On Auto-Ethnographic Authority

Widespread critiques of anthropology and advocacy for "situated knowledges" have created an atmosphere highly favorable to the rise of an autoethnography, yet use of the concept has so far been uneven, undertheorized, and largely unacknowledged. Wariness of essentialism, dissatisfaction with "culture," and confusion about the metaphors structuring our thought on group identity and ethnographic authority are important reasons why. Analyzing autoethnography's simultaneous indispensability and inadmissibility in contemporary critical discourse, this essay suggests that the prestige of the participant's perspective, fed upon the critiques of objectivity, has now attained a magnitude dangerous to criticism itself.