LAUSR

When I read this article, I was surprised to see that the authors use the term autoethnography for something that seems to me much closer to a social experiment. They argue that autoethnography ‘uses the researcher’s personal experiences as primary data’ and that ‘the consensus view is that autoethnography relies on using and analyzing the researcher’s own experiences’. I doubt whether there is such a consensus, and if there were, I would like to question it. Anthropologists engage in participant observation as a main method to learn about the lives of others. Many of us live with our interlocutors, listen to them, engage in some of their activities and reflect on our experiences. Would this mean anthropologists always also engage in autoethnography? My main argument to consider such a broad use of the term autoethnography problematic is that it does not take the positionality of researchers seriously enough. The reflexive turn of the 1980s (as in the seminal Writing Culture volume, Clifford and Marcus, 1986) has engendered considerable debate amongst anthropologists. Some have argued that an exaggerated focus on one’s own experiences has come at the expense of paying attention to the lives of others. Others have pointed out that this reflexivity has overlooked both the conditions of possibility of engaging in anthropological fieldwork and the positionality of researchers, that is, the importance of unequal access to material and political resources and to social and cultural capital. This is convincingly concretized in Women Writing Culture (Behar and Gordon, 1995), the feminist response to Writing Culture that had excluded the work of women anthropologists with the argument that their work was insufficiently innovative. Using the term autoethnography begs the question how this is different from engaging in participant observation, a way of working in which ethnography is grounded. My point is that how we learn to do anthropological fieldwork depends very much on the pre-existing relation between anthropologists and their interlocutors. When one is a relative outsider to the lifeworld of one’s interlocutors, participant observation involves developing relations of trust, forms of closeness and empathy by participating in their lifeworlds (even if this always remains limited). But if one starts off as relatively close to, or part of, a particular lifeworld, and already has acquired forms of experiential, embodied Ethnography 2017, Vol. 18(3) 387–389 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1466138117723354 journals.sagepub.com/home/eth