ABSTRACT
‘Six tales of a visit to Chile’ is my personal response, after being invited to read the pre-publication manuscript of Questions of Culture in Autoethnography : this book. And as noted in Chapter 15, ‘Nothing is stranger than this business of humans observing other humans in order to write about them’ (Behar, 1996, p. 5). Like several authors in this book, this personal response seeks ‘ways to bring the personal into the work we do, part of a broader fundamental shift away from viewing and trying to understand difference as a cornerstone of knowledge production, to instead focus on identification . In other words, what happens when we identify with the people involved in “our” research?’ (Greg Vass, Michelle Bishop, Katharine Thompson, Pauline Bellar, Calita Murray Jane Tovey & Maxine Ryan). However, in this piece I also ask, what happens when we identify with the personal stories gathered, written, and shared in this book. I now invite you, the reader, to ‘mull, to savour, and to put these singular tales [I am about to share] into a larger perspective’ (Robert Rinehart).
