Autoethnographic Loop
When Renato Rosaldo wrote about his own grief caused by the death of his wife Michelle Rosaldo in the field, that grief served for him as a vehicle into embracing the category of the Ilongot grief — so powerful that it led the person to cut off the head of the ambushed enemy. Renato Rosaldo found himself resisting writing about his own experience: “introducing myself into this account requires a certain hesitation both because of the discipline’s taboo and because of its increasingly frequent violation by essays laced with trendy amalgams of continental philosophy and autobiographical snippets.” (Rosaldo 1993, 170). Admittedly, in this reluctant embrace, Rosaldo did not even use the word “autoethnography”; he is talking about “autobiographical snippets.”[1]
The “taboo” of the discipline had significantly lifted since then, due to the growing feminist-championed understanding that the positionality of the anthropologist bears a crucial weight on the anthropological finding, and there is no objective, much less once-equated with the “etic” perspective, truth to which the Western-trained anthropologist has a privileged access. Therefore, in order to evaluate the findings, the public must know where the anthropologist stands in regard to the object of their research.
But the other problem perseveres: “if the classic ethnography’s vice was the slippage from the ideal of detachment to actual indifference, that of present-day reflexivity is the tendency for the self-absorbed Self to lose sight altogether of the culturally different Other.” (Rosaldo 1993, 170). And if the construal of the self in opposition to markedly “culturally different Other” is probably not the idea that the anthropologist will embrace in 2019 without reservation, the self-absorption of the accounts where the self becomes the actual subject and the world of the “cultural settings” serves only as an effective backdrop, continues to plague anthropological accounts.
Despite all the critique that autoethnographic attempts as self-serving and narcissistic, the figure of the anthropologist is always already included into account, if only through the silence that surrounds it to facilitate the “objectivity” of the account. The only difference is whether it is banned on the periphery of our vision or admitted as the subject of reflection. For how much of what ostensibly presents itself as an ethnography, is deep down a veiled autoethnography? If anthropology emerges in the tension between “the other” and “the self,” autoethnography is the process wherein I am othering myself and myselving the other.
The ontological ground to autoethnography is clear: there is only one person of whom one might talk with any kind of ontological authority–oneself. There is no transcending to the limits of self in writing or otherwise. The idea of writing through such device as “self,” as Kathleen Stewart writes, still elicits a split. On the negative extreme of these reactions, she says, “people can feel vertigo, nausea, an almost traumatic fight and flight response. In my experience, this last, extreme response is usually experienced by men and is fairly common for whatever reason. It is certainly not that a gross and essential category, men, is without imagination or experiences, and yet there may be something gendered happening.” (Stewart 2014, 659).
To account for this reaction of uneasiness, “analytic autoethnography” emerged, with clearly defined limitations of this method of qualitative research, as opposed to “evocative autoethnography” (Anderson 2006), some of those who embraced it ended up with the mischievous anticipations of how “Mainstream ethnographers might not like our use of the word ‘autopsy.’” (Ellis and Bochner in “Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography: An Autopsy,” 2006, 447), as well as the attempts to make sense of the (perhaps excessively) convoluted reflections (such as Denzin “Analytic Autoethnography, or Déjà Vu all Over Again,” 2006). The idea is to create more space for experimental space of writing. I am on board with this idea.
But, at the same time, I can’t overcome my aversion to autoethnography. While autoethnography is a useful tool and I am making use out of it, I am well aware of its tendency to center the self at the expense of what is “really” interesting, and I am resisting the seductive allure of the prospect of talking about myself where I could talk about others. Ultimately, the endless loops of reflections around autoethnography are not that deep.[2]
Auto-writing is an autopsy of the still-living body. By documenting the traces of living we’re at the same time creating an autothanatography, as Derrida calls it (1987, 273).
Derrida is probably a model writer for recording “everything that has ever happened to you.” Which is not what autothanatography necessarily is about, but which is the final form of writing about self. Derrida is writing love letters to his lover even as she is present; in fulfillment of the dream “of the complete electro-cardio-encephalo-LOGO-icono-cinemato-bio-gram,” as he calls it (The Post Card, 68). Grammatology yields to electrocardioencephaloLOGOicionocinematobiogrammatology.
I understand such “gram” as an ultimate gram of being, a complete record that is at the same time equivalent to the writer and at the same time bigger than she is (as well as infinitely smaller). And even one moment recorded ultimately, is beyond immense: even a short moment, “a very brief lapse of time” (Ibid) will take infinity of time to be read properly, exhaustively read: “afterwards they would need centuries of university to decipher it.”
I imagine a huge institution decoding such gram, reading such reading, as Lenin’s brain, sliced one thin petal after another, in a vain attempt to decode the nature of human genius and mystery of consciousness.
References
Anderson, Leon. “Analytic autoethnography.” Journal of contemporary ethnography 35.4 (2006): 373–395.
Denzin, Norman K. “Analytic autoethnography, or déjà vu all over again.” Journal of contemporary ethnography 35.4 (2006): 419–428.
Derrida, Jacques, and Alan Bass (translator). The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Rosaldo, Renato. “Introduction: Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press; London: Taylor & Francis, 1993.
Stewart, Kathleen. “An Autoethnography of What Happens.” From Handbook of Autoethnography, ed. by Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, Carolyn Ellis. Oxford University Press, 2014.
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[1] Ethnography purports to be a genre of nonfiction. But perhaps the best autoethnographies of class, culture, and society were written as autobiographies. For example, Xavier de Maister’s Journey Round My Room and Nocturnal Expedition Round My Room, Leo Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Autoethnography begins where it transgresses the limits of self and tells us something about a certain group of people, much as this notion could be resisted by those who were always afforded individuality and personhood in greater degree than others.
[2] Curiously, the writing of autoethnography is likely also to be a writing of “how to write an autoethnography.” On a new level, writing autoethnography would entail how to write autoethnography of writing autoethnography. The final production would be a metaautoethnographic reflection on autoethnographic methods.
