Hypnosis as performance autoethnography in qualitative sociological research

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce to sociologists the concept of dissociative hypnosis and to demonstrate the potential that this discipline has for obtaining or deriving biographical narratives in ethnographic and autoethnographic studies. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents brief comparative histories of the development of hypnosis and of performance autoethnography to highlight the degree of consonance between these apparently, disparate modalities, in their struggle for acceptance and respectability. The intensely introspective, emotional and experiential nature of hypnosis and self-hypnosis narratives is then compared with the personal descriptions and applications of the autoethnographic process as depicted in the sociological literature, to illustrate the parallels between the two modalities. The paper concludes with a review of the potential problems and limitations inherent in using hypnosis as a memory recall modality in sociological research studies. Findings This paper argues that the exploratory and revelatory nature of information accrual during dissociative altered-state hypnosis closely resembles that during performance autoethnography, and that hypnosis could therefore be usefully employed as an additional and novel (ethno-) autobiographical tool in sociological and ethnographic research. Originality/value Performative autoethnography has now become a firmly established route to obtaining a valid and intensely personal autobiographical history of individuals or groups of individuals. However this is the first publication to propose hypnosis as an alternative approach to deriving ethnographic and autoethnographic biographical narratives.