Although auto-ethnographic research requires gathering memory-data and personal documents as forms of self-reported reflections, and family archives related to the topic chosen for the project, it also requires fieldwork, as it is a research of the present, from the present (this is what makes it ethnographic). Hence doing fieldwork (participant-observation) is not optional, but central. It seems to me that the term “deep hanging-out” with yourself (this is, spending quality time with self and others, being fully present and engaged, and writing fieldnotes of the observations and discoveries) is more appropriate and suitable for obvious reasons. As I explain to my students, the “self,” besides being a moving target, is multiple, layered and very crowded. Concrete and virtual fields have also fuzzy boundaries in auto-ethnographic research, at even more extreme degrees than ethnography. As stated above, auto-ethnographic research is always a form of local and “native” ethnographies, or insider scholarship, because the data is generated around a specific individual embodied experience “from the present,” and everyone is an insider or member of a particular group and a resident of a particular locality. The field-site and community of research becomes hence the local life, place and relations of the researcher, in particular those aspects of daily life related to the topic being researched.
In describing the project that they will embark on to my students, I teach them to think of auto-ethnographic fieldwork as “deep-hanging-out” with yourself. The term “deep-hanging-out,” sometimes used to refer to informally to ethnography ←38 | 39→fieldwork (participant-observation), is of uncertain origins; James Clifford mentions that he heard it from Clifford Geertz, and Geertz alludes to how he heard it from Renato Rosaldo. I came into this term while a graduate student, it was used by a professor in a feminist anthropology seminar, and I have not found as of yet, any proper definition of it, and the tree authors mentioned above, dislike and dismiss this term as too informal and irreverent. I fell in love, instantly, with this concept, because I felt (after my first fieldwork experience) that it described much better than any of the other academic sounding term, what we actually do as ethnographers; we hang-out with people. As I explain to my students, this hanging-out could be so extended, so emotionally close and so deep, to affect a researcher’s physical and emotional health; many ethnographers have been murdered in the field, have died of accidents, have been captured and kidnapped as suspect belonging to leftist guerrillas or to the CIA, and some others had to make tough decisions of how deep to go, how far to “participate” and collaborate, for example. when doing fieldwork among police, gangs or drug addicts. In auto-ethnographic fieldwork the hanging-out is also deep, as profound, revelations and traumas are discovered, and doing the oral history with people close to them emotionally could be very, at times, tense and conflicting, but also healing (for concrete examples, see Chapter Three).
To analyze auto-ethnographic data effectively, and to be able to contextualize the personal experiences that are central to auto-ethnographic projects is necessary to gain an understanding of the socio-cultural and historical dimensions that frame our daily experiences in a particular place. When time for writing report and sharing findings come, I remain students that besides writing a first person narrative, researchers need to be careful to avoid sentimentality and confessional nostalgia, especially when it comes to the memory-data. To help them deal with this challenge, over my years of teaching I have developed a grouping of basic concepts to help students acquire critical skills, to be able to interpret their data and write about their findings critically in their final reports. I call these interdisciplinary concepts a Toolkit for Critical Analysis; some of the most basic terms are ethnocentrism, power—in its many forms—political economy, intersecting identities, identity politics, situated knowledge, etc.). The concepts in the Toolkit 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