are linked to particular theoretical frameworks such as Post-colonial and Post-structural analysis, Black feminist and Queer theory, Critical Race Theory, through authors that have been key in my own research (such as the authors discussed in Chapters One and Four). These approaches are chosen not only because they are the most contemporary or “cutting edge” ones, but also because of my academic formation and my political and poetic dispositions. These theoretical currents and concepts have been the most useful for teaching students how to critically ←39 | 40→analyze and contextualize their auto-ethnographic data, to be able to produce more in-depth narratives. To avoid distracting the discussion of auto-ethnography, here I give only this brief notice of the academic sources from where I have taken these concepts; the practical uses and modified definitions of each are further described in Chapter Three.
“We Are All Ethnic”: Auto-ethnography Roots, Routes and Transformations
If we take sincerely the proposal of Trouillot (discussed in Chapter One) to problematize the “West” tropes of “the savage slot” by mapping ethno-historically the “discursive field” of the “other” from before the institutionalization of anthropology (which he sets back to the colonial encounter in the Americas after 1492), we could then include as earlier precursor Fray Ramón Pané. His self-reflexivity could be conceived as contributing to one of the first insider ethnography and even auto-ethnography in the New World. As a catholic priest during the first years of the Spanish colonization in the Americas, Pané’s (1999), took upon himself, to get to know the indigenous people he was obligated to convert to Christianity. In his brief account about the “Tainos” in the Caribbean, he showed his effort to train himself in the language they spoke (diverse dialects of Arawak) and to understand their mythology and ways of life. In this document, he highlights poetically (and indirectly politically) the tribulations of ethnographers and the limitations of the ethnographic methodology, quite a few centuries before the invention of anthropology (see Arrom 1992, Cattan 2013). Feeling the weight of the micro-macro-politics of his fieldwork (a true colonial “deep hanging-out”) with indigenous Caribbean communities in the 16th century, he recognizes that he might fail in his attempt to understand and to translate these unknown ways of life. Besides the uncertainty about available sources and “informants,” his openly admitted rudimentary language skills, and the ad hoc nature of his “scholarly” part-time pursue, I imagine that the tensions and effects of the violent colonial context on the lives of his collaborators—enslaved under the yoke of encomiendas—powerfully influenced his research and his writings. Pané’s doubts pointed—centuries in advance—to the weird role of an ethnographer; we, as ethnographers, are the problematic instrument of knowledge production, bounded by our own cultural filters, histories, circumstance, personal locations and power agendas. As Marx would say, making our histories—and being witness to others’ struggles to make theirs—happens within geopolitical contexts “not of our own choosing.”
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Taking a huge jump, from this early precursor in the 16th century Caribbean, we land in the 20th century US. The ethno-historical context in the emergence of auto-ethnography proper, has few landmark points between the 1930s and the 1970s, and moments of boom between the 1990s and 2000s as well as in the present. A quick timeline of this methodology in US anthropology is found since its early practitioners; this is the case of Zora N. Hurston’s auto-ethnography, Mules and Men, published in 1935. This timing is not accidental; it responds to the depression era and to the context of racial segregation in the US during the 1920s and 1930s, when this Black woman anthropologist was conducting her graduate research under the mentorship of Franz Boas (see Dorst 1987). In the introduction to that book she wrote: “…. But it [culture] was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through that.” This is quite a concise definition of culture, a contribution that was not acknowledged by Boas in his preface, but that it has become fuel for feminist anthropologists (especially for women of color) interested in self-reflexive and experimental writing methods.
Without the more radical version of critical ethnography (discussed in Chapter One), auto-ethnography would have remained a fringe praxis, and without the critical part, auto-ethnography would not have its sharp power to help us question concepts such as what is considered valid data, the boundaries and micro-politics of fieldwork, dichotomies of objectivity-subjectivity, self-other, individual-collective, and to deal with the ethical challenges of working with “human subjects” who increasingly refuse (with good reasons and valid resistance) to sign the consent forms we present to them during fieldwork. Women feminist anthropologists, “minority,” indigenous and other assorted native and insider scholars have been liberating space and offering critiques of the subjective nature of ethnographic fieldwork since the beginning of the institutionalization of anthropology. After the 1980s self-reflexivity essays and integrated reflexivity first person voice vignettes, began appearing in ethnographic works (mostly by women, “minority” and diasporic anthropologists, such as Dorinne Kondo, Kamala Narayan, and Michelle Rosaldo among many others before them, who, as Zora N. Hurston, have declared their researcher positions since the beginning of anthropology as a discipline.
It seems that the major contributions to the development of auto-ethnography into an almost—not quite yet—legitimate tool of research and publications come from outside anthropology and its mainstream ethnographic practice, in fields that range from communication studies, health and nursing to education (Banks & Banks 2000, Foster & O’Brien 2006, Adams 2012, Block & Weatherford 2013, ←41 | 42→Acosta, Goltz & Goodson 2015). Other diverse authors from multiple disciplines ranging from social sciences to literature and film, have also examined their personal roles in research and made critiques of traditional ethnography (see Min-Ha 1982, Hills-Collins 1986, Martin and Mohanty 1986, Narayan 1993, hooks 2000, McClaurin 2001, Alexander 2005, Allen 2011, Danticat 2011, Moraga and Anzaldua 2015, among others).
There is an increasing acceptance and appreciation of auto-ethnographic methodologies within and outside anthropology and academia (e.g., the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography). This aperture is due, in part, to what Hanson (2004) calls “the narrative and reflexivity turns” in the social sciences and, in part, attuned to the zeitgeist of our times, resonating with an age characterized by individualism and a re-centering of the “self.” A renewed interest in auto-ethnography is also part of a revaluation of qualitative methodologies in contemporary scholarship across the social sciences, humanities, communication, education, rhetoric and composition, psychology, nursing and related health fields. In an era of mistrust and tensions, when many marginalized
