Visualizing Different Kinds of Writing: Auto-ethnography, Social Science

Abstract

Studies of indigeneity can prove particularly important if they focus on how history writes and produces the “indigenous” in multiple ways and at multiple sites. Modes and styles of writing appropriate for communicating the multiple effects and the complex and contradictory forces and assumptions at work in the study of indigeneity are yet to be fully answered. The anthology, Writing in the San/d: Auto-ethnographic Explorations amongst Indigenous South Africans, (Keyan Tomaselli, ed. [2007]), presents specific applications of auto-ethnographic methods, drawing attention to problems about methods that are often an anathema to literary studies or to social science. This article traces the evolution of specific reflexive methods developed by the researchers in partnership with the researched, namely, indigenous communities across Southern Africa. The article argues for closer collaboration between social science on the one hand and new ways of documenting, visualizing and expressing field research experiences and encounters on the other. This research journey examines tensions that have arisen between auto-ethnographic and more conventional styles of academic and technical writing. The usual criticism leveled at auto-ethnography, culturalism and other forms of writing and imaging within the orthodox social science/development studies/social anthropology genre is that these methods have no policy relevance. This article is a response to these concerns.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, Nyasha Mobti and Shanade Barnabas for their critical comments on this article. Also thanks to my research assistants, Sarah Strauss and Varona Sathiyah.

The project, now known as Rethinking Indigeneity, is funded by the National Research Foundation: Social Sciences and Humanities. The opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of this author and not of the Foundation. Additional funding has been received from a variety of international sources, facilitated by the University of Leeds, the University of Queensland, the Smithsonian Institution, the Department of Economic Development and Tourism of the Northern Cape, the AIDS Foundation of South Africa, the University of KwaZulu–Natal, and the South African Netherlands Programme for Alternative Development. My thanks also to Megan Biesele and Bob Hitchcock for their comments about this response on their review.

Notes

For further information on this project based in the Centre for Communication, Media and Society, University of KwaZulu–Natal, consult: http://ccms.ukzn.ac.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=735&Itemid=90 (accessed July 2, 2012).

For a full list of outputs relating to the project see http://ccms.ukzn.ac.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=732&Itemid=94 (accessed July 2, 2012).

The components of the model are Production, Identity, Representation, Regulation and Consumption.

See Overcoming the Group Areas Act: Social Movements in Westville, South Africa, 1988–1997 [1997]. http://ccms.ukzn.ac.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=460&Itemid=66 (accessed June 26, 2012).

See Chapman [2003] for a literary response to this lament; also Tomaselli [1997].

We are indebted to Dr Nyasha Mboti for this summary of what he identified as “misunderstandings”; also Mboti [2011].

Again, the reader is referred elsewhere to the work of Biesele [1999], Hitchcock [2002], Hitchcock et al. [2006], Wilmsen [1989], Gordon [1992], Suzman [2001, 2002], Saugestad [2001], Guenther [1980], L. Marshall [1976], White [1995] and many others. Our subjects did indeed write their own narratives, as can be seen in Bregin and Kruiper [2004], Lange [2007a, 2007b] and the video made by Hart [2008].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keyan G. Tomaselli

KEYAN G. TOMASELLI is Senior Professor and Director of The Centre for Communication, Media and Society, School of Applied Human Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, in South Africa. His next book is Cultural Tourism and Identity [Brill, 2012], and he is editor of Critical Arts: South–North Cultural and Media Studies. E-mail: [email protected]