Commentary on “Unsettling the Self: Autoethnography and Related Kin”

Abstract

I have read these papers with awe, surprise, and joy, as well as with a touch of sadness—where was this anthropology when I was starting out almost half a century ago? An anthropology that's personal, intimate, compelling, humbling, healing, holistic, multigenre, poetic, written with grace and humility, and most of all so very human. I wish I were young now and starting out and knew I didn't have to ask for permission to write as freely as the authors here do—with such vulnerability, such deep feeling.

The editors of this volume, Christine Walley and Denielle Elliott, ask, why is this writing happening now? I wonder if in a world at once so fractured and so interconnected, a world at once on fire and collapsing into the sea, perhaps there simply isn't time to stand on ceremony and wait to be patted on the back. We must do the writing that doesn't alienate us from ourselves, the writing that is tender and tough, beautiful and unflinching, memorable and haunting. This is the writing that unsettles the self, because for many of us (I don't dare say “all of us” since there are circles where things haven't changed all that much), anthropology is no longer the study of the “other”; it is a study of our own otherness.

Going elsewhere, because elsewhere is where we're supposed to find our anthropological subject matter, ceases to make sense now that elsewhere is everywhere and nowhere. It's a moment when delving into the heart of things and examining who we are and how we reached our positions as thinkers has turned into a new kind of quest narrative where homecoming is at the center of the journeys we take, and we draw on research, self-reflection, and the art of writing to tell stories that would otherwise have been lost for seeming “too personal.”

Those of us doing this work aren't the hardy sorts that anthropologists once tried to be—getting appendices removed before setting off to do fieldwork, suffering through bouts of malaria while doing fieldwork. We are a tribe of sensitive anthropologists, keenly aware of our colonizing heritage and wary of causing more harm. We have learned to listen, and now we want to listen to those closest to us, our most intimate interlocutors—a grandmother, a father, a daughter. After all, the principles of kinship are part of our legacy as anthropologists. We are skilled at addressing genealogy. So, we are analyzing our own kinship structures, our own families, and offering chronicles based on different sorts of inheritances, including garments, documents, stories, and traumas left unspoken but remembered. And some of us turn the spotlight on ourselves, examining the lived experience of our vulnerability and our unsettledness through the study of illness, cancer, depression, loss, and grief, recognizing the urgency of being present in those moments and that studying anything else amid anguish and despair seems somehow false.

Writing any kind of ethnography involves a strong commitment to tell things as you heard and saw them, not as you wanted them to be. Ethnography is different from fiction, where you can imagine what you don't know, where you can fill in gaps in the historical record with the realities that might have been or realities that should have been. At the same time, more than ever, we are blurring genres, bending genres, leaving gatekeeping behind, and mixing introspective work with carefully researched public histories and sociopolitical contexts. It's a new era of bricolage that involves art and aesthetics in a way that is exciting in how aware we've become of the infinite possibilities of language and multimodal forms of communication to make our stories come alive. The concern for inclusivity and accessibility is crucial to this work. It is not meant to be cloistered in the academy for a privileged few to interrogate. This is work to share across borders, to be read not only by anthropologists but by our mothers who didn't receive a college education. And nothing is more meaningful than when what we wrote with so much heart falls into the hands of unexpected readers whose hearts were aching for our stories.

In the history of anthropology, there have been predecessors, among them Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Benedict, and Edward Sapir, who sought to write fiction, memoir, and poetry, and embrace their artistic souls. But they have been a minority. And they felt hemmed in, especially those who entered the ranks of the academy, so much so that they tended to hide their creative work. Benedict, for example, published her poems under a pseudonym, for fear Franz Boas, her mentor, would learn of this indiscretion. All of us anthropologists who also yearned to be writers and artists and creators inherited this fear, and now many of us have finally let go, and there's such a sense of freedom about what's possible in anthropology.

But the question arises: How do we hold on to the scientific dimensions of our discipline? We can't just become a subfield of creative writing, can we?

My graduate students worry about these questions. They want grants, of course, to do their research, they want to learn how to write grant proposals, they want jobs like ours, and they ask, will they get them by writing autoethnography, intimate ethnography, memoir, and fiction? Is this a luxury attained after tenure? A prize for all the years of writing dense academic prose?

I believe we need to stop thinking this way. It is limiting and narrows what anthropology can be as an intellectual field. I feel strongly that we can write in different genres and different voices, that we can (and should) find inspiration in many kinds of scholarship and literature, that we can write op-ed essays, creative nonfiction, memoir, fiction, and ethnography as well as peer-reviewed articles and classical forms of academic scholarship. I am now writing picture books and middle-grade fiction, and it has been exciting to bring anthropological ideas of identity, memory, culture, and heritage into that writing to reach a younger age group, something I'd never expected to do. Some of my anthropology colleagues even give my books to their kids!

There's huge interest in ethnographic writing nowadays, across the disciplines and beyond the academy as well. I witness this every year when I teach my seminar on ethnographic writing. Students come not only from anthropology but also from communication studies, education, history, art, creative writing, comparative literature, Latina/Latino studies, and many other fields. I am fascinated by how this humble genre that anthropologists invented seems so vital and so timely. The methods we have developed for the close analysis of relationships, the self-reflection that makes us question what we know and how we know, the commitment to engaging with the meaning of place in all its complexities, these are dimensions of our writing that are compelling and offer inspiration for writers, thinkers, and artists of diverse backgrounds. Ethnography has a lot to give, there's no question about that. And we're aware that we can go still deeper, telling stories that are urgent, lucid, emotionally resonant, and ever more embracing of what it means to be human.

Although I began by saying I felt a touch of sadness that these ventures in ethnographic writing weren't widespread when I started out, I am glad to be around to see the many forms of expression that are possible now. I am hopeful for anthropology at a time when it's so difficult to be hopeful.