Blackwell Reference Online

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Autoethnography is a theoretical, methodological, and (primarily) textual approach that seeks to experience, reflect on, and represent through evocation the relationship among self and culture, individual and collective experience, and identity politics and appeals for social justice. In investigating these relationships, autoethnography fuses personal narrative and sociocultural exploration. Autoethnographic inquiry and writing has long been practiced by journalists and novelists, historians and biographers, travelers and journal writers. However, development of the theoretical, methodological, and textual concerns and conventions of autoethnography among researchers and scholars in the human disciplines is more recent. Autoethnography, as the term suggests, is closely aligned with ethnography, which in turn is most notably associated with anthropological explorations of cultural practices beginning in the twentieth century (though ethnographic writing dates to the sixteenth century and perhaps earlier). Such explorations focused on cultures as whole systems, subsuming individual and personal experience within larger, often monolithic structures of kinship and interaction. As practitioners of ethnography began to question the possibility and politics of western writers and scholars’ claims to objectively and authoritatively investigate and represent exotic “others,” ethnographic ... log in or subscribe to read full text