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Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, Literature, and Aesthetics, Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, eds. (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2002; ISBN 0-7591-0129-9). 412 pages.
Rarely in any single volume of qualitative research is a reader confronted with as many deeply personal and private stories of lived experience as is accomplished in Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, Literature, and Aesthetics (2002). Edited by Arthur P, Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, the book is a collection of papers presented at the"Millennium Annual Stone Symposium" sponsored by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in 2000. However, the book is more than an accumulation of similarly-themed academic essays. Instead, Bochner and Ellis invite the reader to experience the conference from its inception through its completion and beyond, by including transcripts of conversations and dialogues, and ultimately sharing details of the academic process of conferencing and publishing normally reserved for planners and reviewers.
The content of the book is divided into eight sections, with the first and the last being labeled "Before" and "After." In "Before", we meet "Art" and "Carolyn", as they draft the "Call for Papers" and later make planning decisions for the conference. In "After", we are privy to their conversation about how some of the presented papers will become a book. The middle six sections, then, recount the papers and conversations encountered during the proceedings of the Symposium, including an "Opening" and "Closing." Between the "Opening" and "Closing" are four major sections: "Culture Embodied: Performing Ethnography", "Wounded Storytellers: Vulnerability, Identity and Narrative" "Ethnographic Aesthetics: Artful Inquiry" and "Between Literature and Ethnography." Between each of these four parts are sections called "Interludes", which vary in form from traditional academic respondent comments on panel papers to color plates of artwork.
Many of the individual essays in this collection demonstrate autoethnographic research and writing as an academic art that involves the heart as much as cognitive or critical skill. For example, Christine E. Kiesinger's piece...