Book Review: Title: Interpretive Autoethnography
| Author | Tarquam McKenna |
| DOI | 10.1177/1035719X1501500206 |
| Published date | 01 June 2015 |
| Date | 01 June 2015 |
39
In his book Interpretive Autoethnography, Norman
Denzin calls us ‘Back to the beginning’. In this dense yet
small volume, the reader traverses the array of forms
that belong under the aegis of autoethnography, as a
qualitative form of inquiry. The book is a delightfully
rich read in its straightforwardness and contention.
There is a continual return to the beginnings of
ideas, theories and practices, which is exciting and
revitalising for the reader of this second edition. It is
a book laden with the richness of Denzins’ earliest
ideas, juxtaposed with the latest thinking on qualitative
inquiry—which provokes us to understand the world
through the lives of those who inhabit it.
The question of what exactly this book is about
can be answered in the reference to Pelias (2011, p. 64),
which, without any measure of ambiguity captures
what is a seemingly simple thesis and the answer to
the question posited. Denzin, who is a global leader in
qualitative inquiry, prompts us to wonder why he wrote
this book when he quotes Pelias:
Today I want to write my way out of this history,
and this is why I write my version of performance and
autoethnography. I want to push back, intervene, be
vulnerable, tell another story. I want to contest what
happened. (Pelias 2011, p. 12)
Indeed, it is clear that for anyone starting on the
qualitative autoethnographic journey this book will be
an exceptional guide or map. Yet there are moments
when, as a reader, I feel I am deliberately munificently
deceived into believing that what one is seeing is a model
of simplicity. This book is a paradox as it is written to
eortlessly map the terrain of this research territory but
it also brings the intricacies, complications and densities
of multiple subjective qualities of knowing to the reader.
To continue, I will endeavour to draw out some of the
questions that the quote by Pelias raises and how Denzin
leads us across the topography of autoethnography.
As Denzin notes, Interpretive Autoethnography is
a way of ‘writing my way out’—and indeed of righting
wrongs; of writing down rites of passage and is a way
to review life rituals and what it means to be alive. This
book is situated in a research field where biography
or ‘life-writing’ is a given and it is privileged rather
than admonished, the core principle of the book is life
writing, which remains the raison d’être for this text.
From the outset, Denzin (Marx cited in Denzin 2014,
p. xi) calls us to realise that the story of the self is
where ‘men and women make their own history, but
■ Author
Norman Denzin
■ Publisher/year
Sage, Los Angeles, second edition, 2014
■ Extent/type
107 pages, paperback
■ Price
A$49.95/NZ$50.39 from Footprint Books which oers a
15% discount to AES members; phone 1300 260 090 (within
Australia) or +61 2 9997 3973 (from outside Australia), email
info@footprint.com.au
, website
http://www.footprint.com.au
for
the latest prices
■ ISBN 978-1-4522-9981-5
Title: Interpretive Autoethnography
BOOK REVIEWS Evaluation Journal of Australasia Vol 15 | No 2 | 2015 | pp. 39–42
not…under conditions they have chosen for themselves;
rather than in terms of immediately existing, given and
handed down to them’. Denzin goes on to note that
autoethnography’s role is to ‘interpret and change the
conditions under which lives are lived’ (2004, p. xx).
The second edition situates the reader in the recent
history of contributors to the field. It sets out to value
what is known and lived out in the activity of research
under the aegis of autoethnography. Denzin cites
the concept of ‘my story’ (2004, p. viii) listing a very
comprehensive range of both new and familiar architects
of narrative ethnography forms. For those interested
in ‘drama’ or creative dramatics I draw attention to
the work of Ellis (meta-autoethnography), Saldana
(2011) (ethnodrama) and Pelias (2011) (sociopoetics and
performance writing) in this edition.
Throughout this book, Denzin reminds us that, as
the audience, we will be taken to a space to critique and
‘interpret and change the conditions under which (our)
lives are lived’ (2004, p. xi). The lives of the self and
the lives of the ‘other’ are deliberated upon from what
is both a traditional life worldview along with the less
familiar human realms of the outsider—using art and
creativity to permeate the research encounter. Denzin
demands that we consider the ‘immediate particularity’
of the life world of each protagonist in the act of him/
her being alive (2004, p. x). Not unlike Moreno (1971),
Denzin’s principles are espoused in psychodrama,
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