Photo by Scudder Stevens at the Sol Food Soulstice Divination Dinner at Merrybell Farm

I can be verbose—especially in my academic writing. My goal and challenge with this project is to be precise, comprehensive, and concise—especially when it comes to topics related to theory, philosophy, and methodology … because I could run ON! So here it is—test #1. In this post, I will discuss what auto-ethnography actually is and in tomorrow’s post, I will discuss why I use it as a method. If you're having a hard time understanding what I'm writing, please let me know and/or ask questions. Just like any profession/craft, I know and marinate in these languages and concepts all day every day and sometimes take that for granted. Additionally, different words are used in different ways by different people. I will do my best to define words that I think need it, but please ask for definitions if you need them. Please communicate with me--this is an experiment and I want your feedback about how and when I can improve what I'm doing.

Auto (self) - ethno (having to do with culture) - graphy (writing).

Ethnography is a research methodology as well as a piece of work having to do with the study of culture. Traditionally, it is associated with the field of Anthropology (the study of humanity—a scant topic). But in more recent years, it has become a methodology in its own right used by people from a variety of disciplines and walks of life. An auto-ethnography, therefore, is an approach and a piece of work that centers its creator’s personal experiences as starting points from which to explore broader cultural phenomena.

For example, today I attended the People’s Festival honoring Bob Marley in Wilmington, DE. If I were doing an auto-ethnography. I might write about the smell of jerk and the smoke wafting from a BBQ pit and use that experience as an opportunity to explore Jamaican/Caribbean food culture or the power of scent to elicit memory.  

Auto-ethnography, typically, is used as a method when someone’s life experiences illuminate a reality that doesn’t fit in to narratives typically explored in academic and cultural research. This “auto-orientation” (auto-biography, auto-fiction, auto-ethnography) is an approach taken frequently by Caribbean writers, creatives, artists, and researchers as a way of describing what it is like to live in bodies and spaces with so many different identities. Auto-orientations subvert the idea that life experiences and identities “should” be normalized and understood within a certain standard deviation on the bell curve (aka some people fit in and some people don’t). Auto-orientations allow one person the ability to express their many identities and the ways these identities reflect broader cultural and social phenomena. Besides its history in the Caribbean, this method is being used increasingly by people of color, those in LGTBQ+ communities, and those with other non-normalized/non-normative identities and lives in the United States.

When I think about the purpose of auto-ethnography as a method, it reminds me of being in high school and responding to people’s stereotypes about various groups of people by questioning if the person making the statement had encountered every person of a given group (typically, to be honest, groups of people to which most of us at my predominantly white upper middle/upper class all-girls Catholic school on the East Coast of the U.S. rarely encountered in our daily lives). So, I guess it’s no surprise that I would spend so much of my life studying, writing about, and making art about the complexity of identity. If you haven’t figured it out yet, the complexity of my own identity is one of the reasons I do the work I do. As I continue to really own the truth of who I am, though, that complexity becomes more and more of a gift. It’s become one of my favorite arts—even though, like all art, it’s a practice. Tomorrow, I will write about why I use this method in my research and how it affects the outcomes of my data and my work.

Thanks for reading,
H