Autoethnography as Method (review)

Abstract

Heewon Chang has written a useful book on autoethnography for novice and experienced researchers alike who wish to include themselves in their traditional ethnographic studies. In this sense, what she advocates is akin to the “analytical autoethnography” advocated by Anderson (2006), which privileges theoretical understanding of broader social phenomena over the concrete understanding and theorizing that can be evoked from personal storytelling. The first part of this book is an introductory overview of culture, self, and others, and their relationship to autoethnography. Chang emphasizes cultural understanding as a major task of autoethnography, a consistent theme throughout the book. She notes the increasing interest in self narratives in contemporary society, and briefly delineates the scope of self narratives from autoethnographies to memoirs to personal essays, journals, and letters. Chang discusses life histories, native ethnographies, confessional tales, and memoirs as genres of self writing in social science. Then she turns her focus to auto- ethnography as a particular form of self narrative that has been gaining interest in the social sciences and humanities for some time.