Autoethnography

Definition and History

As an autobiographical genre of writing and research, autoethnography displays multiple layers of consciousness. Autoethnographers gaze back and forth. First, they look through an ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience. Next, they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations. As they zoom backward and forward, inward and outward, distinctions between the personal and the cultural become blurred, sometimes beyond distinct recognition.

The term autoethnography has been in circulation for at least two decades. Anthropologist Karl Heider used autoethnography in 1975 to refer to the descriptions the Dani people of New Guinea gave of their own culture, but David Hayano usually is credited as the originator of the term. Hayano limited the term to cultural-level studies by anthropologists of their “own people” in which the researchers are full insiders by virtue of being “native,” acquiring an intimate familiarity with the group, or achieving full membership in the group being studied.

Autoethnographic studies now take place in many social science and humanities disciplines interested in ethnographic research; they are most prevalent in communication and performance studies, sociology, anthropology, education, social work, and nursing, among others. The turn to autoethnography in qualitative research is connected to a shift from viewing our observations of others as nonproblematic to a concern about power, praxis, and the writing process. This shift was inspired in part by the epistemological doubt associated with the crisis of representation and the changing composition of those who become ethnographers, with more women, lower-class, ethnic and racial groups, and scholars from the developing world now represented.

Approaches and Forms of Expression

The term autoethnography has become the broad rubric under which many other similarly situated expressions from multiple disciplines are included, such as personal narratives, first-person accounts, opportunistic research, experimental ethnography, lived experience, radical empiricism, autopathography, life writing, confessional tales, ethnographic memoir, narrative ethnography, and Indigenous ethnography. Likewise, a variety of methodological strategies have been developed in connection with autoethnographic projects, including systematic sociological introspection, biographical method, personal experience methods, feminist methods, narrative inquiry, co-constructed narrative, interactive interviewing, and autoethnographic performance.

Autoethnographic texts appear in a variety of forms such as short stories, poetry, fiction, novels, photographic essays, scripts and performances, personal essays, fragmented and layered writing, and social science prose. They showcase concrete action, emotion, embodiment, introspection, and self-consciousness portrayed in dialogue, scenes, characterization, and plot.

[Page 50]Personal narrative writing breaks away from the traditional rational/analytic conventions of academic writing in several

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