93
The
Ethnographic Autobiography
SAGE Publications, Inc.200410.1191/0967550704ab004oa
Harry F.Wolcott
University of Oregon, USA, hwolcott@oregon.uoregon.edu
Address
for correspondence: Harry F. Wolcott, Department of Anthropology, University
of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403, USA; E-mail: hwolcott@oregon.uoregon.edu
The author draws upon an
earlier article by anthropologist Stanley Brandes to recommend that when
the intent and purposes of relating a life story are clearly anthropological,
the work be labelled `ethnographic autobiography'. An ethnographic autobiography
is defined as a life story told to an anthropologist or used in ways that
implicate a sociocultural rather than a psychological interpretation.
INTRODUCTION
In the fall of 1983 I published an article titled `Adequate schools and inadequate
education: the life history of a sneaky kid.' It was about an out-of-school
youth whom I call `Brad.' It dealt in case study fash- ion with a young man
who had built and was living in a rude cabin at the back of my property. It
seems remarkable even today that I did not discover him for about the first
five weeks of his residence, but my 20-acre property is on a hillside bordering
undeveloped forest land, and I did not often make the steep climb to have
a look around when there was always much to do closer to the house. The purpose
of that account was to emphasize the distinction that anthropologists (and
others) make between education and schooling. Brad had already been out of
school for about four years, and his attendance had been sporadic prior to
that. I wrote the study to show how, although his formal schooling had long
ceased, his education continued apace. To live the way he had chosen, there
were things to learn every day, especially as he had opted to live essentially
with- out `working'. He managed to make himself eligible for food stamps,
which gave him a regular source of income (about $70 US per month, enough
to eke out a living in 1980s dollars) and he had learned to
94
invest
his subsidy wisely. Eventually that source dried up as futile efforts to find
a job in a period of staggering unemployment no longer made him eligible for
the handout, but by that time he had found occasional part-time employment.
I was away much of the first year that Brad lived on the property. I had taken
a one-term leave of absence from the university to teach at another institution.
I saw him rather infrequently until I returned home after Christmas. Following
my return, I discovered that I needed to install a new water line down the
hill from its source in a small spring. Talking with a contractor one day
about the work, to my surprise Brad made an informal bid of his own, successfully
argu- ing that if he dug a trench by hand he would produce far less of a muddy
mess than would any machinery brought in to do the work. Since there was no
urgency about the job, I let him go ahead with it, not really sure if he would
complete the work but certainly willing to let him try. When he encountered
rocky spots or roots where the going was tough, we worked together to dig
the trench. As we worked I became more interested in him and in his story.
I was fascinated with what he had done to build and then improve the cabin,
just as he seemed to be doing with his life. My own academic interest is in
the nexus between education and anthropology, specifically in how people acquire
culture. And here, not only in my own cultural milieu but in my own backyard,
was someone doing just that, yet in a very different way, a way that I might
come to understand but could never emulate. I pondered the idea of doing a
case study with Brad, but I was unsure how to go about asking him, or what
form such a study might take, or what I might do with it when completed. The
idea did not go away. I was not sure what to do about it but I kept wishing
there was some way to bring it all together. And lo and behold — serendipity's
finest hour — came a call from someone at the Office of Education in
Washington, DC, asking if I would be willing to join efforts with a group
of other social scientists who had each been asked to submit a `white paper'
on educational adequacy. I saw my chance in a long shot, inquiring whether
they would accept a case study of an out-of-school youth who seemed to offer
a different perspective on educational adequacy from what I assumed others
would contribute. I never learned how they happened to select my name as a
possible contributor, but by the time they invited me they already had enough
economists and political scientists writing, so my counter proposal was acceptable,
even if a bit quirky. (I might note that finding a way to contribute through
ethnography was personally quite satisfying.)
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Now
I had a reason for doing the case study. And Brad, no doubt inspired more
by the offer to be paid than by the higher purposes of the project, agreed
to be interviewed. He even was able to estimate how long he thought it would
take to tape his life story: 12 hours. Not given to long discourses, Brad's
estimate was a bit generous. At our first taped session he spoke rapidly for
about six minutes, end- ing abruptly with `... and so I came up here. And
that's it!' As far as he was concerned, that was it. From that point on, the
impetus for further dialogue had to come from me. But we had a start. By returning
again and again to some of the big themes in his life — especially his
roster of `experiences'— and extend- ing a series of short interviews
over several weeks, I had enough to begin putting parts of his story together:
his parents' divorce, his struggle to get along in various household arrangements,
his escapades, trouble with the police, a year spent in reform school, his
thoughts about getting his life together. Plus, I could supplement what he
said in interviews with what I was learning from him through casual conversation.
Eventually I had a draft of the report I would send to the Office of Education.
Brad read it over without enthusiasm, pretty much dis- missing my effort as
`the kind of stuff professors write'. But he was satisfied with the accuracy
of the draft, and he suggested few changes. I reworked the draft. He did not
take the opportunity to read it again but expressed the hope that it `might
help make people understand', a phrase on which he did not elaborate. Brad
was still living in his cabin when I submitted the report. It ful- filled
Contract No. NIE-P-81-0271. To the best of my knowledge, nothing ever became
of it. The report did not rouse a nation to do something about a problem,
it showed that something had already been done. That is, the reporting function
was completed; contractual responsibility ended there. My original report
was titled, `Adequate schools and inadequate education: an anthropological
perspective' (Wolcott, 1982). Person- ally I was more than satisfied with
it, both for what I felt was the remarkable degree of Brad's candour as an
informant and for my organization and analysis of the material as a study
of an out-of- school youth. The Office of Education, which by then had become
the National Institute of Education, offered useful editorial sugges- tions
and thanked me profusely for my effort. But I realized that nothing was to
become of the report itself or the other reports that together comprised the
School Finance Project. Brad had put me in touch with his life. I felt that
his words, coupled with my efforts to bring some analysis to the case, warranted
96
a broader
audience. I wondered whether the report might be rewritten for a professional
journal. Even my own journal, for instance. For in the interim following Brad's
unannounced arrival, I had been asked to assume the editorship of the Anthropology
and Education Quarterly (AEQ), my tenure to begin with the spring issue of
1983. The journal's previous editor had held the post for six years. He had
spent months tying up loose ends and publishing manuscripts that had been
lost or misplaced, and he resolved not to saddle his successor with a similar
backlog of manuscripts. The result was that while he had received too many
manuscripts from the previous editor, he left me with none. One year was too
short a time to get the sub- mission process rolling smoothly again. I came
to my first publication with virtually nothing to publish, save some short
pieces I had com- missioned and a piece by one of my graduate students. So,
with the blessing of the journal's founding editor, John Singleton, I printed
my article as headliner. In a brief introduction, John acknowledged my `provocative
style' in setting the tone of an editorship with an instance of my own writing.
For a journal titled the Anthropology and Education Quarterly I did not have
to announce that my paper took an anthropological perspective, but I wanted
to emphasize that the study was conducted in the anthropological tradition.
It was a case about somebody, not everybody, an anthropological life history,
albeit a brief one. Brad himself had explained that in his childhood his mother
had accused him of being a sneaky kid. So my subtitle for the rewritten piece
became `The life history of a sneaky kid'. And here I turn to the title of
this paper, `The ethnographic auto- biography', to pursue a different course
from the story of Brad. His account, presented in the original sneaky kid
article, was followed by two additional pieces elaborating on further developments
in the case. The complete story has now been written in a book published by
AltaMira Press titled Sneaky kid and its aftermath: ethics and intimacy in
fieldwork (Wolcott, 2002). By 1983, when the original article was published
in AEQ, Brad had left. I rather doubted that I would ever see him again. At
first I hoped I would, but things took a different turn, and when next we
met the circumstances were not the same. Nevertheless, I often thought about
him, and since I could not get him out of my mind, I continued to write about
him. Any further writing had to be more analytical and conjectural, for in
the subsequent years I have learned little about him except that he is still
alive, or was when I last checked. Today he would be approaching his mid-forties.
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I wrote
the two additional pieces in the 1980s, filling in details that were not relevant
to the purposes of the original article about edu- cational inadequacy but
were critical to the continuing story of Brad himself. I addressed more directly
the nature of the personal relation- ship that eventually developed between
us (Wolcott, 1987a; 1990). Subsequently the three articles were reprinted
together in Transform- ing qualitative data (Wolcott, 1994), published by
Sage. There they became known as the Brad Trilogy, and Brad and I became widely
known, at least in certain qualitative research circles. Subsequent to that,
I was encouraged to retell `our' story in book form, inspired by publisher
Mitch Allen of AltaMira Press and by playwright Johnny Saldaña, who worked
the material into a play, `Finding my place: the Brad trilogy' (Saldaña, 2002).
I trust that read- ers will realize that the book's title, Sneaky kid and
its aftermath announces that it is the story of the sneaky kid that has now
become the subject, not a further story about Brad himself, for, as noted,
I have nothing further to report about him. The problem I pose for this paper
goes back to the article that I prepared for the Office of Education and its
subsequent transform- ation for the Anthropology and Education Quarterly.
The subtitle of that paper was `The life history of a sneaky kid'. The question:
Was `life history' a suitable subtitle at the time? And would `life history'
be a suitable title today? THE LIFE HISTORY IN ANTHROPOLOGY In editing my
original report of 1982 for publication in a professional journal, the term
`life history' seemed not only the best but the obvi- ous phrase to describe
what I had written. And I presented it as an anthropological account. True,
I had not written about some member of an exotic tribe; I had written about
a member of my own tribe, a youth who had spent most of his life in the same
locale where I lived. We also shared pretty much the same values, although
by my stan- dards his means for obtaining what he needed seemed to require
more cunning and be more `devious'. Nor did my report feature a tribal elder
who could reflect back over a lifetime struggle to achieve, but a 20-year-old
youth whose `struggle' was day-to-day and whose life still lay ahead of him,
at least to the extent that he could maintain his low profile. So although
of a slightly different kind than what ordinarily appeared in the anthropological
literature, Brad's account was a life history. During the ensuing years, however,
anthropologists, like other social scientists, have become more acutely aware
of their
98
relationships
among those with whom they deal and more acutely aware of the words they use
to convey the nature of those relation- ships. At the same time, they are
no longer as wary of being described as `story tellers' as they were in the
past. With no opprobrium attached to the idea of telling a story, they have
become content with, and less apprehensive about, relating someone else's
`story', in place of claiming to have recounted a life history, even a partial
one (see, for example, Peacock and Holland, 1993). Had the circumstances been
right, I would have been only too happy to label Brad's account his story,
thus pointing to certain anecdotal features rather than seeming to lay claim
to know more than I ever will know about his history. ENTER `AUTOETHNOGRAPHY'
At the time we did not recognize the potential for confusion in a term that
anthropologist David Hayano only recently had introduced, autoethnography
(Hayano, 1979; 1982). Hayano coined the term to describe his then current
project, an ethnography of people like him- self who spent their leisure hours
playing cards in Southern Califor- nia's legitimate card rooms. He found a
seemingly perfect phrase in `autoethnography', a reference to conducting a
study among those who share a common activity in which one is himself or herself
engaged. For Hayano, who admits to his pleasure at `risk-taking activities',
the poker room was where he was spending a lot of time. He decided he might
as well write up what he was learning, and he needed to signal to his reader
his advantaged position as a fellow player. He certainly was not doing an
ethnography `of' or `on' himself; that was not the meaning he intended for
autoethnography. As he used it, the phrase simply described conducting research
as a true insider, in contrast to the more customary role in which the anthropologist
is, at best, a peripheral participant. Had the term `autoethnography' been
employed only in the strict sense that Hayano intended, it might have served
us well. Taking my own field of `anthropology and education' as a prime example,
we might have nodded approvingly at the overwhelming number of studies conducted
in schools and classrooms where the teacher, or a former teacher, was the
principal investigator. But, as often happens, Hayano's catchy label was soon
separated from the type of study that had spawned it. Instead of being applied
exclusively to studies where the researcher was also a participant, the term
`authoethnography' was applied as
99
well
to the study of oneself, with or without a group in tow. First came individual
articles, then collections and books reporting exam- ples of autoethnography
(see, for example, Reed-Danahay, 1997 or the series edited by Carolyn Ellis
and Arthur Bochner). And this pro- duced confusion, for the term `autoethnography'
was far more often applied to the latter, `auto' referring to the self, and
`ethnography' added to validate a method that most often took the form of
a per- sonal narrative or diary. The articles were serious in intent and often
painfully personal, but they seemed to follow no particular form nor owe allegiance
to any particular discipline. I found the new format distracting. It was not
because the stories did not read well; they often did. But I was distressed
to see the term `ethnography' bandied about by researchers who assigned the
label to their work only because their accounts were personal. `Narratives
of the self', Laurel Richardson labelled them, and they were just that, `highly
personalized', a `revealing text in which an author tells stories about his
or her own lived experience' (Richardson, 1994: 521). I do not mean to assign
mystical properties to ethnography. In gen- eral, the term refers both to
the research arm of cultural anthro- pology (and qualitative sociology) and
to the customary product of that research, the (usually written) `picture'
of a `people' that the ethnographer offers as a result of fieldwork. Since
ethnography is concerned with people, the quality of ethnographicness in a
life story comes through in the social setting in which an individual life
is played out vis-à-vis others in that setting. In my own studies I have endeavoured
to define the essence of ethnography, and I have suggested the distinction
that can be made between `doing ethnography' and borrowing an ethnographic
technique or two. But there was little point in haranguing that auto- ethnographers
were not already exploring, developing and committed to their approach. What
seemed to be needed was a term that would convey to the reader when the story,
or life history, did bear the stamp of an anthropological orientation, an
ethnographer present but never centre stage; when it did in fact illustrate
what I have called `ethnographic intent' (Wolcott, 1987b). ETHNOGRAPHIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY
There is a more suitable term. It was available even back when I was preparing
the original sneaky kid account. I realize that now because I see that among
my references I included an article in which it was introduced, although the
usefulness of the term completely eluded me at the time.
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The
phrase is `ethnographic autobiography'. It was introduced and discussed at
length in anthropologist Stanley Brandes' article `Ethnographic autobiographies
in American anthropology' (Brandes, 1979; 1982). My problem, presumably shared
among my peers at the time, was that we did not feel we needed a new term.
For all the life- history research being reported, there was no confusion
about terms, no self-consciousness about the terms that we were using, no
thought of making ourselves the subject of our inquiries. Brandes presented
his views on the ethnographic autobiography in a paper given at the Spring
Hill (Minnesota) Conference on `American social and cultural anthropology:
past and future', in October 1976. That paper was published in 1979. Subsequently
a number of the conference papers were revised for reissue in a book from
Garland Press titled Crisis in anthropology: view from Spring Hill, 1980,
published in 1982. That is where I came across it. There had been crises before,
and there have been crises since, and as best I recall the book did not precipitate
a call to arms. However, the articles have held up well, and I can recommend
the book for a lively read about topics that concerned anthropologists at
the time. But for me, Brandes had put his finger on something even more timely
now than it seemed at the moment. Brandes' assigned topic was the state of
`life history research' in anthropology. He begins his article with some cogent
remarks about the anthropological life history in general. They bear repeating
to help establish the fact that the anthropological life history has its unique
place in life history research, if only for the lack of uniqueness of its
customary subjects. As Brandes notes, the protagonist of an ethnographic autobiography
is almost always `an ordinary member of his or her society, whose individual
achievements are not noteworthy in and of themselves', and who is `far from
being an introspective, intellectual person self- motivated to produce an
autobiography' (1982: 188-89). Most fre- quently the informant had been a
member of a non-Western society `of the type anthropologists typically study'
(1982: 188). But Brandes recognized changes taking place that were opening
new opportunities for research closer to home at a time when opportunities
for research overseas seemed to be diminishing. Brandes' description fits
Brad's case superbly: an ordinary member of society whose individual achievements
are not noteworthy in and of themselves. Yet I found Brad to be a remarkable
example of resili- ence and self-reliance in living almost completely on his
own. And no doubt it gave Brad a certain pleasure to be able to recount and
review his accomplishments and `experiences', although I doubt that
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he
ever quite fathomed the point of my devoting so much attention to the project.
Brandes stresses that the ethnographic autobiography is a true autobiography,
not to be confused with a third-person account or reminiscence but a first-person
narrative told in the actual words of a real person. And that is the case
with Brad, whose actual words in the original article make up at least half
the story — and made his role relatively easy to recast in play form.
There is always the condition of `time' in the ethnographic account. It is
not that long, intimate acquaintance assures a full account, but that `quickie'
studies and brief expressive interviews do not fill the bill for what Brandes
considers the `larger, more ambitious life histories' about which he was writing
(1982: 189). In that, perhaps I was more fortunate than some ethnographers,
for although my formal tape- recorded interviews were completed in a matter
of weeks, Brad lived on my place for more than two years. That long period
provided a rich context. Brandes argues for the ethnographic autobiography
on the basis of its humanistic contribution, railing against those of his
colleagues who believed (and continue to believe) that social anthropology
can approximate the methods of the so-called hard sciences. `People are not
automatons, responding blindly to the vague factors and forces that are said
to complete this or that type of action' (1982: 190). I could not agree more.
Brad's story has been around for more than 20 years now, and although we both
have our detractors, count- less numbers of graduate students and others who
have encountered Brad in their reading have had to come to grips with him,
and with me, in the specific form that each of us took in the original story
and its sequels. Brandes discusses some of the criteria that the anthropologist
tries to consider in selecting an informant for an ethnographic autobiogra-
phy. But he concludes, `Whatever the particular research aims of the ethnographer,
the selection of an informant is frequently conditioned by purely fortuitous
circumstances of fieldwork' (1982: 192). It seemed to take forever for me
to realize the link between my long- term professional interest in cultural
acquisition and the fact that Brad had come to live on my place. That I might
achieve some under- standing of his case as an example of cultural acquisition
could have escaped me all too easily. It still leaves me wondering how often
we try too hard to seek out informants or search for the perfect locale. There
is no such thing as the ideal informant or the perfect setting. But there
may be quite satisfactory informants standing right in front of us.
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FINE
TUNING Brandes takes a quote from an early and popular treatise on life his-
tory written by L.L. Langness, The life history in anthropological science,
to point out that life histories are `seldom the product of the informant's
clearly articulated, expressive, chronological account of his life' (1965:
48). It would seem almost self-evident that, by rea- son of their very ordinariness,
most informants' accounts, essentially oral as they are, would need rearranging
and editing in order to read well, especially if one's purpose is to portray
a cultural rather than a psychological setting. I was surprised that some
critics took excep- tion to my statement when I reported that I `worked with
a heavy hand in reorganizing material and selecting the most cogent excerpts
from months of informal conversation and many hours of formal interviews'
(Wolcott, 1983: 8) to produce an article length account about sneaky kid.
I did not expect Brad to come up with a coherent account. When we began, I
was not sure there would be any account at all. It must also be noted, however,
that an informant's account does not necessarily need editing. In his day
Brandes could point to a recently completed account that was published by
Charles Hughes, Eskimo boyhood: an autobiography in psychosocial perspective
(1974), which was solicited from a youthful informant who was hos- pitalized
at the time with tuberculosis. That autobiography was pub- lished with only
slight editorial changes. In similar fashion, I have recently published (in
the 2003 AltaMira reissue of A Kwakiutl village and school) an autobiographical
statement written in 1963 by Lucy Puglas. Lucy was a Kwakiutl Indian woman
who wrote her own story so well that I left it intact except for some additional
punctuation. In her case, I did not even realize that she had completed the
writing after I proposed it, for she drowned in a boating accident before
she was able to present me with the finished product. Brad, on the other hand,
had the barest of writing skills. Although he had procured a dictionary for
the cabin and was able to read, his efforts to produce anything in writing
were limited to brief notes, which took some charitable deciphering to be
understood. An oral tradition was our only hope. Statements like the one obtained
by Hughes, or that of Lucy, are true autobiographies. They are `ethnographic'
only in the sense that they might never have been recorded had not an ethnographer
sug- gested it; in Lucy's case, that was all I had to do. Whether or not they
find their way into the anthropological literature depends on who
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does
the asking. My hunch is that today other literary genres account for much
of what might have become `anthropological' in earlier times. After reading
Sneaky kid and its aftermath, a colleague, anthropol- ogist Allan Burns, noted
a parallel with an account he had read ear- lier in Spanish, Juan Gamella's
La historia de Julián: memorias de heroína y delincuencia (1990). Julián's
account, covering a period of 10 years of his life, grew out of a larger project
investigating the then new wave of young intravenous drug users in Madrid.
Gamella's interviews with Julián began the same year as my inter- views with
Brad (1981); the two youths were only a year apart in age. Although Brad did
not use hard drugs, their exploits during those years had many similarities.
The major difference occurs in nar- rative style. Gamella has Julián tell
his own tale, interspersed only with comments by a few others close to him,
especially Julián's mother. Both studies are ethnographic autobiographies,
each intended to offer readers an insider's view. For third-person accounts,
where an anthropologist either shares the stage with an informant or uses
a life history to illustrate a differ- ent point (for example, about the nature
of fieldwork), Brandes sug- gests the term `anthropological' rather than `ethnographic'.
It is probably useful to have a residual category such as `anthropological
life history', although my interest here is with the ethnographic one. I should
note, however, that I consider everything else in the full account of Sneaky
kid and its aftermath to be of this second type. It is anthropological, and
sometimes autobiographical (not only about Brad but also about me), but personally
I do not consider it to be ethnographic, at least in the sense that the original
sneaky kid article is. The distinction works, at least for me. I prefer it
to the label `autoethnography'. It draws a finer line between what is truly
`ethnographic' and what is essentially a personal account in which I am one
of the players. IN SUMMARY In the mid-1970s when Stanley Brandes first drafted
his article, he was clarifying something that benefited from the attention
but had not yet been muddled by time or competing terms. Today, with life
history reported in a wide variety of ways, in so many fields, and with many
alternative labels to draw from, there is more reason to exam- ine the labels
we choose and to apply our labels with care. I applaud efforts to produce
life history, or life story, or autoethnography. But
104
in
cases where an ethnographic perspective is central to the purpose, I suggest
that we can, and should, signal our intent by labeling our work as `ethnographic
autobiography'. That was my intent with the original sneaky kid article. Were
I looking for a label today, that is the label I would use. Brandes notes
that an ethnographic autobiography usually is `recorded and edited by a social
anthropologist or by some other professional with interests closely allied
to sociocultural anthro- pology' (1982: 188). Whether that individual is a
card carrying anthropologist seems of less importance than the perspective
from which one works. There are many with social science training working
outside academic institutions today, researchers who find useful applications
of that perspective in their work. They are not excluded from using the label.
The life history is not peculiarly anthropological, but there should be something
peculiarly anthropological about a life history or life story designated as
ethnographic. Of necessity life history deals with personality, but the purpose
of an ethnographic account is to situate personality within a cultural context.
Whether explicit or implicit, we should be able to discern the influence of
a cultural system in the direction the account takes. Brandes reaffirms his
belief that life histories in general, and the ethnographic autobiography
in particular, have provided an essential research tool through which to achieve
the intellectual task of defin- ing the relationship between individual and
culture. He laments what he saw in the 1970s as the tendency for individuals
to be `forgotten' in anthropological analyses, a tendency he felt was exacerbated
by government funding that attempted to portray anthropology as a `fully positivistic,
objective discipline, whose main goal is to discover laws of human behavior'
(Brandes, 1982: 200). In the years since Brandes wrote, we have witnessed
a softening in this regard. Some anthropologists have resisted the urgency
to make their discipline `fully positivistic', and government spending exerts
less influence, in part because there is relatively less of it. As long as
we have researchers willing to collect and report ethnographic autobiographies,
there will be a prevailing force to counteract claims about the dominant role
of `culture' to set the course of human lives. Culture provides us with notions
of an ideal: what we have come to expect from others and what we believe they
expect from us. But only as we direct attention to how specific individuals — like Brad, or like me or you — actually live out our lives can we ever
know how things really work out.
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NOTE
ON CONTRIBUTOR HARRY F. WOLCOTT is Professor Emeritus in the Department of
Anthropology, University of Oregon. He completed his doctorate at Stanford
University in 1964 and accepted a position at the Univer- sity of Oregon where
he has been ever since. Harry has served on the faculties of education and
anthropology. His area of interest is the acquisition of culture. He has also
written on doing and writing up qualitative research, particularly on ethnography.
The account here draws upon his most recent book, Sneaky kid and its aftermath:
ethics and intimacy in fieldwork and his search for a label for the story
of Brad contained within it.