Carolyn Ellis stated that autoethnography as a form of ethnography as a part of auto/self, in order to understand cultural experience. Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience.
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A researcher uses tenets of autobiography and ethnography to 'do' and 'write' autoethnography. Thus, as a method, autoethnography is both a process and product.
Jony E Adams and Arthur state that autoethnography is a research method uses as a reseachers's personal experience to describe and critique cultural beliefs, practices and experience, acknowledge and values a researchers relationship with other.
Autoethnography is a combination of auto-biography and ethnography. Autobiography is a person retroactivity and selectivity writes about past experiences which are brought together by recall or recollect. Example, Ephiphanies- remembered moments. And also by using interview, photographs, journals and recordings
While ethnography is a study of culture, it includes rational practices, common values and belief and share experiences by becoming participant observer in the culture by taking field notes of cultural happenings. Also by interviewing cultural member, examine member's way of speaking and relating, investigate uses of space and place or analyze artefacts such as clothing and architecture, and such as books, movies and photographs.
The Product
In order to write autobiography, authors are expected to posses a fine command of the print medium.
Autubiographers can make texts aethetics and avocative by using techniques of 'showing' to bring reader into the scene- particularly into thoughts, emotions, and action in order to 'experience an experience'. 'Telling' is a writing strategy that works with 'showing' to provides readers some distance from the events in a more abstract way.
Autobiograher make a text artful and evocative by altering authorial points of view by using a first person or even third person to express himself.
When researchers writes ethnographies, they produce a 'thick description' (Clifford Greetz) of a culture. The goal of thick description is to help facilitate understanding of a culture for insiders and outsiders and is created by pattern of cultural experience as evidenced by field notes, interview and or artifacts. They seek to produce aesthetic and evocate thick description of personal and interpersonal experience. Thus, they not only tries to make personal experience meaningful and cultural experience engaging but also by producing accessible texts, they may be able to reach wider mass audience, a move that can make personal and social change for more people.
Forms and approaches to Autoethnography:
1. Indigeneous/native ethnographies: For example, it develop from colonized or economically subordinated peoole, and are used to address and disrupt power in research, particularly a reseacher's right and authority to study others.
2.Narrative Ethnograpgies: It refers to texts presented in the form of stories that incorporate the ethbographer's experiences into the ethnographic descriptions and analysis of others.
3.Reflextive, dyadic interviews: It focus on the interactively produced meanings and emotional dynamics of the interview itself. Though the main focus is on the participant and his story, the researchers words and feelings are also important just like interview between two participant with closely discussing the topics. It can change by the process of interviewing.
4. Reflexive Ethnographies: A findings of the research in field work can change a reseachers life. Here the personal experience can also be useful and helping in his research.
5. Layered accounts: It often focused on the author's experience alongside data, abstract analysis and relevant literature. This form emphasizes the procedural nature of research.
6. Interactive interviews: It is a collabrative endeavors between reseachers and participants, those who are closely interact about particular topics. The story or idea draw from their conersation can be added to his own autoethnographic research.
7. Community Autoethnography: It use the personla experience of researchers in collaborate to illustrate how a community manifest particular social/cultural issues.
8.Co-constructed narratives: It illustrated that two persons intimate relation and shared their experience through their rememebered moments. From that co-reconstrictive narratives, a story/idea can get and be written like 1st, 2nd, 3rd person by the ethnographer to represent himself.
9. Personal narratives: Personal narratives are stories about authors who view themselves through diaries, videos etc. specifically focused on their academic research and personal lives.
Importance of Autoethnographic writing
The writings of personal stories can make feel better for authors. It encourage personal efficiency, purge the burden, raise conciousness and promote cultural change, and a voicless can have a voice through autoethnography. In 1960s, feminist Bettt Friedan promote writings in order to introduce and share women's stories of the white middle-class women and let them know women's right.
Reliability, Validity and generalizability are applied to autoethnography:
1. Reliability: It refers to the narrator's credibility.
2.Validity: It means that a work seeks verisimilitude.
3. Generalizability: Respondents to readers and determine if a story speaks to them about their experience.
Critiques and response
As autoethnography is a part of ethnography and part of autobiography, autoethnographers are often criticized in the same line. They criticized that it is either being too artful and not scientific, or too scientific and not sufficiently artful.
As a part of ethnography, autoethbography is dissmissed for social scientific standards as being insufficiently rigorous, theoretical and analytical and too aesthetic, emotional and therapeutic.
As a part of autobiography, autoethnography is dismmissed for autobiographical writing standard as being in sufficiently aesthetic and literary an not artful enough.
So, we can came to conclude that Autoethnography is useful for an ethnographer to help him move attractive in his research.
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