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

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.