Autoethnography

Autoethnography is a qualitative research method that combines elements from autobiography and ethnography in order to reflect on lived experiences and to understand the broader cultural, social, or institutional context.

“…we have witnessed an upsurge of new or revisited nationalisms and racisms, directed most often against that diversity of mind and spirit of which our lifetime projects were so clearly a part. To confront this implicit, sometimes rampant ethnic and ecological devastation, there is the need for a kind of omnipoetics that tests the range of our threatened natures wherever found and looks toward an ever-greater assemblage of words and thoughts as a singular buttress against those forces that would divide and diminish us. It is in this sens that we are attempting here an omnipoetics of the American hemisphere, as an experimental instance of what might be attempted further on a worldwide scale, toward what one of us once described as 'an anthrology of everything.'” (xli)

Autoethnography is the vehicle towards seeing omnipoetics in action. A symposium of the whole, that includes the individual and how they interact and create the world. Autoethnography is a writing research method that requires the researcher to explore their personal experiences and reflect on the broader cultural context or theme. In Dr. David Hanauer's article, “Poetic Writing Research: The History, Methods, and OUtcomes of Poetic (Auto) Ethnography,” he describes the background of autoethnographic writing,

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Autoethnography is a vehicle towards seeing omnipoetics in action. A symposium of the whole, that includes the individual and how they interact and create the world.

”…we have witnessed an upsurge of new or revisited nationalisms and racisms, directed most often against that diversity of mind and spirit of which our lifetime projects were so clearly a part. To confront this implicit, sometimes rampant ethnic and ecological devastation, there is the need for a kind of omnipoetics that tests the range of our threatened natures wherever found and looks toward an ever-greater assemblage of words and thoughts as a singular buttress against those forces that would divide and diminish us. It is in this sens that we are attempting here an omnipoetics of the American hemisphere, as an experimental instance of what might be attempted further on a worldwide scale, toward what one of us once described as 'an anthrology of everything.'“ (xli)

Omnipoetics provides the groundwork for a pathway towards the realization of a continually growing, “symposium of the whole,” but that symposium is incomplete without the work continuing to create a bridge between the individual and the past. Through autoethnography, the individual can gain a better sense of personal experience while also investigating how this intersects with cultural, social, and institutional contexts. The last part of the omnipoetics manifesto leaves the reader with the opportunity to become a part of this collective ever-expanding consciousness, “Omnipoetics as a contemporary attempt to project anew a primal (=complex) consciousness of the whole. As in the Kumeyaay myth of creation: 'The great snake absorbed all knowledge,/all the arts were inside her/When the fire reached her,/she exploded:/all knowledge gushed from her,/was scattered everywhere” (xliii). This last line points to the imperative and unsaid point of the manifesto, omnipoetics requires us - not just as scholars and academics that dig into the past to continue building the symposium, but as individuals with personal experiences and intersecting identities that are a necessary part of the ever expanding whole - this collective consciousness that is necessary to explore, the way that reading a poem sparks thoughts and change and movement inside of you; capture this, reflect on it, and write yourself into the narrative.

Part of reading the Serpent and the Fire, is learning how to take all of these poems, to listen to the life-givers singing the song, and to translate that into your own creation. The indigenous tribes thought of life as a circle with each of us filling our role within this, if there is no beginning and no end, then the individual creating right here and now, is the vehicle to learning to sing the song. There are no high or low forms of art and poetry, there is not a standard of a work being 'good' enough, there is simply the act of creation, and the act of creation is the way to internalize and live an omnipoetic life. A life that is filled with the experience of living alive, in reconnecting to technicians of the sacred and looking backward to look forward, to experience life as an individual, but to translate that into the collective, to become a part of the symposium.