Ellis/Bochner Literature Review

Summary of Main Points and Key Concepts:

• We must open our eyes and ears to the necessity of exposing how the complex contingencies of race, class, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity are woven into the fabric of concrete, personal lived experiences, championing the cause of reflexive, experimental, autobiographical, and vulnerable texts.
• One of the goals of autoethnography is to enter and document the moment-to-moment, concrete details of a life, as well as to use that life experience to generalize back to a larger group or culture.
• There are several things that hinder good autoethnographies, especially from social scientists:
• They don’t write well enough to carry it off
• They’re not sufficiently introspective about their feelings or motives
• They don’t understand the contradictions they experience
• They have a difficult time with self-questioning
• They have a difficult time confronting things about themselves that are less than flattering
• They can’t be vulnerable
• The original use of the term autoethnography was limited to referring to cultural-level studies by anthropologists of their “own people,” in which the researcher is a full insider by virtue of being “native,” acquiring an intimate familiarity with the group, or achieving full membership in the group being studied.  The term has now evolved in a manner that makes precise definition and application difficult.
• Autoethnographers vary in their emphasis on the research process (graphy), on culture (ethnos), and on self (auto).  Different exemplars of autoethnography fall at different places along the continuum or each of these three axes.
• Narrative truth seeks to keep the past alive in the present.  Stories show us that the meanings and significance of the past are incomplete, tentative, and revisable according to contingencies of our present life circumstances, the present from which we narrate.
• Stories run the risk of distorting the past.  They rearrange, redescribe, invent, omit, and revise.  But that’s okay because a story is not a neutral attempt to mirror the facts of one’s life; it does not seek to recover already constituted meanings.  We should be more concerned with what consequences the story produces rather than historical accuracy

Ideas and Terminology Used:

• Autoethnography: an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural.  Back and forth autoethnographers gaze, first through An ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then, they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations.

•  “Crisis of Confidence” in Social Science:  work in the 1970’s and 1980’s that changed the modernist conception of “author.”  The interpretive space available to the reader was broadened, encouraging multiple perspectives, unsettled meanings, plural voices, and local and illegitimate knowledges that transgress against the claims of a unitary body of theory.
• Systematic Sociological Introspection:  paying attention to ones personal life, physical feelings, thoughts, and emotions.  Using emotional recall to try to understand an experience.  Exploring a particular life to understand a way of life.
• Reflexive Ethnographies:  the researcher’s personal experience becomes important primarily in how it illuminates the culture under study.  Reflexive ethnographies primarily focus on a culture or subculture, and authors use their own experiences in the culture reflexively to bend back on self and look more deeply at self-other interactions.
• Native Ethnographies:  researchers who are natives of cultures that have been marginalized or exoticized by others write about and interpret their own cultures for others.
• Complete-Member Researchers:  researchers who explore groups of which they already are members or in which, during the research process, became full members with complete identification and acceptance.
• Radical Empiricism:  the process that includes the ethnographer’s experiences and interaction with other participants as vital parts of what is being studied.
• Narrative Truth:  narrative truth seeks to keep the past alive in the present through stories.

 

Linkages to other class readings:

The Vulnerable Observer touches on a lot of the same points that this article does.  The main point, and most poignant in my opinion, is that the intellectual mission of ethnography is deeply paradoxical: get the “native point of view,” without actually “going native.” The term we like to use is “participant observation” which is an oxymoron in itself.

 

The other point that I find especially intriguing is the idea of getting involved in the observation in an emotional and/or physical way.  When the subject of the research is autoethnography the researcher is naturally involved, but must figure out how to limit or increase his or her involvement in the story.  As The Vulnerable Observer points out, even a researcher who is not doing his or her own story still can become emotionally and/or physically involved if the safety or emotional well-being of the subjects comes into question.

 

Possible class discussion questions or topics:

• Do you have a particular experience in your life that you think would lend itself to autoethnography?  What is this experience, and how would you look at it from both a personal view and an ethnographic view?
• How do you protect against your own biases if you are doing an autoethnography?  Or is it even necessary to worry about such biases?

 

Response

I enjoyed reading this article because I felt like it addressed questions that had come up to me throughout this quarter.  One of my major questions all along was whether an ethnographer needs to be somewhat involved in the culture he or she is researching, or if a member of a culture can give a true view of what is being researched.  The answer is yes, and it may in fact be more profound and more useful to the community (not necessarily the academic community, but to the researcher’s cultural community) as a whole.

I am glad there is a branch of ethnography that acknowledges personal experience and personal insights into a culture as a legitimate resource.  This is the direction I want to go for my final paper.

Quotes to Ponder:

• “Well, that’s clever.  Although you started with the ‘I,’ you quickly fell into using the handbook genre to argue against writing in the handbook genre….Reminds me of how so many of our texts argue in postmodern abstract jargon for greater accessibility and experimental forms.”
• “What good would my research be if it doesn’t help others who are going through this experience, especially my subjects?”