Paper short abstract:

Autoethnography is a tool for constructing alternative interpretations of ethnographic data. From my experience researching tattooing and tattooed bodies from a feminist perspective, I will ask: Are poetry, disordered reflection or unanswerable questions, possible in our ethnographic work?

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1970s, autoethnography has been proposing new paths for anthropological research from positions that are openly critical to the history of the discipline itself. Autoethnographic data covers a wide range of media and languages, from narrative to poetic or audiovisual, and it is sometimes difficult to fit them into larger research projects. Particular modes of autoethnography, like indigenous autoethnography, seek to increase the complexity of our proposals, allowing us to include in the pages of our research reflections that are closer to action and human feeling than the rigid traditional Western academic structures usually allow us to do.

My embodied autoethnographic experience is part of the process of constructing a doctoral thesis that investigates tattooing and tattooed bodies from a feminist perspective in the Spanish context. From here, I will ask myself how could we incorporate complex data, with emotional depth and deeply linked to our biography, in our anthropological research. Are poetry, disordered reflection or open, unanswerable questions, possible in our ethnographic work? In my fieldwork, my autoethnographic notebooks are intermingled with interviews with my informants and a meticulous observation that does not only cover specific times but extends to all the moments of my life. This research process, which in a way seamlessly combines one's own life with academic reflection, requires new languages and a committed openness to what we study, especially if, as in my case, the main actor is the body.