The Intellectual Origins of Autoethnography
As a form of social inquiry, autoethnography emerged some forty years ago. Although it is usually traced to Hayanoâs (1979) article,1 autoethnography acquired much of its intellectual legitimacy during the linguistic turn of the late 1980s. Indeed, the intellectual legitimacy afforded to autoethnography was largely the outcome of the critical theories that took shape during this period. Perhaps most importantly, the discourses that emerged from postmodernismâand the philosophically related traditions within the âcriticalâ paradigmâcame to question the taken-for-granted ontological and epistemological assumptions upon which social science research had, up until that point, been predicated. Concomitantly, by questioning such assumptions, these discourses offered a substantive challenge to the hegemony of positivism in social science research.
The linguistic turn established new space from which to not only imagine the possibilities of doing research, but to have that research validated on philosophical grounds. Critical scholars in this new space contested the very criteria that were used to measure the quality and the legitimacy of knowledge production. At the most fundamental level, it prompted a revisiting of the Cartesian-based assertion that the researcher ought to be ontologically divorced from that which is being researched. This assertion, of course, presupposes a couple of things. First, it assumes that reality is fixed and exists independent of subjects. Second, it assumes that the nature of that reality can be ascertained through detached and dispassionate empirical investigation (Guba & Lincoln, 1994; Morgan & Smircich, 1980). Autoethnography is wholly disloyal to these ontological assumptions insofar as rather than negating the role of the self, it locates the self as being central to informing and making sense of all social phenomena.
It merits note that locating the self in social inquiry did not commence with autoethnography. The self was imbricated in broader engagements with reflexivity that preceded the establishment of autoethnography. Indeed, the self has been the cornerstone of methods in the social sciences, including, especially, among those approaches that were inspired by symbolic interaction theory. Reflexivity underscores the need to acknowledge the intersubjective dynamic between the subject and others within the culture in which the subject is located. George Herbert Mead explicated this point:
It is by means of reflexivnessâthe turning back of the experience of the individual upon himselfâthat the whole social process is thus brought into the experiences of the individuals involved in it; it is by such means, which enable the individual to take the attitude of the other toward himself, that the individuals is consciously to adjust himself to that process, and to modify the resultant of that process in any given social act in terms of his adjustment to it. Reflexiveness then, is the essential condition, within the social process, for the development of mind. (as cited in Salzman, 2002, p. 805)
Put more simply, reflexivity provides an intersubjective conceptualization of how social relating is constituted. Within this purview, there is no provision by which to render tenable any claim that reality can exist autonomous of the self. When applied to social inquiry, reflexivity repudiates the suggestion that the self can (or should) be written out of the research creation process. As such, rather than pretending that the self is not involved in empirical execution, reflexivity calls for the investigator to acknowledge the role of the self at each stageâfrom the conception of the idea to the final written product.2
The importance of accounting for reflexivity has been captured by numerous social theorists. For example, both Foucault (1980) and Gramsci (1971) have shown how hegemonic cultural discourses that are represented as being natural are, actually, socially constructed and intended to support particular ideological projects. As they elucidate, these ideological projects are often detrimental to disenfranchised constituents in society. Moving from the abstract to the empirical, Latour (1987) has demonstrated how scientific fact is entirely a social fabrication. He showed that even when the scientific fact comes from the most controlled and sterile of environmentsâi.e., the laboratoryâit is, still, the product of myriad social interactions. According to him, authors utilize rhetoric to erase, by not acknowledging, the social interactions that were involved in the construction of scientific fact. The most disturbing implication engendered by this erasure is that scientific facts become culturally inscribedâhowever erroneouslyâwith a veneer of objectivity, making it seem as though they are apolitical and unproblematic.
The significance of considering reflexivity by being cognizant of the role of the self in social inquiry is especially conspicuous in the works of feminist writers. Indeed, feminist thinkers have long argued against appeals to a priori bases of knowledge by illuminating how, on the contrary, knowledge is situated (Haraway, 1988); that it is circumscribed by social experience. Helene Cixous (1976) went so far as to develop the concept of Ă©criture feminine (âfeminine writingâ) to call for writing that explicitly comes from the body (I further discuss Ă©criture feminine in Chapter 4). Heeding this call, feminist scholars have offered much evidence to substantiate the claim that the corporeal self is pivotal to understanding how subjects construct, experience, and explain social reality (e.g., Fotaki, Metcalfe, & Harding, 2014; Phillips, Pullen, & Rhodes, 2014; Pullen, 2006; Ulus, 2015). In an effort to animate this position, Paulina Segarra and I have elsewhere used the illustrative example of Hannah Arendtâs theory of the banality of evil to demonstrate how theorizing is the outcome of, and cannot be separated from, corporeal experiences (Segarra & Prasad, in press). Ultimately, feminists have captured the primacy of the selfâof the embodied self, to be more preciseâin identifying the epistemological parameters of knowledge and knowledge production.
Defining Autoethnography
Put simply, autoethnography turns the analytical gaze upon the self in seeking to understand the nexus between the personal and the culture in which the personal is situated (Ellis, 2004). Rather than making any sort of de-contextualized, grand statements about culture, autoethnography illuminates how the personal is informed by culture, and vice versa. Maintaining the primacy of the self, autoethnography is a methodological approach that posits personal experiences as the source of the empirical data from which to conceptualize social phenomena. The etymology of the term alludes to its meaning. Namely, autoethnography endeavors to âsystematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethnos)â (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011, p. 273). As a method, autoethnography shares many ontological and epistemological affinitiesâand is sometimes conflatedâwith self-narratives, reflexive ethnography, and ethnographic autobiography (Collinson & Hockey, 2005).
While autoethnography has grown in methodological currency in the last few years, its legitimacy as a path to social inquiry is routinely questioned. Critics of autoethnography have viewed the method as lacking rigor (Le Roux, 2017) and being too artful (Ellis et al., 2011), and have accused those who adopt it of engaging in self-indulgence and intellectual masturbation (Collinson & Hockey, 2005). Holt (2003) has distilled many of the criticisms of autoethnography in describing the response he received from reviewers when attempting to publish a journal article using the method. As he found, foregrounding the criticisms of the reviewers was the underlying suspicion about the legitimacy of autoethnography as a method for do...