Intimate ethnography: What's it good for?

Anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer and I coined the term “intimate ethnography” in 2006 to capture the research and writing approach in our respective life-history projects, she with her mother and I with my father. Since that time, the genre has seen growing recognition in anthropology. Intimate ethnography centers on an intimate other—family members or someone known to the ethnographer prior to the research—as the subject of an ethnographic project that is also a study of historical conditions and circumstances. Critical to intimate ethnography is attention to crafting accessible, evocative, and scholarly informed works that engage public conversation on serious sociocultural issues and political-economic conditions, past and present. In this article, I define and describe intimate ethnography in relation to the original vision Rylko-Bauer and I imagined for it. In doing so, I situate the genre in a series of intellectual concerns and conversations, sociocultural formations, and political circumstances and events from the writing culture debates to the politics of representation and discussions on ways to decolonize anthropology. In considering the value of intimate ethnography, I will assess its potential contributions and limitations in a time when the need to rethink and recount lives lived and experienced is increasingly urgent.