Analytic Autoethnography,
or Déjà Vu all Over Again
Norman K. Denzin
Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography
Volume 35 Number 4
August 2006 419-428
© 2006 Sage Publications
10.1177/0891241606286985
http://jce.sagepub.com
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University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
V
oices, where to begin.
Stacy Holman Jones’s (2005, 765) quoting Carolyn Ellis is a good place
to start. Ellis:
Autoethnography is . . .
research, writing and method that connect the
autobiographical and personal to the cultural and social.
This form usually features concrete action, emotion,
embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection. (Ellis 2004, xix)
Tami Spry:
Autoethnography is . . .
a self-narrative that critiques the situatedness
of self and others in social context. (2001, 710)
Mark Neumann:
Autoethnographic texts . . .
democratize the representational sphere
of culture by locating the particular experiences of
individuals in tension with dominant expressions of
discursive power. (1996, 189)
Leon Anderson:
Analytic autooethnography has five key features. It is ethnographic work in
which the researcher (a) is a full member in a research group or setting; (b)
uses analytic reflexivity; (c) has a visible narrative presence in the written
text; (c) engages in dialogue with informants beyond the self; (d) is committed to an analytic research agenda focused on improving theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena. (2006 [this issue], 375)
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Finally, Jones herself:
Autoethnography is a blurred genre . . . a response to the call . . . it is setting
a scene, telling a story, weaving intricate connections between life and art . . .
making a text present . . . refusing categorization . . . believing that words
matter and writing toward the moment when the point of creating autoethnographic texts is to change the world. (2005, 765)
***
Apples and oranges—are we dealing with two different things? Leon
wants to use analytic reflexivity to improve theoretical understandings.
Stacy wants to change the world. Carolyn wants to embed the personal in
the social. Tami Spry’s self-narratives critique the social situatedness of
identity. Mark wants to “democratize the representational sphere of culture” by writing outward from the self to the social. Are we in parallel or
separate universes? Who is talking to whom? It’s déjà vu all over again.
***
Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) observe that the narrative genres connected to ethnographic writing have, in the past decade, “been blurred,
enlarged, and altered. . . . These ethnographies . . . are produced through
creative analytical practices (CAP)” (p. 962). These new writing practices
include autoethnography, fiction-stories, poetry, performance texts, polyvocal texts, reader’s theatre, responsive readings, aphorisms, comedy and
satire, visual presentations, allegory, conversation, layered accounts, writing stories, and mixed genres. Creative nonfiction, performance writing,
mysteries, memoirs, personal histories, and cultural criticism can be added
to this list of narrative forms that can be used by the creative analytic ethnographer. The CAP ethnographer has little in common with Anderson’s
analytic ethnographer.
***
Anderson’s agenda is clear. He wants to define and then claim ownership over at least one version of autoethnography, what he calls analytic
autoethnography. He is impressed by the success of evocative or emotional
autoethnography. But he fears this success may eclipse other versions of the
method. This success also obscures the ways in which this other version of
ethnography may fit productively in other traditions of inquiry, especially
the so-called classic Chicago School. Like others before him, Anderson
does not want to review the debates that have gone on between the analytic
Denzin / Déjà Vu all Over Again
421
and evocative schools of (auto)ethnography. Rather, he wants to clarify and
embed his approach in traditional symbolic interactionist assumptions.
***
This return to the basics has the feel of something familiar. The old, or
the new old, in the form of the first and second generations of the Chicago
School (Fine 1995), can do the work of the new. Indeed, we may speak of
a third Chicago School, that sociological cohort that came of age after the
Vietnam War. This cohort, the third school, had to bear the brunt of many
new formations, from ethnomethodology, to standpoint epistemologies, to
feminist, queer, critical race, postcolonial, and now indigenous methodologies. This is the space Anderson writes out of.
***
So a return to the basics, to traditional symbolic interactionists assumptions, has the effect, intended or not, of leading to a negation of the recent
poststructural, antifoundational arguments that have been swirling around
for at least a quarter century. These are the very arguments that support
CAP. Anderson seems to fear that we are in danger of forgetting our past.
In returning to the past, while claiming that portion of the new that fits with
the past, we can move forward as a mature, interpretive discipline. In doing
so, we will understand that the work of the good realist ethnographer has
always been to study and understand a social setting, a social group, or a
social problem. Good ethnographers have always believed in documenting
and analyzing those phenomena for fellow scholars. They have gone for the
best data, never losing sight of their research focus, even when studying
insider meanings, including their own!
These researchers were self-reflexive but not self-obsessed. They were,
most of the time, professional strangers; the bulk of their analytic ethnographies were not autobiographical. Still, while they knew how to connect biography with social structure, they did not believe in writing themselves
completely into their texts. They understood the value of self-understanding,
but they knew that most of the time their research interests and their personal
lives did not intersect.
The new- and old-school Chicago ethnographers do not write messy vulnerable texts that make you cry. They keep politics out of their research,
although they may still worry now and then about whose side they are on.
The new third Chicago School is not preoccupied with the crises of representation, legitimation, and praxis. They rather keep their eye on the goal of
describing the world with their methods, and they focus on a small number
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of key, or classic, themes. Some get quite bold and go global, or become
reflexive or phenomenological, calling it theoretically informed; some use
extended case methodologies, a litany of missing names: Bourdieu, Wacquant,
Foley, Willis, Burawoy, Carspecken.
They do this by borrowing one or two techniques from the creative, analytic, evocative autoethnographers. But mostly, they want to expand the reach
of analytic ethnography into their version of reflexive autoethnography.
And here we have apples and oranges. Ellis, Bochner, Richardson,
St. Pierre, Holman Jones, and their cohort want to change the world by
writing from the heart (Pelias, 2004). The writers in the third Chicago
School want none of this.
***
In offering his reflections on these themes and questions, Leon wants to
assert a continuity with the past, while charting a more stable future for his
version of ethnographic inquiry. Of course, I disagree with much of his
essay. In discounting the arguments of the CAP school, he returns almost
uncritically to the past. The first-generation Chicago sociologists are still
my heroes, but after decades of trying, I find that they no longer help me do
the kind of work I want to do. I want to move on. Leon does not share this
view. So we part ways, reluctantly and respectfully.
***
My position can be briefly summarized. Ethnography is a not an innocent practice. Our research practices are performative, pedagogical, and
political. Through our writing and our talk, we enact the worlds we study.
These performances are messy and pedagogical. They instruct our readers
about this world and how we see it. The pedagogical is always moral and
political; by enacting a way of seeing and being, it challenges, contests, or
endorses the official, hegemonic ways of seeing and representing the other.
Critical pedagogy, folded into and through performance (auto)ethnography attempts to disrupt and deconstruct these cultural and methodological
practices performatively in the name of a “more just, democratic, and egalitarian society” (Kincheloe and McLaren 2000, 285). I want a new qualitative
research tradition focused on the themes that come from this commitment. It
is time to close the door on the Chicago School and all of its variations.
***
My current project builds on these commitments. It enacts a critical cultural politics concerning Native Americans and the representations of their
historical presence in Yellowstone Park and elsewhere (Denzin 2006). With
Denzin / Déjà Vu all Over Again
423
Pelias (2004), I seek a writing form that enacts a methodology of the heart,
a form that listens to the heart, knowing that “stories are the truths that
won’t stand still” (Pelias 2004, 171). In writing from the heart, we learn
how to love, to forgive, to heal, and to move forward.
I offer an example.
***
In bringing the past into the autobiographical present, I insert myself into
the past and create the conditions for rewriting and hence re-experiencing
it. History becomes a montage, moments quoted out of context, “juxtaposed fragments from widely dispersed places and times” (Ulmer 1989,
112). I move across and between several writing styles, genres, and
representational performative forms, some borrowed from Dos Passos
(1937), including news of the day (NEWSREEL) and the Camera Eye.1
Words and quotations, visual texts, historical advertisements, maps, and
photographs are performance vehicles, ways of “revealing and evoking
the character of the person who spoke [or produced] them . . . they are not
an end in themselves” (Smith 1994, xxiii-xxiv). With Anna Deavere
Smith (2000), I seek a dramatic, performative poetic, a form of performance writing that includes excerpts from personal histories, official
and unofficial government documents, scholarly articles, and popular
culture texts.
The history at hand is the history of Native Americans in two cultural
and symbolic landscapes, mid-central Iowa in the 1940s and 1950s, and
Yellowstone Park in the 1870s. Quoting from multiple texts, including personal autobiography, popular culture and history, and scholarly discourse,
I attempt to create a chorus of discordant voices (and images) concerning
Native Americans and their place in Yellowstone Park, as well as in our
collective imagination (Spindel 2000, 8).
I read Yellowstone, America’s first national park, metaphorically. In
and across the discourses that historically define the park are deeply
entrenched meanings concerning nature, culture, violence, gender, wilderness, parks, whites, and Native Americans (Haines 1977/1996; Bartlett
1985; Schullery 1979a, b, 1997). I situate these voices and discourses in
my own biography.
The presence of Native Americans in the collective white imagination is
almost entirely a matter of racist myth, shifting meanings of the color line,
the Veil of Color (Du Bois 1903/1989, xxxi, 2-3), theatricality and minstrelsy (Spindel 2000). Call this critical race theory and critical pedagogy
(Denzin 2003) confront Yellowstone National Park and its histories.
***
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As a child, I lived inside this white imaginary. I played dress-up games
called “Cowboys and Indians.” I watched Red Rider and Little Beaver and
Lone Ranger and Tonto on Saturday morning American television. On
Saturday nights, my grandfather took me to Western movies—Shane,
Stagecoach, Broken Arrow, The Searchers—at the Strand Theatre in Iowa
City, Iowa.
Voice 1—Narrator as young boy:
When I was not yet 10
one Sunday Mother and Dad
took my brother and me to Tama,
to the Mesquaki Reservation,
to see a powwow.
It was raining.
The sky was dark gray.
The road was muddy.
We drove down a lane
to a large fairground
and parked
in a back row with other cars.
We walked through the mud,
past teepees
to the center of a big field.
Indians in costumes
with paint on their faces,
and long braids of hair
were singing, and dancing.
Some were drumming
and singing.
At the edge of the field
tables under canvas tents were set up.
You could buy trinkets,
moccasins,
beaded purses, and belts and wooden flutes.
In another area a family
was making and selling Indian fry bread.
Dad bought some fry bread
for all of us,
and bottles of cold root beer.
We took the fry bread
and pop
back to the dance area
and watched the dancers.
Denzin / Déjà Vu all Over Again
425
Then it rained
some more
and the dancing stopped,
and we got in the car and
drove home.
***
Voice 2—Narrator as adult:
Today, a local travel company organizes overnight bus trips for senior citizens
from Champaign, Illinois, to the big casino on the reservation in Tama, Iowa.
***
Voice 3—Narrator as young boy:
The next time I saw an Indian was the following Saturday night when Grandpa
took me to a movie at the Strand Theater in Iowa City and we watched Broken
Arrow with Jay Silverheels, Jimmy Stewart, Debra Paget, Will Geer, and Jeff
Chandler, who played Chief Cochise. Those Indians did not look like the Indians
on the Tama Reservation. They rode horses, carried spears, had bows and arrows
and tomahawks. I thought maybe it was just a different time and a different
place. That is, those were the real Indians in the movie, because they were from
the Wild West and they were in a movie. The Tama Indians were less real, they
kind of looked like everybody else, except for the dancers in their costumes.
***
Voice 4—Doug Foley 1:
The Chicago anthropologists
studied the assimilation process,
how the Mesquaki
were absorbed
into
white
culture. (1995, 6)
***
Voice 5—Foley 2:
Kids were told
to stay away from
“those Indians” . . .
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Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
it was a dark,
scary place
full of violence . . .
I heard many scary stories
about the settlement,
but one version
told by a white woman married
to a Mesquaki stands above all others.
Her scary story
was about a
white boy who got
castrated
for messing around
with an Indian
woman (1995, 3-4).
***
Voice 6—Narrator as writer:
It saddens me to hear a story
such as Foley’s,
Is it true?
because, because if it is
to forgive
is to risk letting everything
fall
apart
and can there ever be any
hope of healing?
***
Today I want to write my way into and out of this history, and this is why
I write my version of autoethnography.
***
Note
1. The NEWSREEL is also Dos Passos’s term (and method) for incorporating current
events and newsworthy items into his text. It could also be called NEWS or MEDIA STORY/
EVENT.
Denzin / Déjà Vu all Over Again
427
References
Bartlett, Richard A. 1985. Yellowstone: A wilderness besieged. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press.
Denzin, Norman K. 2003. Performance ethnography: Critical pedagogy and the politics of
culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
———. 2006. Searching for Yellowstone: Peforming race, nation and nature in the new West.
Walnut Creek, CA: LeftCoast Press.
Dos Passos, John. 1937. U.S.A.: I. The 42nd parallel; II. Nineteen nineteen; III. The big
money. New York: Modern Library.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903/1989. The souls of black folk. New York: Bantam.
Ellis, Carolyn. 2004. The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about teaching and doing
autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
Fine, Gary A. 1995. A second Chicago School: The development of a postwar American
sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Foley, Douglas E. 1995. The heartland chronicles. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
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Haines, Aubrey L. 1977/1996. The Yellowstone story: A history of our first national park. Rev.
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Kincheloe, Joe L. , and Peter McLaren. 2000. Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research.
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Pelias, Ronald J. 2004. A methodology of the heart. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Richardson, Laurel, and Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre. 2005. Writing: A method of inquiry. In
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Schullery, Paul, ed. 1979a. Old Yellowstone days. Niwot: University Press of Colorado.
———. 1979b. Introduction: 1. Mrs. George Cowan, 1877. In Old Yellowstone Days, ed. Paul
Schullery (1-2). Niwot: University Press of Colorado.
———. 1997. Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and wonder in the last wilderness. Boston:
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Smith, Anna Deavere. 1994. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. New York: Doubleday.
———. 2000. Talk to me: Listening between the lines. New York: Random House.
Spindel, Carol. 2000. Dancing at halftime: Sports and the controversy over American Indian
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Norman K. Denzin is a Distinguished Professor of Communications, College of
Communications Scholar, and Research Professor of Communications, Sociology and
Humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. His most recent books include
Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture (2003), Cultural
Studies after 9/11 (coeditor, 2006), Qualitative Inquiry and the Conservative Challenge (coeditor, 2006), Flags in the Window (2006), and Searching for Yellowstone: Performing Race,
Nation and Nature in the New West (2006).