Autoethnography: self, identity and reflection as categories of analysis in Ethnography

Abstract

The autoethnography associated with ethnographic research emerges in the literature with the research of Ellis and Bochner starting from 1999 and in it, it gains space as an alternative to ethnographies that
address: stories and life, self-report and the ways in which the researcher tries to insert himself as a subject of speech in the ethnographic narrative. The guiding questions are: What is autoethnography? How has the term been conceptualized and what are the categories associated with it? Who are the most cited authors in these studies and how do they explain autoethnography? The objectives of this article are to explore the concept of
autoethnography, to identify methodological-epistemological lines that guided the analyzed research, and to outline a conceptual profile of the categories associated with the term. The methodology used was the systematic literature review (RBS-Roadmap) and the Atlas.ti23 software for the analysis and derivation of results
from 2,200 articles in English. Of these, 286 articles were selected that used the term autoethnography in the title. As preliminary results, we point out that although the articles emphasize self-writing, in the first person, calling attention to categories such as self, identity and reflection, the excessive use of autobiographical or biographical narrative can make the ethnographic enterprise ethno, of autoethnography, less or less important.