(Auto)Ethnography Underground: Some French “Fibrils” and “Scratches”

Abstract

This essay examines the ethnographer’s “underground” as a foundational research space lacking in light: the light provided by being fully aware of our motives and by illuminating the “lack” that leads us to look for something in others, who then become the human instruments of our research. From as early as the 1930s, the ethnographic “I” was central to how Michel Leiris viewed his engagement with research, so much so that the French writer and researcher is an often forgotten or underestimated precursor of a type of reflexivity that has placed questioning research subjects at the heart of (auto)ethnography. This essay returns to the forms taken by Leiris’s writing, viewing them as a foundational impulse for an autoethnography that takes a detour to the self via others without this simply being a return to the self.