Meet “Me” in the field(-notes) : the selves and self-relations of autoethnography

Abstract

Autoethnographers write about culture and cultural practice by primarily writing about their own experience—about themselves. This article asks who—or what—the “self” is that autoethnographers engage with, study, and write about. It argues that the ethnographic self is not just the object and agent of the autoethnographic research process but also a product of it, particularly of autoethnographic writing. Doing autoethnography is less a matter of writing up, than of writing into existence the self that is the prerequisite of the research in the first place. Drawing on Mead’s distinction of a pre-reflexive “I” and a reflexive “Me” as oscillating phases of the social self, the article develops a typology for analytically distinguishing the multiple “I”s and “Me”s that make up the autoethnographic self: in the field, in fieldnotes, and in other types of ethnographic texts. Autoethnographic Positioning Analysis is applied to fieldnotes and analytical texts from an ongoing research project to illustrate how these different selves are produced and related to each other in a way that results in fieldnotes (or other texts) passing as accounts of “the” ethnographic self. This not only helps accomplish the shift between familiarization and alienation with the field (and one’s self) that is crucial for analytic and reflexive ethnography but can give insights into the social and moral structure of the field. Far from the notion of autoethnography as self-absorbed “mesearch,” this article argues that good autoethnography is indeed a methodical search for a reflexive “Me” in the field(-notes).