Autoethnography and power in a tourism researcher position

Abstract

Paternalism is a subject par excellence for such an autoethnographic analysis because ‘authors use their own experiences in the culture reflexively to bend back on self and look more deeply at self-other interactions’. In this chapter, the author argues that, despite the absence of any awareness of doing research, his experience as a development fieldworker nevertheless created important and useful knowledge. However, this unawareness also implies an autoethnography that is retrospective. L. Anderson, though, developed the idea of an ‘analytic autoethnography’ which rests on three main pillars: the researcher must be a full member of the group or setting that is being studied; s/he should be present in her/his publications. Lastly, s/he should work within an analytic research agenda in order to improve theoretical understandings of wider social phenomena.