On the Autoethnography of Touches, Wounds, and Deformations

The author presents autoethnography as a systematic research method used in field studies into the emotions of love. She begins by tracing various sociological and anthropological approaches and noting the place they give to an active, subjective researcher with agency. Then she concentrates on how autoethnographic data is generated and used in the course of the research process. In her opinion, autoethnography can be an original source of data—a supplement and verification for other materials collected in the field—if the personal experiences of the researcher are treated with the same attention as the experiences of the persons studied. She proposes to verify these experiences and the researcher’s activities in the world by use of the “clinical” and analytic autoethnographic method, which relies on the strategy of the “researcher as a tool.” This concept corresponds to the figure of the “vulnerable observer” used by researchers of the school of evocative autoethnography; it turns the researcher’s personal biography into a unit of analysis