Paper short abstract:

We analyse ethical implications of the autoethnographies developed as undisclosed research in Spanish context from 1980. The paper is a contribution to rethink relations among personal experience, time, undisclosed research and autoethnography.

Paper long abstract:

As a research method, the autoethnography is built as a dialectic process between culture and the researcher's experience. The autoethnographical sources cover from critical thoughts about lived process during the research (anthropology at home), until the classic ones in which the researcher belongs to the researched group (native autoethnographies).

This paper presents a historical review about autoethnographical contributions developed in anthropological Spanish context based on undisclosed research. Two pioneer examples took place in Tarragona School from the eighties: Oscar Guasch and Marta Alluè. Both authors systematize their personal experience which give rise to an autoethnographical text, wrote after the lived experience. While Oscar Guasch based his anthropological study on discourses and practises of power around homosexual subculture, Marta Alluè is located as a survivor and patient after a grave accident. We propose a reflection about contributions and ethical implications of the autoethnographies based on undisclosed researches. The analysed autoethnographies show how authors take their experience and become it into an undisclosed research when they decide using it as an object of study and building an autoethnographical text. Consequently, we discuss about the ethical involvement of using personal experiences which took place before the idea of making a research in the analysed sources.