Notes on Autoethnography part 1: Definitions and Problems

This is another section from my thesis which concerns the ways that free improvisors engage in the creation of a group identity and how they exclude audiences.

(a short note: this post first appeared on my blog a few months ago and uses a dictionary definition within it, this is a very lazy thing to do and i offer my apologies however i wanted to preserve the post as it was.)

‘We are in the burning bush. We are born in the burning bush.’ (Cixous 1998, XVI)

In preparation for Thursday’s improvisation I must consider how I will engage in an analysis of my own responses to the event, I must consider how I will engage in autoethnography. ethnography and autoethnography are broad methodological categories and need to be defined to some extent before we move forward.

Words and Meanings.

On Princeton University's anthropology page ethnography is defined in the following way:

Ethnography is a research method central to knowing the world from the standpoint of its social relations. It is a qualitative research method predicated on the diversity of culture at home (wherever that may be) and abroad. Ethnography involves hands-on, on-the-scene learning — and it is relevant wherever people are relevant. (Department of Anthropology, 2022)

This, however, hardly serves as a definition, is a little too vague. Turning to the Cambridge Dictionary we are offered the following 'a scientific description of the culture of a society by someone who has lived in it, or a book containing this.' (Cambridge Dictionary 2022) The objectivity of ethnography is questionable and positivist in nature. Perhaps it is best to say that ethnography is the systematised study of cultures in which the individual studying them is situated for a time, a study of the other.

Autoethnography is the inclusion of the self within ethnographic study, the systematised study of the self as situated within culture (be that your own culture or the culture being studied within an anthropological study.) In her book 'Autoethnography as Method' Heewon Chang details an exchange with her sister-in-law over a meal where she is asked to define autoethnography. She describes it as 'a research method the utilizes the researcher's autobiographical data to analyze and interpret their cultural assumptions.' (Chang 2008, 9) This is a very high level definition and one that Chang herself admits is far from perfect (Chang 2008, 9) In 'Critical Writing for Embodied Approaches: Autoethnography, Feminism and Decoloniality' Elizabeth MacKinlay argues that Autoethnography arises from the mess and detritus of life, from 'Diaries and rooms, ordinary affects, dreams I tell you and the troubling secret lives of them' (MacKinlay 2019, 6) before situating it within Woolf's moments of being: 'imagine, Virginia and me wording and writing and wording critical autoethnography. This is the stuff that a girl sitting in a room of her own might give herself permission to dream.' (MacKinlay 2019, 6)

Autoethnography is the personal used as a tool for the universal, the acceptance of self as a construct worthy of analytical study.

The Problems With/ Within Autoethnography.

Given the claims to scientific rigour employed by ethnography (call to mind the definition from the Cambridge dictionary or the 'qualitative' of the definition offered by Princeton University) then how can that which is subjective - literally grounded in the self - nature of autoethnography also embrace the positivism of the dictionary or the quantitive nature of Princeton's definition of ethnography. Is autoethnography the poorer, less worthy companion to the more rigorous methodology of ethnography?

This is an issue Sue Butler addresses in her review of Chang's 'Autoethnography as Method.' If the objective/ subjective split is an issue in the writing of and on autoethnography then how can one achieve what Chang attempts which is a general text book on autoethnographic models, is it (to quote Bulter) 'possible to follow rigorous methodological processes...while embracing opposing philosophical, theoretical and epistemological stances?' (Butler 2009, 297) The method Chang uses is to move therein both positions without positioning herself within any camp. (Butler 2009)

I feel there is, however, an unstated and deeper issue left unaddressed by simply operating with this approach and that is to ask if the dichotomy is itself a valid one.

Within the first stage of deconstructionism Derrida critiqued the idea of dualities and dichotomies, pointing to their hierarchal nature 'with one side of the opposition being more valuable than the other.' (Lawlor, 2021) If we ask what hierarchies a objective/ subjective dichotomy embodies and what other dichotomies it shares a formal nature with (male - female, mind - body, presence - absence and so on) then we can begin to see that by engaging with the objective/ subjective dichotomy we are embodying a discourse that already ensnares us within the objective. By recognising this and choosing not to embody this hierarchy then we allow our methodological approaches to provide an equal grounding for both rigorous methodology and the insights to be gained through an immersion in self.

What next then?

This is the first part of this blog on methodology. Tomorrow I will discuss how I intend to go about the process of collecting data during the improvisations, what work has already been undertaken to create a set of themes to guide my research and what will be done with the data I collect. I will also discuss alternative texts for autoethnography including a discussion of Héléne Cixous and my use of her work to construct an awareness of the imperfect nature of solutions to the problems inherent in autoethnography, the construction of a metaphorical journey into self and the presence of the body within autoethnography.

References.

Butler, S.(2009) 'Possibilities in Autoethnography: A Critique of Heewon Chang's Autoethnography as Method.' The Weekly Qualitative Report, 2(51), pp. 295-299

Cambridge Dictionary (2022) Ethnography. Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ethnography (Accessed: 29th March, 2022)

Chang, H. (2008) Autoethnography as Method. London and New York: Routedge

Cixous, H. (1994)Preface: On Stigmatexts by Hélène Cixous, in Cixous, H. (1994)Stigmata Translated from the French by Eric Prenowitz. London and New York: Routledge Classics

Department of Anthropology (2022)What is Ethnography? Available at: https://anthropology.princeton.edu/undergraduate/what-ethnography (Accessed on 29th March, 2022)

Lawlor, L. (2021) Jacques Derrida. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Zalta, E. N. (ed.) Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/derrida/ (Accessed 29th November 2021)

MacKinley, E. (2019) Critical Writing For Embodied Approaches: Autoethnography, Feminism and Decoloniality. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan.