Autoethnography as research methodology?

Abstract

Composition studies has adapted ethnographic practices to form a new research methodology in "autoethnography." This article highlights some of the problematic issues in the autoethnography, interrogates the shift away from autobiography, and proposes a new relationship for the reader and researcher.

Introduction

In The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz argues, "a good interpretation of anything... takes us into the heart of that which it is the interpretation" (18). This suggests a profound faith in the researcher, in the process of inquiry systematized by ethnographic methodology, and in knowledge itself: that a researcher can, in fact, find the "heart" of a culture and re-present it in language, that there is a definable "heart."

Autoethnography grows out of this methodology, a cross-disciplinary "borrowing." As Linda Brodkey argues in Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only, autoethnography is the study of a culture through an individual's self-study: "personal histories ground cultural analysis and criticism" (27). As a relatively new methodology in composition studies, it little theoretical framing of its own; this newly emerging disciplinary practice derives its authority as a research method from anthropology. Thus composition scholars are "doing" autoethnography without a discipline-specific context.

But what does this really mean? What is the relationship between ethnographic fieldwork defined from an anthropological perspective and composition studies' adaptation and appropriation of it? Finally, how does autoethnography relate to autobiography?

From Ethnography 

Geertz asserts the subjective nature of ethnography as an interpretive, not merely observational, study of the "data" of a culture, the "socially established structures of meaning ... What we call our data are really our constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to" (12, 10). The ethnographer must "sort out [of] structures of signification" (9) by systematizing her interpretations of her informants' interpretations. Geertz argues, "Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meaning, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses" (20).

However, these broad goals are not transparently enacted, for example, in "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." Geertz's constructions are presented as "fact" with little reference to how the Balinese view themselves: "the villagers dealt with us as the Balinese always seem to deal with people not part of their life ... as though we were not there ... ignored us in a way only a Balinese can do..." (412). He is sorting out "'structures of signification" here, but apparently only through the lens of his experience, and only though the comparison of the Balinese to other cultures. When he does refer to his informants' constructions, it is to validate his conclusions. After an explication of the "deep psychological identification of Balinese men with their cocks" (417) and the rituals of the cockfight and betting, Geertz enumerates the ways that this plays out the "status concerns" of the culture. He concludes, "Finally the Balinese peasants themselves are quite aware of all this and can and, at least to an ethnographer, do state most of it in approximately the same terms I have" (440).

While they can recognize "a dimension of Balinese experience normally that is obscured from view" (444) which Geertz has presented as simultaneously "fact" and his meaning-making, they can only do so via the presence of the cultural outsider. A faith in the researcher and his data: the outsider can accurately "read" a culture.[1] Recognizing cultural patterns, in Geertz's formula, hinges upon that researcher.

Ethnographic methodology has proved fruitful for composition studies and education research, in accounting, in particular, for the development of literacy and the influences of culture upon a writer. In "Ethnography and Methodology," Beverly Moss reiterates the definition of ethnography as "[to] study, explore and describe a group's culture" (155). This methodology invites multiple perspectives, as the researcher looks at the history, participants, and language of a community. As the researcher's questions evolve, the community members define the community for themselves through thick description, "based on how [they] make meaning and explain and interpret social actions in their own communities; in short, how they define culture" (157).

Data collection consists of multiple experiential and observational activities, analyzed through the researcher's identification of patterns and relationships implicit in the life of the community. Moss perceives the problematic in this project. Warning against "ethnocentrism and mental baggage" (168), she locates critical interpretive tensions. Her questions about the role and limitations of the researcher echo the tensions I located in "Deep Play," namely, the insider/outsider dynamic that seems at the center of the ethnographic project. Moss questions how "membership" inflects vision, how a lack of distance may alter the perception of "significant patterns." Thus, the ethnographic project hinges on a difficult balance. The researcher must be both "insider" and "outsider" to the culture she explores. One must be a "member" to observe the informants' representation of that culture to themselves, but one must obey the imperative to maintain distance to be able to observe these significant patterns. The researcher must be both within and distinct from the community to adequately conceptualize that culture.

How does autoethnography fit into this research protocol? How does the researcher manage these multiple roles that exist simultaneously: to be a cultural informant, whose constructions of her culture are the "data" of the study as well as to be that observer who sorts through the informant's interpretations? When the methodological imperative of an insider/outsider dynamic disappears, the study "not of the village, but in the village" (Geertz 21) is radically transformed. When "the village" becomes a village of one, when "data" and "data collector" are one, is ethnography possible?

To Autoethnography

In discussing Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks, Francoise Lionnet defines autoethnography as "open[ing] up a space of resistance between the individual (auto-) and the collective (-ethno-) where the writing (-graphy) of resistance cannot be foreclosed" (391), thus simultaneously challenging the limitations of a singular identity and that which is constituted by culture. Brodkey further suggests autoethnography invests itself in "the potential for social change rather than any psychological benefits" (28). Mary Louise Pratt expands Lionnet's formulation, foregrounding autoethnography as

   a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways
   that engage with representations that others have made of them.
   Thus if ethnographic texts are those in which European metropolitan
   subjects represent to themselves their others ... autoethnographic
   texts are representations that the so-defined others construct in
   response to or in dialogue with those texts ... [to] create
   self-representations intended to intervene in metropolitan modes of
   understanding... (35).

For Lionnet and Pratt, autoethnography is political and reactive, written in response to a colonizer's [mis]representations of that culture. Self-interpretation is triangulated by the colonizer's representations. In Moss's schema, the colonizer's definitions become alternate data against which the researcher can "test" interpretations. Pratt's vision seems limited in its literal sense: rather than simply imagining autoethnography in response to the printed texts of colonizers, it is useful to understand the "metropolitan modes of understanding" as the spoken and unspoken texts of a culture, the dominant representations that shape interactions within that culture. Thus, autoethnography is the language of protest.

In contrast to these definitions, in "Writing on the Bias" Brodkey produces what may be termed the first self-proclaimed autoethnography. In a graduate seminar on ethnographic methodology, she asked her students to produce their own pieces that highlight the "problems of representation in ethnography [which] cannot be understood apart from the problems of collecting and transforming data collected in the field...students were ask to treat themselves as informants ..." (207). Such an account suggests that autoethnography shares (unproblematically) those processes of collecting and interpreting data that distinguish ethnography.

However, Brodkey's "Writing on the Bias" and Mark Dressman's "Catholic Boy: An Account of Parochial School Literacy" [2] highlight the problems of data-collection and analysis in autoethnography. Both texts are retrospective; data collection is limited to memory. Brodkey tries to externalize the sources of data, proposing family folklore and "stories" are "all that remain of that childhood experience" (528). In suggesting her memories are "carefully staged" (532), Brodkey suggests that data itself is destabilized.

Can we utilize memory in an autoethnographic project in the same way we use observation, interviews, and material records in an ethnography? Memory is a self-selecting process, creating patterns through elision, emphasis, forgetfulness. Such transformations radically alter the "data." We read the writer's retrospective reconstructions of, essentially, a different culture; hypotheses inhere through these patterns of memory. History gives these constructions a teleological imperative: to explain the present though the past. There is no alternate source against which to "test" the hypotheses presented as inarguable. For example, Brodkey reflects,

   When I finally studied dance ... I learned the rules and followed
   them religiously. I loved the discipline of ballet with all the
   fervor of an S & M enthusiast, for I can recall no distinctions
   between pleasure and pain. I cherished the grueling daily routine
   that disciplines students not to cut class for fear of permanent
   injury; I learned to trust bloody toes and aching muscles as proof
   of progress; I fasted and dieted routinely, all so that I could,
   every once in a while, fly ... If I didn't fly as often as I wished,
   perhaps it was because I was a good Catholic girl who translated
   the discipline of ballet into ritual enactments ... (531)

Why, for Brodkey, do religion, dance, and her mother's sewing, become pieces of the pattern of her learning to write? Memory has connected them, eliding what does not easily fit. Beverly Moss's concern for the ethnographer's "distance" and "membership" impeding vision and analysis seem useful here: can Brodkey-the-ethnographer recognize the significant patterns of her "village of one"? Dressman's account also conflates his constructions in memory and the present. In describing his "method" for looking up articles in The Golden Book Encyclopedia, he says:

   I had learned everything in school that I needed to get by in life
   ... I preferred instead my own system of finding an article by
   looking for its picture on the cover of a volume and then searching
   through the pages until I found the article. In that way I was
   sidetracked a lot ... It was a game to me, systematically
   desultory, and remains to this day my "method" of doing library
   research, shopping, driving cross-country, making friends, and
   building a career ... (275)

Is this the child's voice, or the adult's, seeking patterns in memory to explain his present? Likewise, I wonder about the child represented in Brodkey's text. I read her account of learning to write, not with questions about objectivity, but with questions about her position within the text. She is the "child of memory" who acted in culture; the child who created meaning contemporaneously with her experience; the adult whose memory reshapes those accounts to a coherent whole, to fit into a conceptual framework about her past and present identities and about how culture "works"; the adult who may be experiencing discomfort about the "shill" from a working-class background to a middle-class culture through the education this piece documents; the academic who shapes this account to create an argument about the effects of middle-class schooling and culture upon a child's desire to write; the academic who, I argue, proposes a highly-gendered re-visioning of the writing process.

This potentially-tangled multiplication of identities is striking compared to the original ethnographic model: ethnography's imperative to distinguish "inside" and "outside" a culture is erased in the autoethnographic project. Unlike traditional ethnography, there is no distinguishable "observer" in this project. Instead, the autoethnographer is simultaneously always observer, always data. To apply Pratt's configuration of the power relations in the autoethnographic project, Brodkey is both colonizer and colonized: using the middle-class language of the academy in protest of her experience as the "other." She reads her own working class culture as "other," to interrogate the position she now inhabits.

Such positioning leads to another distinguishing feature of the autoethnographic project: the researcher's agenda. Ethnographers have a stake in the cultures they present: Moss writes about a community of which she is a part and acknowledges her responsibility to that community. Geertz is arguably less constrained in how the text of the Balinese "comes out." (This is not to suggest his reading of them was completely impartial. Naturalizing the Balinese as a not-so-dissimilar culture has political consequences). But there is something very different at stake for Brodkey, in her representation of her culture, of herself as a culture, despite her disavowal of any "psychological" benefit. She reflexively returns to seek an explanation for her academic success. A tale of upward mobility through education, her story follows a particular cultural pattern: a rags-to-riches story where success is predicated by the lessons of home, materialized in her metaphor of "writing on the bias." In positioning herself as both culture and its interpreter, Brodkey has something critical at issue: a middle-class anxiety about position. To what extent does this shape her accounting of/for culture? Dressman's account, mapping out his anxiety about his educational success and identity, also relies upon a familiar cultural narrative. His account is intriguing in how it represents the rhetorical situation of being assigned an autoethnography. Tracing his disillusionment with the "educational process" and his distancing from schoolwork and the authority of school, Dressman concludes,

   The process of separating laborers from managers that had begun in
   primary school was concluding for me, as my disillusionment with
   the ends, but not the means, of management began to grown. Since
   then I have wandered, in a desultory search for more satisfying
   things to do. (283)

Harkening back to his opening, and his "systematically desultory" encyclopedia searches, Dressman seems to be involved in a process of justification---to himself and his primary reader (Brodkey). After professing his disaffection from the academic enterprise, Dressman has to offer an explanation of his identity as a graduate student. The rhetorical situation calls forth another cultural narrative, the wandering, dispirited hero searching for redemption. The implied message from student to teacher: perhaps this will be a more satisfying labor.

In looking at these two self-designated autoethnographies, their connection to the ethnographic project seems blurred indeed. Indeed they study a culture, but the roles of researcher and "data," observer and participant are inextricably linked in the autoethnographic project. While these narratives offer valuable ways of understanding a culture, to call them "ethnographies" ignores the radical ways they are different from those projects.

To Autobiography

Brodkey claims, "I wrote this ["Writing on the Bias"] in memory of other people's children. I once was and sometimes still am one of those children ..." (27). In this explanation (and the need to explain) Brodkey reveals a complex relationship to experience as a way of knowing, explicitly connected to the contested position of "experience" within the academy. She embraces it as a viable source of information, while distancing herself from the problematic "personal narrative." She externalizes her motivation in "other people's children," skillfully evading an admission of any investment in how her narrative "turns out."

To tell her story requires justification: "This is a family story about my success in school, but in my autoethnography I also see it as a story about a working-class family and neighborhood in a small town in Illinois in the 1950s" (173). Experience is validated in a backhand way: it is validated as a way of knowing, as a grounding for thinking critically, but only through its connection with an "authorized" way of knowing in ethnography. Experience and narrative assume prestige through association with a "scientific" research method. Experience, then, is validated as a way of knowing, but only through the maintenance of a devalued [and limited] "other" of narrative, a perceived less critical version of it. Autoethnography derives its authority through narrow conceptualization of the autobiographical project.

This uneasy relationship to experience connects to the autoethnographic impulse to distinguish itself from autobiography. Lionnet, in discussing Hurston's work, claims that it is "autoethnographic," not merely autobiographic because it "does not gesture towards a coherent tradition of introspective self-examination with soul-baring displays of emotion ... legitimated through a powerful source of authority such as religion or another organized system of belief" (385, 384). Perhaps an adequate description of some autobiography, this seems a short-sighted dismissal. For those who cannot assert a contiguous relationship between the self and culture, for those who experience a radical disjuncture between the collective and the individual, for those who experience a "contact zone" in representation, autobiography can provide a space for working out those relationships, without being constricted to the limits Lionnet and Brodkey want to impose.

How are we to understand critical autobiographies about the process of coming to literacy, including Richard Rodriguez's The Hunger of Memory, bell hooks' Bone Black, Frederick Douglass's Autobiographies? Autobiography, for these and other writers, is always a process of representing a culture, of engaging with texts to disrupt "metropolitan modes of understanding." To suggest otherwise is to radically misconstrue the radical potential of autobiography. Madeleine Grumet, in "The Politics of Personal Knowledge," quotes Janet Gunn on the success of autobiography:

   "The problem of autobiography lies in the threat of ideology which
   dogs all narrative in its compulsion towards whole. The pull
   towards ideology is all the more difficult for autobiography to
   resist because the ideological impulse has so much in common with
   the autobiographical impulse. Both arise from a simultaneous
   groundedness and a need for acknowledging a meaningful orientation
   in the world ..."

   When we work with life history, the autobiographical act is not
   complete until the writer of the story has become its reader and
   the temporal fissure that has opened between the writing and the
   reading invite negation as well as affirmation ... (72-73)

The type of splitting that Brodkey proposes between writing that has "psychological benefits" and writing that calls for social action is not possible in this vision; personal cannot be divided from political in autobiography's inextricable association with ideology. "A meaningful groundedness in the world" necessarily involves both the individual and the collective as a single enterprise.

And Back Again

I do not dispute memory and its pattern-making processes as a viable source of knowledge and theorizing about culture; indeed my own research draws on my students' and my own retrospective narratives. However, I believe we need a better way to articulate the place of the researcher's story in the research that does not dismiss the radical potential of autobiography.

In "Personal Ethnography," Lyall Crawford argues " ... taking the ethnographic turn, living and writing the ethnographic life, is essentially a self-report of personal experiences. Ethnography, then, becomes autoethnographic [I would substitute autobiographic here] because the ethnographer is unavoidably in the ethnography one way or another, however subtly or obviously" (158). Since ethnography is always about the ethnographer, Geertz's study of the Balinese is a study of himself; Brodkey's representation of a "working class family in the 1950s" is her vision of what that should look like. Crawford proposes a radical re-visioning of the relationship between ethnography and autoethnography.

   I must include some account of myself ... the reflexive turn of
   fieldwork for human study by (re)positioning the researcher as an
   object of inquiry ... An unstable/ subjective self, the reduction
   of distinctions, the surfing of perspectives, the high-speed
   juxtaposition of the private and global, and the like may be
   features of autoethnographic account ... a kind of guerilla action
   and subversive discourse that productively challenges and changes
   the traditional and, in my judgment, transparently flawed ways of
   experiencing, portraying and acknowledging ethnography. (167-9)

This radical reformulation of the ethnographic project activates a different relationship for the reader of the text. When we come to see all ethnography (and all research) as about the researcher, as autobiographical in some sense, readers must recognize themselves as active ethnographers as well, studying, exploring, and describing the culture represented in the printed text. The "ethnocentrism and mental baggage" that Beverly Moss warns against are welcomed as part of the ethnographic project, as critical data to consider for a "good interpretation."

Works Cited

Brodkey, Linda. "Writing on the Bias." College English. 56:5 (Sept. 1994): 527-547.

--. Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Crawford, Lyall. "Personal Ethnography." Communication Monographs. 63 (June 1996): 158-170.

Dressman, Mark. "Catholic Boy: An Account of Parochial School Literacy." Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only. Linda Brodkey (ed.) Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996. 275-283.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Grumet, Madeleine R. "The Politics of Personal Knowledge." Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dialogue in Education. Carol Witherell and Nel Noddings (eds.) New York: Teachers College Press, 1991.67-81.

Lionnet, Francoise. "Autoethnography: The An-Archic Style of Dust Tracks on a Road." Reading Black, Reading Feminist. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.) New York: Meridian, 1990. 382-414.

Moss, Beverly J. "Ethnography and Composition: Studying Language at Home." Methods and Methodology in Composition Research. Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Sullivan (eds). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 153-171.

Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession. New York: MLA, 1991.33-40.

Endnotes

[1] Geertz dramatizes this point in the closing sections of the essay, when he compares "a story they tell themselves about themselves" (448) to distinctly non-Balinese cultural artifacts: Aristotle, Freud, Shakespeare and Dickens. The cockfights attain their significance when they are placed within this matrix of distinctly Western themes.

[2] Due to space constraints, I focus my analysis primarily on Brodkey's writing, because she theorizes about this project in Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only. She also publishes five of her students' accounts; I examine one of these to discuss other methodological constraints.

Mary M. Reda, College of Staten Island, NY

Reda, PhD is an assistant professor of English and co-coordinator of Writing.