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Deborah E. Reed-Danahay, ed. Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997. 277 pp. ISBN 1-8597-3970-9, $55.00 cloth; ISBN 1-8597-3975-X, $19.50.
How can "we" write about "them"? How does the biographical subjectivity of an ethnographer color attempts at objective representation? And how should academic theory engage with the voice of the other, which, in its myriad forms, both shares and resists anthropology's project of cultural and social description? Such late twentieth century crises of representation have been both lamented as paralyzing and celebrated as liberating. Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social simultaneously acknowledges such contemporary anxieties, and attempts to use them as energizing, often personalized, sources of exploration into the construction of categories like "self" and "other." Through such explorations, this book aims to open up the boundaries between ethnography and autobiography, a project that draws on contemporary issues in literary theory, anthropology, and feminism.
The volume is comprised of nine chapters which vary a good deal in voice, style, analytic scope, and intention. Their authorial positions relate in different ways to their ethnographic subjects. But they come together through the common themes and theoretical implications that emerge in editor Reed-Danahay's thoughtful and historically grounded introduction (which also includes a useful discussion of related interdisciplinary literature).
At the same time, Auto/Ethnography is composed of different textual strands which do not unify, but rather complicate, the boundaries of genre. The diversity of these essays reflects the complexity of the term "auto-ethnography" itself, as Reed-Danahay explains it, noting that autoethnography stands at the crossroads of several other genres. The term can refer, first of all, to "native ethnography" (ethnography that is written by a native member of the group studied). It can also signify the genre of "ethnic autobiography," in which autobiography by "members of ethnic minority groups" is seen...