When I read the Ellis & Bochner paper, I suddenly realized that I had been through one of these autoethnography researches myself.
When I was in college in China, I was in an anthropology research team heading Yunnan. They needed a cameraman and an editor, and I was both. My professor asked me to write diaries everyday besides shooting dailies for the team. I wrote about weird and funny things all along the way, from a Korean ring tone came out from a Chinese remote mountainous villager’s cell phone, to the gazing from Chinese villagers on the bikinis of French art students playing under a waterfall. I was writing “fiction-like” diaries, some events were exaggerated while being written. I did that for fun, not knowing that I would use the diary as the base of my graduation thesis.
After I got back, professor told me to watch the footage and the diary at the same time before editing. Interestingly after tens of times reviewing, some meanings, or “things that can be told” rose from those random recorded materials. That was the misunderstanding and misinterpretation between the two cultures, hence the impossible nature of “culture rescue” from one “developed” culture to another (this maybe to big a topic, though). So finally I wrote a very short paper on the former concept. And also I did a short documentary and a small flip book focusing on the feeling and expression of the villagers after they have seen the trailer trucks from “civilized people” (yes, they are this remote from city), and the feeling and expression of the French students after they have seen the art form of the villagers.
I did not have in mind a topic when I shot and wrote. I did not think deep. I did not even know I was doing autoethnography (or maybe I was not) until I read this paper. I was just amazed by the period when something of meaning rose from a chaos.
DW
