Doing Autoethnography: Facing Challenges, Taking Choices, Accepting Responsibilities

Abstract

In this article, I address six particular challenges that autoethnographers may face during their journey to understand how culture flows through the self while the self flows through culture. I ask how autoethnographers zoom into personal lives while staying focused on the study of culture, whether they should prefer hard data or soft impressions, to what extent autoethnography can be done collaboratively, whether evocative autoethnography is better than the analytic one, whether we own the stories that we tell in our texts, and in what way autoethnographers are either self-indulged narcissists or self-reflexive and vulnerable scholars. Addressing these challenges, I refer to the existing literature to illuminate the choices that autoethnographers have and to elaborate on the responsibility that they have for others and themselves, alike.