Thoughts on Ellis

I’m not sure that was a very helpful read. It was more confusing than informative. I feel I have some idea of what autoethnography is, but like my wife, who will receive her Masters in Public Health next Saturday, said, I need to hear the other side of the story, too, the ethnography story, before I can understand what this is.

I gathered a few nuggets from the creek, which I have below. But perhaps the biggest help was the way the text itself was written. It was a semester’s-worth of material told as if I was in the class. It got the points across, citing related quotes, while making me feel I was in the story – thus making me want to read on and participate. There was a story, a plot to follow.

I got the sense that it was the lack of emotion in traditional ethnography that autoethnography is railing against (apparently, since I still don't know what traditional ethnography reads like). Ellis seems to stress that it is this emotion that we must insert into research in order to get the reader interested. And it’s the only way to tell the truth; for a researcher to be truthful s/he can not pretend s/he is not a part of the research.

I told my wife about a part in the book where a student presents her “research” to a women’s shelter. It was a play about the student's own domestic abuse. My wife was less interested in the reaction of the shelter’s staff than in how this play the student performs can even be considered any kind of ethnography. It seemed like nothing more than a memoir to her. I couldn't’t defend it, but I did mention the other students in the book and their projects, which included interviews and research.

Here are some 0f the nuggets: take retrospective field notes on your subject, one of the goals is to assist other in telling their stories, a writer who makes himself vulnerable is taking a greater risk but could find greater reward, and understanding of others comes through understanding yourself.

Finally, I liked this quote: "I write because I want to find something out. I write in order to learn something that I didn't know before I wrote it." - Laurel Richardson (pg 170-171)

I will keep my impressions in mind as I continue with this project. I think I will get some reading on ethnography before I start to read the ethnography books on my reading list. I plan to read those last. Today I will start with the Peace Corps Memoirs. I will read Mike Tidwell's The Ponds of Kalambayi first.