Autoethnography

In the article “Autoethnography: An Overview”, the authors thoroughly discuss what is an autoethnography, and what is this approach on research and writing. Ellis et al. goes on making readers understand the concept of autoethnography by discussing piece by piece the words and ideas that all contribute to the concept of autoethnography. Though it was also mentioned in the text, the points of explaining and stressing how an autoethnography is both an autobiography and ethnography implies that this type of writing centers on understanding personal experience and cultural experience in writing, it also goes to make readers open to idea that qualitative research is not necessarily limited to some neutral, limiting and conventional ways but in fact is influenced by personal knowledge, experience, and such.

The authors described the term as a systematic analysis (graphy) of personal experience (auto) to further understand cultural experience (ethno). This implies that doing autoethnography involves or influence one’s person and social experience. The process would also involve interviews, field notes, etc. as evidence to such claimed cultural and personal experience.  Although uses both techniques and product of two types of writing, autobiography and ethnography, which could be an advantage in further understanding qualitative research, autoethnography is also criticized for the same reason. The raising concern is on how autoethnography would be too much of the other and lacks the element of the other when it comes to writing standards as been mentioned on the critic response on autoethnography. Nonetheless, it would be a main goal of an autoethnography to make the readers be connected with the story or writing with its elements as it has a component of personal fractions from the writer.

Whose Story Is It? An Autoethnography Concerning Narrative Identity

The authors discussed the understanding of an autoethnography by first outlining their understanding of autoethnography in writing short stories, in historical, philosophical, theoretical, and methodological contexts, which is then followed by a short story example and a thorough analysis from a narrative identity perspective.

Grant and Zeeman emphasize the stories in lives and how every person is living in a “storied” life defining our emotions, behaviors, and perspectives, to which also influence cultural engagement. This implies that an author’s work is very much fueled and is also limited to his or her knowledge. In relation, it then gives way to the idea that a scholarly work especially in human science are influenced by the personal perspective of the author and is impossible to just follow a neutral limiting concept. The sense of beauty in writing an autoethnography was further shown in the short story by Grant, by letting the readers pip into his memories. It would look like an autobiography on the first glance but as the elements are examined, social and cultural aspects and experience are present, for instance the author’s narration of his life as a young man in Scotland. This tries to show how it was, what the culture are to be able to fully understand the story, to which also drives the story to be moving and is trying to connect with the reader. Similar reaction was shown in the discussion part of the article. Critique on the short story by can however be influenced by the discussions of the author. The literary aspect of an autoethnography is what attracts readers in to this type of writing, a metaphor for instance as also used by the author in his short story gave deeper representation of ideas than just stating them directly. With the sense of incorporating personal experience and knowledge in writing, this does not however, easily give license to poor researched writing. It must be noted that to be thoroughly connected with readers, they must be able to relate and comprehend with what the writer is presenting and use globally accepted evidence for instance.

Resources

Ellis, Carolyn; Adams, Tony & Bochner, Arthur.” Autoethnography: An Overview.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, vol. 12, no. 1, 2010, Art. 10, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1101108. Accessed 16 Mar. 2020

Grant, Alec & Zeeman Laetitia. “Whose Story Is It? An Autoethnography Concerning Narrative Identity”. The Qualitative Report, vol. 17, no. 36, 2012, pp. 1-12. Retrieved from https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1735&context=tqr. Accessed 16 Mar. 2020