Autoethnography


Autoethnography is a form of ethnographic research in which a researcher connects personal experiences to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. It is considered a form of qualitative and arts-based research.
Autoethnography has been used across various disciplines, including anthropology, arts education, communication studies, education, educational administration, English literature, ethnic studies, gender studies, history, human resource development, marketing, music therapy, nursing, organizational behavior, paramedicine, performance studies, physiotherapy, psychology, social work, sociology, and theology and religious studies.

Definitions

Historically, researchers have had trouble reaching a consensus regarding the definition of autoethnography. Whereas some scholars situate autoethnography within the family of narrative methods, others place it within the ethnographic tradition. However, it generally refers to research that involves critical observation of an individual's lived experiences and connecting those experience to broader cultural, political, and social concepts.
Autoethnography can refer to research in which a researcher reflexively studies a group they belong to or their subjective experience. In the 1970s, autoethnography was more narrowly defined as "insider ethnography", referring to studies of the a group of which the researcher is a member.
According to Adams et al., autoethnography
  1. uses a researcher's personal experience to describe and critique cultural beliefs, practices, and experiences;
  2. acknowledges and values a researcher's relationships with others
  3. uses deep and careful self-reflection—typically referred to as “reflexivity”—to name and interrogate the intersections between self and society, the particular and the general, the personal and the political
  4. shows people in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the meaning of their struggles
  5. balances intellectual and methodological rigor, emotion, and creativity
  6. strives for social justice and to make life better.
Bochner and Ellis have also defined autoethnography as "an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural." They further indicate that autoethnography is typically written in first-person and can "appear in a variety of forms," such as "short stories, poetry, fiction, novels, photographic essays, personal essays, journals, fragmented and layered writing, and social science prose."

History

Mid-1800s

Anthropologists began conducting ethnographic research in the mid-1800s to study the cultures people they deemed "exotic" and/or "primitive." Typically, these early ethnographers aimed to merely observe and write "objective" accounts of these groups to provide others a better understanding of various cultures. They also "recognized and wrestled with questions of how to render textual accounts that would provide clear, accurate, rich descriptions of cultural practices of others" and "were concerned with offering valid, reliable, and objective interpretations in their writings."

Early- to mid-1900s

In the early to mid 1900s, it became clear that observation and fieldwork interfered with the cultural groups' natural and typical behaviors. Additionally, researchers realized the role they play in analyzing others' behaviors. As such, "serious questions arose about the possibility and legitimacy of offering purely objective accounts of cultural practices, traditions, symbols, meanings, premises, rituals, rules, and other social engagements."
To help combat potential issues of validity, ethnographers began using what Gilbert Ryle refers to as thick description: a description of human social behavior in which the writer-researcher describes the behavior and provides "commentary on, context for, and interpretation of these behaviors into the text." By doing so, the researcher aims to "evoke a cultural scene vividly, in detail, and with care," so readers can understand and attempt to interpret the scene for themselves, much like in more traditional research methods.
A few ethnographers, especially those related to the Chicago school, began incorporating aspects of autoethnography into their work, such as narrated life histories. While they created more lifelike representations of their subject than their predecessors, these researchers often "romanticized the subject" by creating narratives with "the three stages of the classic morality tale: being in a state of grace, being seduced by evil and falling from grace, and finally achieving redemption through suffering." Such researchers include Robert Parks, Nels Anderson, Everett Hughes, and Fred Davis.
During this time period, new theoretical constructs, such as feminism, began to emerge and with it, grew qualitative research. However, researchers were trying to "fit the classical traditional model of internal and external validity to constructionist and interactionist conceptions of the research act."

1970s

With the growth of qualitative research from the mid-1900s, "a few scholars were urging thicker descriptions, giving more attention to concrete details of everyday life, renouncing the ethics and artificiality of experimental studies, and complaining about the obscurity of jargon and technical language,... but social scientists, for the most part, weren't all that concerned about the researcher's location in the text, the capacity of language to accurately represent reality, or the need for researcher reflexivity."
The term autoethnography was first used in 1975, when Heider connected individuals' personal experiences to larger, cultural beliefs and traditions. In Heider's case, the individual self referred to the people he was studying rather than himself. Because the people he studied were providing their personal accounts and experiences, Heider considered the work autoethnographic.
Later in the 1970s, researchers began more clearly stating their positionality and indicating how their mere presence altered the behaviors of the groups they studied. Further, researchers distinguished between people who researched groups of which they were a part and those who researched groups of which they were not a part. At this point, the term autoethnography began to refer to forms of ethnography in which the researcher is a cultural insider.
Walter Goldschmidt proposed that all ethnography is, in some way, autobiographical, because "ethnographic representations privilege personal beliefs, perspectives, and observations." As an anthropologist, David Hayano was interested in the role that an individual's own identity had in their research. Unlike more traditional research methods, Hayano believed there was value in a researcher "conducting and writing ethnographies of their own people."
While researchers recognized the part they played in understanding a group of people, none focused explicitly on the "inclusion and importance of personal experience in research."

1980s

More generally in the 1980s, researchers began questioning and critiquing the role of the researcher, especially in social sciences. Multiple researchers aimed to make "research and writing more reflexive and called into question the issues of gender, class, and race." As a result of these concerns, researchers purposefully inserted themselves as characters in the ethnographic narrative as a way of navigating the problem of researcher interference. Additionally, some of the predmoninant ways of understanding truth were eroded, and "ssues such as validity, reliability, and objectivity... were once again problematic. Pattern and interpretive theories, as opposed to causal linear theories, were now more common as writers continued to challenge older models of truth and meaning."
In addition to and perhaps because of the above, researchers became interested in the importance of culture and storytelling as they gradually became more engaged through the personal aspects in ethnographic practices.
In 1988, John Van Maanen noted three predominant ways ethnographers write about culture:
  1. Realist Tales, in which the researcher uses a "dispassionate, third-person voice" and attempts to provide an "accurate" and "objective" account of the group studied without provider much researcher response
  2. Confessional Tales, which include the researchers' "highly personalized styles" and responses to the observed data
  3. Impressionist Tales, in which the researcher uses first-person to craft a "tightly focused, vibrant, exact, but necessarily imaginative rendering of fieldwork"
At the end of the 1980s, scholars began to apply the term autoethnography to work that used confessional and impressionist forms as they recognized that "the richness of cultural lives and life practices of others cannot be fully captured or evoked in purely objective or descriptive language."

1990s to present

In the early- to mid-1990s, researchers aimed to address the concerns raised in the previous decades regarding questions of legitimacy and reliability of ethnographic approaches. One way to do that was to directly place oneself into the research narrative, noting the positionality of the researcher. Here, the researcher could either insert themselves into the research narrative or increase participants' involvement in the research project, such as through participatory action research.
Autoethnography became more popular in the 1990s for ethnographers who aimed to use "personal experience and reflexivity to examine cultural experiences." Series such as Ethnographic Alternatives and the first Handbook of Qualitative Research were published to better explain the importance of autoethnographic use, and key texts focused specifically on autoethnography were published, including Carolyn Ellis's Investigating Subjectivity, ''Final Negotiations, The Ethnographic I, and Revision, as well as Art Bochner's Coming to Narrative. In 2013, Tony Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis co-edited the first edition of the Handbook of Autoethnography. They published Autoethnography in 2015 and the second edition of the Handbook of Autoethnography in 2022. In 2020, Adams and Andrew Herrmann started the Journal of Autoethnography with the University of California Press. In 2021, Marlen Harrison started The Autoethnographer'', a Literary & Arts Magazine. In 2023, Tony Adams launched the Certificate in Autoethnography program at Bradley University.
In the 2000s, major conferences began to regularly accept autoethnographic work, starting primarily with the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Other conferences that foreground autoethnographic research include the International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative, the International Conference of Autoethnography, and Critical Autoethnography.
Today, ethnographers typically use a "kind of hybrid form of confessional-impressionist tale" that includes "performative, poetic, impressionistic, symbolic, and lyrical language" while also "focusing closely on the self-data inherent in confessional writing."