Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work

Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives

by Carolyn Ellis

Carolyn Ellis is the leading writer in the move toward personal, autobiographical writing as a strategy for academic research. In addition to her landmark books Final Negotiations and The Ethnographic I, she has authored numerous stories that demonstrate the emotional power and academic value of autoethnography. This volume collects a dozen of Ellis’s stories―about the loss of her husband, brother and mother; of growing up in small town Virginia; about the work of the ethnographer; about emotionally charged life issues such as abortion, caregiving, and love. Atop these captivating stories, she adds the component of meta-autoethography―a layering of new interpretations, reflections, and vignettes to her older work. An important new work for qualitative researchers and a student-friendly text for courses.

396 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Carolyn Ellis is an interdisciplinary scholar and qualitative researcher, widely regarded as an originator and developer of autoethnography, a reflexive approach to research, writing, and storytelling that connects the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political.

She is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of South Florida and an Honorary Professor at the Communication University of China. She served as President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and is a founding member of the Ethnography Division in the National Communication Association and the Section on Emotions in the American Sociological Association. Among her publications are a documentary film, five monographs, six edited books, and more than 150 articles, book chapters, and essays on autoethnography, ethnography, compassionate and interactive interviewing, research ethics, death and dying, minor bodily stigmas, caregiving, intimate relationships, health and illness, and research with Holocaust survivors.[4][5] Ellis retired from the University of South Florida in 2018.

Reviews

[Arda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notes from thesis:
Finding oneself defined as something or other by way of place impacts not only how one sees oneself but also the ways in which one navigates the world. Such is one of the purposes of autoethnography, for it provides a way of understanding who we are in the world, how we relate to the world, and how we want to live our lives (Ellis, 2013). And such is the genre of “autobiographical writing and research” about the “personal and its relationship to culture” and which “displays multiple layers of consciousness” (Ellis, 2004, p. 37).

Delving into reflexive inquiry in a manner that engages the details of lived experience has the potential not only to change the way one feels about what one thinks one knows, but also to change one’s stories (Ellis, 2009).

[Amy]

I like Ellis's idea of meta-autoethnography and her description of her methodology, and picked up this book out of a desire to write about my own life, and to find common ground between narrative therapy and production of narrative as a qualitative research method, which it will undoubtedly help me do.

I do think, unfortunately, some of the criticisms of autoethnography come true in this text; specifically, that it claims a type of universality that is simply not possible with this form without making wild presumptions about similarity of human experience. Although, that does not mean its products are not valuable, and also does not mean what one learns from producing one's own or reading another's autoethnographic account is not applicable in the sense of having potential to generate social change/ how we see things/ how we see ourselves.

For example, Ellis writes about her experience of her lisp, and encountering an African-American man with a lisp who "hates his voice," leading Ellis to explore her own experience of her lisp and the concept of "minor bodily stigma" more broadly. However, and even though she makes efforts to at least name her awareness of cultural difference, it seems to me quite presumptuous to assume that her hatred of her voice and this man's hatred of his voice have much in common. In particular, she neglects gender-- it struck me as rather obvious that a man, particularly a man who already stood out as a person of color in the mostly white community of his childhood-- would hate and attempt to conceal another marker of difference, but particularly a marker of difference that for men is read into as a sign of being gay. This alone makes his encounter with his voice of a whole different world, subject to a different set of readings of his "minor body stigma" which he tries to diminish by speaking softly. Indeed, it does not seem like a gift for him to hear that she loves his voice in the same way it would be for her to hear that someone loves hers, and he responds with a gritty, aggressive (stereotypically heterosexual masculine?) vocal tone to someone openly loving this effortfully disavowed fragment of his identity.

This makes me begin to think about a revised autoethnographic method, perhaps informed by psychoanalysis, in which one situates oneself in history, rather than only situating history in oneself (or, finding history through one's experience, the autoethnographic way)-- perhaps there is a way to combine these strategies. If anyone can recommend a text/ author/ qualitative method, please do.

[Aventurera Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was thought-provoking and deep. i enjoyed and savored all the stories. The discussion of ethics was first-rate.