Editorial Introduction

This collection is an unusual addition to the autobiographical or ‘confessional’ literature by ethnographers: that is, those publications in which researchers report on what they experienced and learnt whilst trying to conduct a piece of ethnographic research. Our title ‘Lost Ethnographies’ is not to be taken literally. In this introduction we draw out the lessons of our contributions, ‘trouble’ the categories of ‘lost’ and of ‘ethnography’, and of the confessional genre of text itself. There are a good many collections of such ‘confessions’ and autobiographies, and the genre has been analysed by Van Maanen (1988), who contrasted three varieties of such Tales of the Field, whilst Atkinson (1992) and Delamont (2009) used the scholarly work on Russian folklore by Propp to convey the narrative structure of confessional tales about American urban ethnographies and fieldwork amongst feminist witches. However, the authors of the conventional autobiographical or confessional pieces choose to constrain their stories – and there are conventions which are widely observed – their authors are generally successful.