50: House Dresses and Sensible Shoes: A Baby Boomer Faces Fifty

Ellis and Bochner (1996) address the crisis of representation in ethnography by presenting an intriguing collection of ethnographic research methodologies. The purpose of ethnography is that it “tries to deepen and enlarge our sense of a human community. Literature does this, too” (p. 18). Therefore, it is both the writer and the reader who benefit from freedom of ethnographic expression. The authors encourage such methodologies as sociopoetics, reflexivity, and autoethnography, assuming that ethnographers cannot stand above and outside what they study. In autoethnography, researchers stand as both informant and participant. As such, they use the tools of ethnographers. “They interact, … take note, … photograph, moralize, and write” (p. 16). The affect of the accounts and the various genres in the book is to leave the reader not only drenched in research disguised as story, but compelled to write an autoethnography. Following are excerpts of my autoethnography.¹