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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the generative valence of the autoethnographic methodology in its capacity to craft evocative truth claims about fieldwork relations. It reflects how “friendship-as-method” allows one to convey context and relationality in times of economic hardships.

Paper long abstract:

This paper starts from a discomfort with the autoethnographic label. It’s a personal thing. At the same time, I am immensely drawn to the narrative intersections between the self and the “field” not least because I have nurtured longstanding ethnographic friendships in El Salvador and Cuba without which I would not have become an anthropologist. One could call it indebtedness in a Maussian sense of the term. Tackling the unease head-on, this paper engages with what Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux calls the “impersonal personal” and explores the methodological implications that arise from the genre. The scholarly literature on autoethnography is traversed by numerous tensions: How much of the self should one display? How much social analysis is deemed necessary? Is there a charmed dosage between objectivity and subjectivity one should aspire to? What’s the threshold in social life-writing? Autoethnography signals something more than reflexive positioning; it presents partial truths (Clifford 1986) and partial knowledge (Haraway) and centres the author’s – or ethnographer’s – voice beyond the anecdotal or confessional. Autoethnography is perhaps aptly captured as a practice “of representing ourselves in the act of engaging with and writing about our selves in interaction with other selves” (Tedlock 1991). Drawing on lived experience vignettes, this paper explores the generative valence of the autoethnographic methodology in its capacity to craft evocative truth claims about unique relations. Ultimately, it is a reflection on how “friendship-as-method” allows one to convey relationality in times of economic hardships.