Autoethnography
Autoethnography is a qualitative research methodology that uses autobiographical experience, personal subjectivity, and self-reflection to investigate and connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political.[1] [2]
Notes
Autoethnography, though open to charges of bias, self-indulgence, and narcissism[3], is a powerful and increasingly popular research methodology whereby an author uses autobiographical experience, their own subjectivity, and self-reflection to connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political” [4]. Like all research methodology, autoethnography has its strengthens and weaknesses. Autoethnography is particularly suited to recovering voices otherwise silenced by colonial activity of the dominant cultural and economic apparatus. Autoethnography can expose marginalized knowledges, marginalized people, oppression, and subjugations [5]. Autoethnography confronts “dominant forms of representation and power in an attempt to reclaim, through self-reflective responses, representational spaces that have marginalized those ... at the border.” [6]. This ability to expose marginalized voices is important when it comes to human spirituality because, as has become increasingly clear to me, authentic human spirituality has been suppressed and marginalized in the same way cultures have been marginalized and even destroyed by dominant and exploitative cultures. This includes the suppression of more egalitarian “female” spiritualities by violent and patriarchal Aryan invaders [7], the suppression of contemporary indigenous spirituality by Western Christian actors [8] [9], and the suppression of Christian teachings that threatened the ancient status quo. ion by an empirical and scientific voice is needed.
Footnotes
- ↑ Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
- ↑ Ellis, C. S., and A. P. Bochner. “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, and Personal Reflexivity. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook Of.” edited by N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000.
- ↑ Holt, Nicholas L. “Representation, Legitimation, and Autoethnography: An Autoethnographic Writing Story.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 2, no. 1 (2003): 18–28.
- ↑ Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. p. xix
- ↑ Pensoneau-Conway, Sandra L, Tony E. Adams, and Derek M Bolen. Doing Autoethnography. Boston: Sense Publishers, 2017.
- ↑ Tierney, William G. “Life History’s History: Subjects Foretold.” Qualitative Inquiry, no. 1 (1998): 49. p. 66
- ↑ Stone, Merlin. When God Was Woman. New York: Doubleday, 1976.
- ↑ Govinda, Lama Anakarika. “The Ecstasy of Breaking-Through in the Experience of Meditations.” In The Highest State of Consciousness, edited by John White, 235–49. New York: Doubleday, 2012.
- ↑ Some, Malidoma Patrice. Of Water and the Spirit. New York: Penguin Arcana, 1994.
