Ethnography Unbound: From Theory Shock to Critical Praxis

10. Critical Auto/Ethnography: A Constructive Approach to Research in the Composition Classroom

Personal narrative mediates [the] contradiction between the engagement called for in fieldwork and the self-effacement called for in formal ethnographic description, or at least it mitigates some of its anguish, by inserting into the text the authority of the personal experience out of which ethnography is made. —Mary Louise Pratt, “Fieldwork in Common Places” The only way to fight a hegemonic discourse is to teach ourselves and others alternative ways of seeing the world and discussing what it is we have come to understand as theory, research, and practice. —Linda Brodkey, Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only MARY WAS THE FIRST STUDENT to voice a connection.1 It was the last class meeting of a general curriculum composition course, and the students were ready to make a run for it. I had organized the order of the reading and writing assignments to demonstrate that autobiography and ethnography operate on a continuum and to suggest that the two forms of narrative are inextricably connected. The first writing assignment was an autobiographical essay 183 10 Critical Auto/Ethnography A Constructive Approach to Research in the Composition Classroom SUSAN S. HANSON and the last, an ethnographic essay based on the student’s own field research. I was reviewing the path the students had taken from the autobiographical Here to the ethnographic There, from writing about the Self to writing about the Other, hopeful that the students would reflect on what they learned about points of view and voice, when Mary interjected, “It’s like we’re back where we started.” “Exactly.” Autobiography is a self-oriented narrative based on personal experience whereas ethnography is an other-oriented one based on systematic participant observation.2 As a composition pedagogy, critical auto/ethnography enables subjugated others (read students) to do systematic fieldwork and data production about subjects other than themselves, but without concealing what they learn about themselves in the process. As Françoise Lionnet suggests, writers and readers must resist subscribing to the dominant conventions, resist assimilating , and resist reinforcing the practices and assumptions that relegate nonconforming texts to the margin (326). Critical auto/ethnography is a nonconforming text. When I first encountered the term autoethnography while doing research in connection with a graduate course on fieldwork methods, I automatically presumed that it was intended to suggest that there is space within ethnography to locate the Self as a subject; a space to narrate, perhaps in some detail, aspects of the ethnographer’s own experiences; a space other than the introduction to situate my story. Exhilarated by the possibilities, I consulted my committee members, fully expecting that they would share my enthusiasm. “Do you mean reflexive ethnography?” “No, I’m talking about autoethnography—ethnography that is part autobiography.” “You don’t want to write about yourself, do you?” I thought to myself, “That’s precisely what I want to do. How better to explain how I learned what I learned?” The idea that an ethnographer learns by and through systematic participant observation, and then suppresses (or disguises) the Self in the telling struck me then and strikes me still as problematic . But I was persuaded by the reactions, one after another, to accept that my “I-story” should not, would not figure in my thesis because, “No one wants to read about the ethnographer.” The primary message is that, while we should be aware of our identities and how these may affect our field research, we should continue to work toward scientific observations of people and their cultures. The objective of ethnography should not be to learn more about ourselves as individuals (although that will happen), but to learn more about others. (Dewalt and Dewalt 291) 184 Susan S. Hanson Therein lies the dilemma. Is producing a text that is both Self- and Otheroriented possible? And in what contexts is it appropriate, effective—even necessary , perhaps—to combine both points of view within a single narrative? The goal of this chapter is to explore that ground. To be sure, the reflexive turn cleared the way within ethnography for the ethnographer to reflect on her own subjectivity. Yet, of those ethnographers who have risked slipping more of the Self into the body of their ethnography than is customary, few anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists, or sociolinguists have dared to describe either their methods or their texts as autoethnographic because the term is largely pejorative. Unlike the “auto” of autobiography , which is understood to connote...