What is Autoethnography?
Autoethnography: An Overview
Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams and Arthur P. Bochner
Ellis, C. Adams, T.E. and Bochner, A.P. (2011) ‘Autoethnography: An Overview’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, Vol 12 (1), Available at: https://www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095 (Accessed: 25th November)
- ‘Scholars became increasingly troubled by social science’s ontological, epistemological and axiological limitations’ (Ellis and Bochner, 2000)
- ‘Recognized the impossibility of and lack of desire for master, universal narratives’ (De Certeau, 1984; Lyotard, 1984)
- ‘Realized that stories were complex, constitutive, meaningful phenomena that taught morals and ethics, introduced unique ways of thinking and feeling, and helped people make sense of themselves and others’ (Adama, 2008; Bochner, 2001, 2002; Fisher, 1984)
- ‘Closer to literature than to physics’
- ‘Self-consciously value-centered rather than pretending to be value free.’ (Bochner, 1994)
- ‘Meaningful, accessible, and evocative research grounded in personal experience, research that would sensitize readers to issues of identity politics, to experiences shrouded in silence, and to forms of representation that deepen our capacity to empathize with people who are different to us.’ (Ellis & Bochner, 2000)
- ‘Autoethnography is one of the approaches that acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don’t exist.’
- ‘Auto-ethnography combines characteristics of autobiography and ethnography.’
- ‘Retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity.’
- Not just telling but analyzing.
‘Mitch Allen says an autoethnographer must
‘Look at experience analytically. Otherwise (you’re) telling (your) story – and that’s nice – but people do that on Oprah ( a U.S-based television program every day)’’
- Connecting to others experience
‘Autoethnographers must not only use their methodological tools and research literature to analyze experience, but also must consider ways others may experience similar epiphanies; they must use personal experience to illustrate facets of cultural and experience, and in so doing, make characteristics of a culture familiar insiders and outsiders. To accomplish this might require comparing and contrasting personal experience against existing research (Ronai, 1995, 1996), interviewing cultural members (Foster, 2006; Marvasti, 2006; Tillmann-Healy, 2001) and/or examining relevant cultural artifacts.’ (Boylorn, 2008; Denzin, 2006).
- ‘They seek to produce aesthetic and evocative thick descriptions of personal interpersonal experience.’
- Relational concerns
‘This obligates autoethnographers to show their work to others implicated in or by their texts, allowing these others to respond, and/or acknowledging how these others feel about what is being written and allowing them to talk back to how they have been represented in the text.’
- ‘When terms such as reliability, validity and generalizability are applied to autoethnography, the context, meaning and utility of these terms are altered.’
- Reliability
‘Questions of reliability refer to the narrator’s credibility. Could the narrator have had the experiences described, given available ‘factual’ evidence? Does the narrator believe that this is actually what happened to her or him?(Bochner, 2002, p.86) has the narrator taken ‘literary license’ to the point that the story is better viewed as fiction than a truthful account?’
- Validity
‘For autoethnographers, validity means that a work seeks verisimilitude; it evokes in readers a feeling that the experience described is lifelike, believable, and possible, a feeling that what has been represented could be true.’
‘What matters is the way in which the story enables the reader to enter the subjective world of the teller-to see the world from her or his point of view, even if this world does not ‘match reality’ ‘(Plummer, 2001, p.401)
‘Whether it helps readers communicate with others different from themselves or offer a way to improve the lives of participants and readers or the author’s own (Ellis, 2004, p.124)’
They ask ‘‘How useful is the story?’ and ‘To what uses might the story be put?’ (Bochner, 2002)
- Generalizability
‘The focus of generalizability moves from respondents to readers, and is always being tested by the readers as they determine if a story speaks to them about their experience or about the lives of others they know;, it is determined by whether the (specific) autoethnographer is able to illuminate (general) unfamiliar cultural processes’ (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Ellia & Ellingson, 2000)
‘Readers provide validation by comparing their lives to ours, by thinking about how our lives are similar and different and the reasons why, and by feeling that the stories have informed them about unfamiliar people or lives.’ (Ellis, 2004, p.195; Flick, 2010)
- Criticism
‘Insufficiently rigorous, theoretical and analytical, and too aesthetic, emotional and therapeutic.’ (Ellis, 2009; Hooks, 1994; Keller, 1995)
‘Too little fieldwork, for observing too few cultural members, for not spending enough time with (different) others.’ (Buzard, 2003; Fine, 2003; Delamont, 2009)
‘Not only use supposedly biased data (Anderson, 2006; Atkinson, 1997; Gans, 1999) but are also navel-gazers (Madison, 2006) self-absorbed narcissists who don’t fulfil scholarly obligations of hypothesizing, analyzing and theorizing.’
‘Insufficiently aesthetic and literary and not artful enough’
‘These criticisms erroneously position art and science at odds with each other, a condition that autoethnography seeks to correct.’
Disrupt the binary
- Most important questions:
‘Who reads our work?’
‘How are they affected by it?’
‘How does it keep conversation going?’
- In the face of methodological difference, debates over the validity of authethnography are futile.
- Different point of view toward to matter of social science
‘In Rorty’s words ‘these different views are ‘not issue(s) to be resolved, only’ instead they are difference(s) to be lived with’ (1982, p.197)