ABSTRACT
Writing about how autoethnographers “make and relate” their texts is one of the distinguishing features of qualitative theory and research. is bald-faced fact in a research world where facts are rare should not, however, be surprising to anyone familiar with the history of ethnography (Manganaro, 1990). From Malinowski’s debt to Joseph Conrad (complicated by his diary’s admission of how he really felt about relating to the natives) to Geertz’s genre-blurring cockfight (complicated by how he and his wife were ignored “as wind” by the Balinese) to Ellis’s textbook-as-novel (complicated by her relationships to the students and their work), ethnographers have always placed a high value on literary style that evokes as well as represents “what happened” while they were in the company of others. It is,
then, how they/we accomplish those two goals that is worthy of our scholarly and aesthetic attention (Ellis & Bochner, 2002).
