Autoethnography is no longer a marginal anthropological practice but one that is taught at many universities worldwide. And this approach to empirical knowledge gathering and anthropological analysis forms the basis for hundreds if not thousands of publications, many of which are well cited and widely celebrated. The success of autoethnography is surely a cause for celebration. It is, however, also a cause for concern, especially when we look at more recent developments where autoethnography has changed from its original formulation of an anthropology “at home” to that of an anthropology “as home.” In this article, we revisit previous critiques of autoethnography and offer some new ones of our own. Doing so, we point to five limits to current autoethnography—five limitations, old and new, that reveal the disciplinary and wider societal unsustainability of the way in which the method is increasingly perceived and practiced.
Sausdal et al. (Wed,) studied this question.