Navigating the Complexities of Identity through Autoethnography

Abstract (English)

It was not until the 1980s that autoethnography as a research method was developed as a protest to the existing methodologies of how the stories of the ‘other’ were not accurately represented (Marak 2016) and since then auto-ethnographers have brought to the fore, the ‘self’ and their story. The core of autoethnography is not merely personal narratives or autobiographies, rather, it connects the personal to the cultural, social, and political (Pathak 2010; Ellis 2004), making it a self-conscious self-exploration of the researcher’s own positionality (Clandinin & Connelly 1994), a potential tool for decolonial research. This paper, thus illuminates how autoethnography can be integrated into the scholarly pursuit of the ‘self’ and the myriad ‘i/dentities’. It recenters the researcher (the other) and her story as a subject/participant and context in the field. This article presents in brief the researcher’s story of conducting research among her own; the negotiations and renegotiations she endured being a woman researcher, and to being a tribal in a multicultural space she calls her own. It will be discussed into three parts: first part deals with the theoretical and methodological aspect of autoethnography; the second part, on the researchers’ story of stories conducting fieldwork and navigating through with her tribal identity and part three examines various challenges raised in the story, including the insider-outsider knowledge, researcher-participant relationship and address power imbalances and ethical practice in social scientific research.