, Deborah E. Introduction. Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and theSocial. Ed. Reed-Danahay. Oxford: Berg, 1997. 1-17.

Zebroski, James and Nancy Mack. "Ethnographic Writing for Critical Consciousness." SocialIssues in the English Classroom. Eds. C. Mark Hurlbert and Samuel Totten. Urbana, IL; NCTE, 1992.

[http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/65082 | Autoethnography Bibliography @ h2o playlist]

Notable publications that incorporate autoethnography

• Jago, B. J. (2002). Chronicling an academic depression. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 31:6, 729-757.
• Jones, S. H. (2005). (M)othering loss: Telling performativity. Text and Performance Quarterly. 25:2, 113-135.
• Ronai, C. R. (1995). Multiple reflections of child sex abuse: An argument for a layered account. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 23:4, 395-426.
• Tillmann-Healy, L.M. (1996). A secret life in a culture of thinness. In C. Ellis & A.P. Bochner (Eds.), Composing ethnography: Alternative forms of qualitative writing (pp. 76-108). Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
• Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. WalnutCreek: AltaMira Press, 2004.
• Reed-Danahay, Deborah E. Introduction. Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and theSocial. Ed. Reed-Danahay. Oxford: Berg, 1997. 1-17.