FORUM: QUALITATIVE Volume 3, No. 3, Art.

10
SOCIAL RESEARCH September 2002
SOZIALFORSCHUNG

Home and Away: Self-Reflexive Auto-/Ethnography

Christiane Kraft Alsop

Key words: Abstract: Studying the unknown involves leaving the familiar. Leaving is prerequisite to transcend-
ethnography, auto- ing self and society, whether studying a far-away culture or the neighborhood culture. However,
ethnography, self- leaving also enables a different and deeper understanding of what we left at home. In this explora-
reflexivity, cultural tion I will interweave the two very human states of being at home and being away, both in the literal
psychology, home, sense of studying one's "own" and the "other" culture, and in the metaphorical sense of studying
homesickness the known and the unknown within the field of the ethnographic endeavor. The look back home
emerges as a chance to practice self-reflexivity.

I will relate scientific approaches to the experience of being home versus being away with my per-
sonal experiences of leaving my home-country (Germany) and immersing myself in another culture
(the United States) to open up various dimensions of meaning. My contribution includes: (a) the
etymology of home and away; (b) cultural psychology of home and away; (c) Fernweh versus Heim-
weh; and (d) central autoethnographic questions and "Journeys Back Home" that illustrate the
possibilities auto-ethnography opens up as yet another piece of the puzzle in attempting to
understanding ourselves and others.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Roots of Meanings
3. The Cultural Psychological Meanings of Home and Away
4. Fernweh and Heimweh
5. Central Autoethnographic Questions and Journeys Back Home
6. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Author
Citation

1. Introduction

Practicing ethnography means shifting one's notion of center and periphery and
coping with the complexity of multiple centers with multiple peripheries. In this
contribution I will introduce one attempt at interrelating centers and peripheries by
interrelating what it means to be home and to be away. I will do so by referring to
different aspects of my identity as teacher and mentor, as ethnographer and
writer and as a German immigrant to the United States. By using these different
voices I intend to demonstrate that being home and being away are two very
human states of being that are intimately connected. By referring to etymology,
cultural psychology, psychoanalysis and anthropology I will provide a description
of those two states to open up various dimensions of their meanings. [1]

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FQS 3(3), Art. 10, Christiane Kraft Alsop: Home and Away: Self-Reflexive Auto-/Ethnography

In the wake of colonialism anthropologists came up with the term self-reflexivity to

understand ethnographic limitations and potentials. The concept and method
called auto-ethnography is an attempt at practicing this self-reflexivity by having a
closer look at one's own longings and belongings, with the familiarity that—when
viewed from a distance—it can change one's perspective considerably. This
change comes about when the auto-ethnographer places the self within a social
context by connecting the personal and the cultural (REED-DANAHAY 1997, p.9;
ELLIS & BOCHNER 2000, p.739). In the latter part of this article I will
consequently focus not on the traditional ethnographic notion of the "other" but on
the familiar from the perspective of the person immersed in the life of the
"others." What remains is a characterization of auto-ethnography—illustrated by
two examples—as an artistic walk along boundaries made up by dialectic
connections and paradoxical twists and turns. [2]

2. Roots of Meanings

One approach to understanding the meaning of terms is to look at the roots of the
words themselves, their etymology. As a native German speaker I decided to look
at the German roots of being home versus being away as the facets of their
emotional meanings are more familiar to me (see BRAUN et al. 1993; KLUGE
1995). [3]

The German language has two words for home: Heim and Heimat. The roots of
both words are found in Old and Middle High German, Old English, Old Nordic,
Irish and Russian. These roots point to a meaning that encompasses the material
residence (like one's farm, or the village), the material means to make a living
such as farmland, as well as the social environment of family and significant
people. The word Heimat has roots in the Indo-Germanic word for residing but
surprisingly also hints at meanings of wasteland, poverty and treasure. Heimat
consequently has at its poles the rather awful prospect of living in a desert of the
familiar, the same; at the other extreme it is a jewel, a gem, something special
and very dear and precious to you. [4]

Digging for the roots of its antonym "foreign" holds yet another surprise. The
German word for foreign or strange is fremd, an adjective formed out of the roots
of "away from" and "forward." In its current usage fremd means "coming from
abroad, not from home, not belonging, unknown" (BRAUN et al. 1993, p.373,
Translation C.K.A.). However, the roots of the term also hint at meanings of being
brave, strong and competent. There is an aspect to the person coming from far
away or leaving for the far away, or the object originating in the foreign, that is
considered brave, strong and competent. What is surprising, however, is that
hostile reactions to the foreign are not to be found at its roots. [5]

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3. The Cultural Psychological Meanings of Home and Away

In his "Skizze zur Psychologie des Heimwehs," Ernst E. BOESCH (1991) looks at
childhood as the foundation of Heimat. It is most obvious in childhood how
interrelated being home and being away are. The child who can return to a safe
haven after each step forward can explore the unknown. Crawling on the floor of
the family room a baby will frequently turn around to make sure her caretaker is
still in sight before crawling around the couch, the chair, or even out of the room.1
The frightened child, however, will cling to her caretaker and stick to the familiar,
unable to further her development (BOESCH, 1991; compare AINSWORTH,
1979). [6]

What makes Heimat so special is that it provides the primary experience we are
exploring for the first time. And it is so special because the processes of
exploration happen simultaneously: we are exploring our physical environment,
our selves and our identifications. No other explorations later in life are
simultaneous and primary. [7]

Heimat provides the original template that allows for orientation and
communication in our mother tongue (BOESCH 1991, p.22). This template is
crucial in a double sense. First, it allows us to anticipate. When we perceive
others we can read their faces, their gestures, their tone of voice in a way that
allows projections into the future because we can rely on a long history of
experiences. [8]

As an immigrant to the United States I become aware of this most painfully in

moments of crisis. The tone of voice, the mimic of a speaker and the deep
emotional meaning and historical roots the words of another language convey
are not, or are barely or only partly accessible to those not native. Listening to
the news after September 11, 2001 I found myself missing the familiarity of
German radio and TV broadcasts. Not that they convey the golden path to
wisdom but their familiarity to me provides a sense of basic orientation in a
moment of utter confusion. Shortly after the terror attacks I gave a talk about
this very same topic of home and away. Afterwards a woman in her late fifties
approached me. She had left her Canadian Heimat thirty five years ago. She
explained to me that she never felt an urge to go back but at the first
awareness of the attacks she sensed an immediate longing to be back in her
hometown. [9]

Secondly, from childhood on we make use of the original template provided by

Heimat by conjuring up fictional worlds of a better home using the stories, fairy
tales and movies we encounter while growing up. [10]

1 Here and in what follows I will refer to the grammatically female form. However, throughout the
text I will sometimes consciously, sometimes "by chance" go back to the male form of
reference. It is up to the reader to interpret those inconsistencies or accept them as
idiosyncrasies of my style.

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Heimat therefore provides security by enabling us to develop an inner compass

(AMERY 1980, RAUSCHENBACH 2001) that we rely on unconsciously in every
second of our life—unconsciously as long as we are at home. Heimat becomes
significant only when leaving (BOESCH 1991, AMERY 1980, RAUSCHENBACH
2001). Consequently, Heimat dialectically links our past and our future (BOESCH
1991, p.26); being home dialectically refers to being away. [11]

In his sketch of homesickness Ernst E. BOESCH (1991, pp.29ff.) goes on to

explain that compared to home the foreign is merely an area of projection
because the foreign lacks the inner template home provides. The foreign is
amorphous and unstructured. It does not allow for anticipation because we
cannot read it, cannot interpret what is possible or impossible, attractive or
repulsive. We lack the history of personal and cultural experiences. This lack of
transparency holds potential for both euphoria and frustration. By immersing
ourselves in another culture, we can expand our selves and our identifications by
exploring the foreign just like a child explores its new environment. Discovering
the unknown environment and unknown parts of our selves makes us feel
empowered, empowered by expanding our potential and reinventing ourselves.
We can do all this because away from home we get labeled as an outsider.
Outsiders can be eccentric. They are even supposed to be eccentric. That way
outsiders can be romanticized by the natives or treated with hostility as
foreigners.2 [12]

I remember my first time at West Beach up in Beverly where I live. I changed

from my bathing suit to my normal clothes after swimming by loosely wrapping
a towel around my body. A woman on the beach approached me: You must be
from Europe, she said. No one on the beach dares to change clothes your way.
This and other teachers in culturally correct behavior were amused at the
behavior I displayed here and in other situations. And I felt relaxed about those
"mistakes." After all, how could I have known? I felt the freedom granted only
to fools. [13]

However, the euphoric phase is followed by frustrations. Gerda LERNER (1997),

an émigré from Nazi Austria describes:

"Living in translation and lacking both an adequate vocabulary and the sense for the
rhythm of the language, it was as though my adult knowledge had to be transposed
into the vocabulary of a six-year-old [...] (p.35). To come [...] to the imbecile
stammerings of an immigrant American was a fall [...] (p.38)."

And this is just one of many ways of "falling" when abroad.3 [14]

2 American hotel chains abroad ease the pain this lack of anticipation causes in the tourist or the
business person; they take away the feeling of being an outsider by creating an environment
identical to the one at home (see HELLER 1995, p.2).
3 Here and in the following I am not talking about the temporal challenge of being a tourist but the
long-term immersion in other ways of life. Although, tourism is in fact something dear to
Germans—they show the highest rate of tourism per population in the Western world. The "itch
to get away" is something the material prosperity of modern industrialized countries brought

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In my childhood girls in Germany, third graders mostly, loved to keep what they
call a Poesiealbum, a poetry album. You asked your friends to write a favorite
poem, quotation or proverb on a page of your album. I found the following in mine
and remember it had been one of the most popular ones (compare
RAUSCHENBACH 2001, p.230):

Never forget home where your cradle stands,

You'll never find a second home in the foreign lands. [15]

This wisdom threatens the one who dares to leave that her inner compass will fail
to serve her away from home. The wisdom also hints at something all cultures do:
they tend to divide the world into a here and there, we and they, the civilized and
the savage. [16]

Just like the dialectic of home versus away there is the dialectic of nationalism
versus the foreign. Connotations of a nation include the incarnate belonging, to a
place and its people, to a heritage, to a community. Nations provide a "quasi-
religious text" not only about their historical and geographical landmarks but also
about their official enemies and heroes (SAID 2000, pp.176f.). Nationalism,
again, dialectically refers to imperialism. Ever since humans have written history
there has been the effort to conquer the foreign and incorporate it into the familiar
on all levels of being. It remains to be seen what the future brings both for the
idea of nations as well as for the idea of Heimat. Tommy DAHLEN (2000)
ventured some thoughts on the substitution of nations by corporate identities.
Jean AMERY (1980) predicts a future of objects without history, foreseeing the
replacement of the individual calendar and address book by the universal palm
pilot. And Brigitte RAUSCHENBACH (2001, pp.245f.) elaborates on borders open
only for the inhabitants to leave and return not for the intruders to stay. Heimat
she predicts will be substituted by "non-places." [17]

Between the here and there, the we and they, the gap of not belonging opens up
to the outsider. There are various ways of reacting to this not-belonging. On an
individual level we might try to cope with feelings of resentment at those who are
at home. The anthropologist Edward SAID (2000, p.181) points at yet another
coping strategy. Immigrants, he finds, often create their own world to rule. They
become novelists, chess players or political activists. On the cultural level one
can often observe the first generation of immigrants attempting to create an
imitation of Heimat with familiar shops, restaurants, houses and organizations. "In
New York City's Washington Heights they created a small Mittel-Europa of
familiar shops, coffee houses and organizations. Their cynical stance towards the
USA gave them a sense of continuity" (LERNER 1997, p.39). [18]

However, leaving not only turns me into an outsider in the new culture, I also
become an outsider at home. My leaving disturbs the order of the divide into a
here and a there. Those who stay at home identify me as belonging to their we,
whereas I offend them by preferring the company of a they. The ones staying

along (RIEFF 1994, p.30).

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react with suppressed dissatisfaction and envy which springs from the conscious
or subconscious knowledge that home is not perfect, that it can be limiting or
even existentially threatening (BOESCH 1991, p.30). Why is that? I think it is
because every person feels the gap between her factual and her fictional home,
between the wasteland of the familiar and the treasure of the "promised land."
And by leaving I point my finger at that gap for all those who stay behind.
Auto-/biographical accounts of émigrés, refugees and expatriates give multiple
witness to the difficulties of those left behind (see for example FISCHER 1998,
FREMONT 1999, REICH-RANICKI 2000). However, cultures are inventive in their
ways of coping with this dissatisfaction and envy (BOESCH (1991, p.30). They
invent farewell rituals like presents and the promises of frequent contact via
letters and phone calls.4 [19]

4. Fernweh and Heimweh

The dialectics of home and away, of nationalism and the foreign, of insider and
outsider become even more apparent when looking at the feelings that emerge
when home gets too close and when home is too far away. While hinting in
opposite directions of their longing, both feelings are captured in two German
words that share the same noun: Fernweh and Heimweh. [20]

Weh means a cry of pain, of fright, or of surprise at which roots are rage, anger
and sadness (BRAUN et al. 1993, p.1545, KLUGE 1995, p.879). And while
Heimweh easily translates into homesickness, I am at a loss when it comes to the
German word Fernweh. The English wanderlust expresses the longing to leave
but it emphasizes the tourist's longing for a week or two of adventure. The
German meaning, however, entails a horizon narrowing down on us to a point
where home becomes almost suffocating and we wander off. We leave the desert
of the familiar. Consequently, we meet the new environment with enthusiasm,
experience the widening of our horizon as empowering, and explore aspects of
our identity that were buried at home. We fall in love at first sight. However, stuck
in the foreign land for some time, the wasteland we left turns into a jewel in our
memory, the treasure of the familiar, the compass of our feeling, thinking and act-
ing. We get struck with homesickness, the cry of pain for what we left at home. [21]

How could this happen to us? How could our euphoria change so rapidly into
misery? [22]

In what follows, I will walk along part of the way with Brigitte RAUSCHENBACH's
exploration of homesickness (2001) as it leads to the central paradox that will
open up questions for auto-/ethnographic accounts. [23]

RAUSCHENBACH (2001) explains the meaning of homesickness by referring to

FREUD's understanding of the two phenomena, mourning and melancholia. The

4 There are various reasons to leave home. SAID (2000, p.181) distinguishes between exiles and
refugees on the one hand versus expatriates and émigrés on the other—the latter category
having a touch of deliberate choice to it. I exclude, however the tourist who goes on an
adventurous trip for a week or month. This is not what I consider immersion in another culture.

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loss of a significant relationship, whether that be a person or an abstraction like

homeland, means that all invested energy is now homeless, producing pain in the
bereaved person, followed by an intense longing to continue the relationship,
prolonging it even if only in fantasy. A major loss of interest in the world and in
other people is the consequence.

"Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to
demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. This
demand arouses understandable opposition—it is a matter of general observation
that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed when a
substitute is already beckoning to them. This opposition, can be so intense that
turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through
[hallucinating it]. Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders
cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit at great expense of time
and psychic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is
psychologically prolonged. [...] When the work of mourning is completed the ego
becomes free and uninhibited again." (FREUD 1917, p.237)5 [24]

While the mourning person experiences an impoverished and empty world, the
melancholic person experiences an impoverished and empty "I," not knowing
what makes her sad. Therefore she cannot mourn because the loss is
accompanied by a major disappointment that can have anger or even hatred at
its roots. The melancholic holds on to parts of her early childhood identifications
that she secretly blames. Melancholia turns into self-destructive hate that is
meant to target someone or something else. [25]

RAUSCHENBACH (2001, p.237) concludes that homesickness is a combination

of FREUD's understanding of mourning and melancholia. Heimweh has at its
roots an accusation against home: It does not provide a living be that in the
material, social or ideological sense. Consequently, I am forced to search for a
future abroad. However, abroad I rely on an inner compass that my home
provided me with. Homesickness, then, replaces the original meaning of home
with a nostalgic longing which covers up my home's failure to provide the help
and security I need in order to explore and find stability in the unknown
environment (AMERY 1980). [26]

When I left Germany I was feeling frustrated. To me, this Germany seemed
narrow-minded and inflexible. They still refuse to use the Internet, I thought,
they cling to a job market of professions that have been invented a century
ago, and devoutly believe in authority and hierarchy. However, from this
distance that Germany had put on a new face. I found myself glossing over the
cracks. I found myself praising the Germans' skepticism towards each and
every technological invention, praising their recycling of each and every bottle,
plastic or tin can, every shred of paper. Looking back, these German ways
seemed glorious to me. [27]

5 The changes FREUD later made to his theory are not considered relevant in this exploration.

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At the center of homesickness lies a paradox: "Homesickness is the nostalgic

longing for a home that symbolizes the happiness that home could no longer
provide" (RAUSCHENBACH 2001, pp.237f., italics added) [28]

The underlying anxiety and rage become apparent when the homesick person
blames the hosting culture for the various ways in which it does not provide the
security the inner compass guaranteed at home. [29]

When bound by anxiety and confusion at my inner compass not working for me
in the United States, I would tear apart what I found was wrong with "the
others." I would rant: Americans are stupid. They don't manage to look beyond
the rim of their dinner plates and have no idea what deep friendship really
means. [30]

Paradoxes, I believe, are the most fruitful states of mind. The paradox of
homesickness leads me to the central question relevant to every person who
crosses borders, relevant to every person engaging in ethnography:

• What causes my Fernweh? What causes my Heimweh?

• What were the hopes with which I left? What were the disappointments with
home that made me leave?
• And where does my inner compass fail to guide me in my new environment?
[31]

I can give a glimpse at my disappointments that I became aware of long after the
fact of their occurrence. [32]

First, there were my disappointments with my career. In Germany the

academic system demands that—after finishing your Ph.D.—you have to work
on another thesis called Habilitation that takes another five to seven years to
complete. Germany is one of very few countries in the world that clings to this
ritual of obedience and control. It led me to blame not only the German academic
system but also social science in general for my feelings of being stuck in my
career. Away, in the United States, the horizon seemed open and wide. The
land of possibilities would be mine. I would reinvent myself. However, when my
euphoria evaporated in the distance of my ever so widened horizon in my
second home country, after having played with the idea of starting various
other careers I realized that what I had hated in Germany was the system of
academia, not social science itself, which indeed had become so much part of
my identity that I decided to practice it the way I believe is reasonable. [33]

Second, as the daughter of the World War II generation there were the numb,
amorphous and undefined feelings of shame and guilt about my country. I
wanted to leave those behind, at home, tucked away in the basements and
attics of friends who politely offered their storage room for the things I did not

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want to bring to the US right away. But instead of succeeding in running away
from my numb, amorphous and undefined guilt and shame, I found it vibrant,
tangible and very conceivable here in the United States. I saw Americans
proudly presenting their national flag at the entrance to their houses—back in
Germany I had observed this right wing nationalists or neo-Nazis using the
German flag (see PROUD GERMAN? 2001). I saw at the bottom of my
mother-in-law's eyes the pain that was still alive at the loss of her brother who
flew a bomber over North Africa and was shot down by Germans. And I
marveled at the fact that my brother-in-law proudly displayed his father's WWII-
military medals in the hallway of his house. My late father-in-law had fought for
the winners. [34]

Suddenly stories popped up in my mind I had had no access to while living at

home.6 I will give an example of one of those stories later on. Let me put it into
the words one of my students used: "I became Japanese, she said, after I left my
country to relocate in the US." [35]

What I wish to convey with these examples: No matter how strong my Fernweh,
Heimat is in my storage. I cannot leave it back home. No matter how far I venture
out, my inner compass travels with me and I experience its constant change.
Every person who leaves undergoes these processes. Ethnographers involved in
exploring and relating cultures can make use of them systematically. [36]

5. Central Autoethnographic Questions and Journeys Back Home

My first example of how ethnographers can make use of these processes is the
analogy of training a psychotherapist. To the best of my knowledge all approved
and scientifically respected methods of psychotherapy demand that a therapist
explore every angle of her own mind by undergoing a therapy herself (THE
BOSTON PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY AND INSTITUTE, BULLETIN, n.d.,
p.12). The idea is that the therapist has to explore her own secret wishes and
fantasies, her anxieties and angers, her joys and delights in order to support
others in exploring theirs. After all, how can she help her clients to make peace
with themselves, and with their strengths and shortcomings, if she herself does
not take a close look at her own? In this case it seems so obvious that therapists
need to engage in self-reflexivity. Transferring this self-reflexivity to the level of
culture, we—who study other cultures—should explore our home, the wishes and
fantasies it provides us with, the anxieties and angers it causes, the joys and
delights of our everyday lives, the gaps between our factual and our fictional
homes. [37]

6 This is a daring hypothesis to pose because who knows, I might have eventually gotten access
to those feelings at home as well. After all, it often takes two generations to face the trauma a
country has undergone (see the various publications of memoirs by members of the second
generation, i.e. SCHAEFER & KLOCKMANN 1999, SCHLINK 1998, SCHMIDT 1999,
SEIFFERT 2001). However, there are also the frequent tales ethnographers and authors tell
that when gone, with the distance of borders, countries and oceans between themselves and
their home, they see what they had been blind to before (see for example WEISS 2001, ARTS
IN AMERICA 1998).

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Another reason to engage in self-reflexivity becomes obvious when looking at the

history of anthropology. Anthropology started as a colonial undertaking. We Euro-
Americans examined people in the world to determine their place in the hierarchy
of our value systems. There is much evidence that when we colonialists went
away without reflecting on what we left, we measured the unknown against our
own inner compass. And when that inner compass didn't work the others failed,
not we. When the Aborigines of Australia failed the psychologists' so called
culture-free intelligence test, we thought we had proof that they were just not as
smart as we are (COLE 1996, pp.52ff.). And when we found the Ilongots of the
Philippines clinging to their ritual of head hunting when one of their loved ones
died, we thought we had proof of their savage state of mind (ROSALDO
1989/1993, p.65). It was the atrocities and mass migrations of two world wars that
made it difficult for us to simply blame the others. We had to look inward. It was
also the critical voices of feminists who pointed at the power hierarchies in our
own homes that caused abuse, alienation and exploitation between and among
the sexes (see BEHAR & GORDON 1995, NASH 1997, WOLF 1992). And, there
were the voices of those we judged. They suddenly faced us as experts of their
own indigenous cultures, the ones we had put at the bottom of the totem pole
(BEHAR 1996, SMITH 1999). [38]

All this and more caused a major crisis in anthropology and social sciences in
general. One way out is the striving for self-reflexivity. That self-reflexivity can
take various forms and shapes such as asking ourselves about our frame of
mind, about our power position in the network of cultures, about the ways in
which we produce knowledge, and about our notion of center and periphery
(ALSOP 2001, BEHAR 1996, BOURDIEU 1998, 1990, STAEUBLE 1992, 1996).
One possible way to practice self-reflexivity is auto-ethnography, a relatively new
concept and method. [39]

Auto-ethnography (ELLIS & BOCHNER 2000, p.739)

"is an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of
consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural. Back and forth
autoethnographic gaze, first through an ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing
outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then, they look
inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract
and resist cultural interpretations (...). As they zoom backward and forward, inward
and outward, distinctions between the personal and cultural become blurred,
sometimes beyond distinct recognition." [40]

But instead of further defining this genre in the abstract I will give two examples
of autoethnographic works.7 [41]

7 For a good overview on the history of auto-ethnography see REED-DANAHAY (1997). Another
excellent example for an auto-ethnographic approach is KENNY (2000). In a recent article on
Power, Anxiety and the Research Process (ALSOP 2001) I open up yet another way of
practicing self-reflexivity. In that article I describe the various phases of my experience with the
research process, concluding that it is crucial to write an auto-ethnography of your research
process. You can engage in self-reflexivity by interrelating your struggles for power as
academics with your struggles with anxiety about not meeting the standards this academic

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My first example of what we can find when we look back home, is the work of the
literary critic Svetlana BOYM (1996, pp.264f.). She left Russia, her home country,
some ten years ago as a political émigré and returned to better understand the
home she left. In her article on Unsettling Homecoming she describes a particular
event that took place when she was a child and her parents hosted foreigners for
the first time. The family lived in a so-called communal apartment. Their
neighbors, to whom she refers as Aunt Vera and Uncle Fedia, were home

"'Uncle Fedia,' she remembers, 'usually came home drunk, and, if Aunt Vera refused
to let him in, he would crash right in the middle of the long corridor [...] obstructing the
entrance to' the room of her family. On this particular night 'we were all in the living room
listening to music, to tone down the communal noises, and my mother was telling our
foreign guests about the beauties of Leningrad. ... As the conversation rolled along,
and the foreign guest was commenting on the riches of the Russian Museum, a little
yellow stream slowly made its way through the door of the room. Smelly,
embarrassing, intrusive, it formed a little puddle right in front of the dinner table. This
scene, with the precarious coziness of a family gathering, both intimate and public,
with a mixture of ease and fear in the presence of foreigners and neighbors,
remained in my mind as memory of home'." (BOYM 1996, p.264) [42]

She then goes on to work with that memory by transferring it to a metaphor. That
metaphor captures a feature of the Soviet's culture unconscious inner compass.
"If a Soviet cultural unconscious ever existed, it must have been structured as a
communal apartment—with flimsy partitions between public and private, control
and intoxication." (BOYM 1996, p.265) This example shows how taking a look
back home helps to understand Heimat by having memories crystallize in form of
a cultural metaphor. [43]

In my second example I will quote a short part of a story I wrote for a book I am
working on. This book deals with the relationship between German World War II
participants and the Second Generation, and in this case, the relationship
between my father and me.

"It is one of those days when mother is out singing in the choir—a winter afternoon.
Again, I have to sit with my father in the living room and listen. He drinks beer,
canned beer. He loves it whenever Mother is out, because she hates cans and only
buys him bottled beer. With relish he gathers the empty cans on grandma's
embroidered tablecloth until they form a semi- circle around him, his fortress against
invading memories. Each time he opens one, he rips off the lid and carefully aims it
at the trash can under grandfather's oak desk.
Today it's wartime stories. It is war every time he makes me sit and listen. Every beer
can, another story. After a while he gets up.
'Shouldn't we go on a walk around the block?' he asks.

system sets. Approaching the research process in that way one gets a chance at renegotiating
the boundaries between the researcher's subjectivity, the academic field and the framework of
the society in which one's research takes place.

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FQS 3(3), Art. 10, Christiane Kraft Alsop: Home and Away: Self-Reflexive Auto-/Ethnography

This request in disguise means wrapping ourselves in thick winter coats, getting the
boots out and, armed with hats and mittens, stepping out into the cold of a snowless,
late, dim, almost dark, winter afternoon. A walk around the block means turning right
at the Weber's house, going up Magdalenenstrasse, and on to the main street
alongside the shops. First, we will have a glance into the jeweler's window, then the
post office and, right after that, the pharmacy. Between its window and entrance door
hangs the thermometer and the barometer. My father needs these tools to validate
his state of health.
'I knew it was way below freezing.'
He knocks at the barometer glass.
'No wonder I feel so queasy,' my father says.
And on to the hairdresser's shop and past the village pub. Always his hesitation, here.
His longing to dare enter. With a slight touch of his elbow, as if it were my temptation
from which he had to dissuade me, we move on to the window of the drugstore. We
pause. Always his questions.
'Do you need a hair dryer? Or should we get a new heating pad?'
But these questions come later when I am a student in Hamburg visiting my parents.
Here I am eleven, young enough to sit through his stories and accompany him on his
walk without opposition, curious to learn about my father and ennobled by his
demand for my presence, confused, though, by expectations and meanings that
exceed my capacity.
About here, as we leave the drugstore behind, the story begins.
Father is a radio operator. He has been drafted into the war right after his third
semester at medical school. It is his first war year. He is in Greece with his unit.
Compared to his stories about Russia these times seem golden. Enough to eat,
alcohol and cigarettes always at hand. And it is warm. I see the chamber under the
narrow corrugated iron roof. Military desks, the simple kind, made from steel. It is
night. He is on duty, reading the incoming Morse-coded messages, and passing them
on to his lieutenant, the urgent ones; he makes a note of the others in the book for
incoming messages and hands them over in the morning to the next officer on duty. I
see him stepping out into the night to catch a cool breeze and have a cigarette,
leaving the office clerk inside. A woman. Is she Greek? I imagine a dark-haired
woman in her late twenties with slightly careworn features. At other times I cannot
see her at all, or perhaps just her back. The radio equipment chatters. My father
steps back inside to find the nameless woman at the radio reading a message, her
back turned towards him. She rips the tape off and holds it in her hands. She lets it
disappear. Does she burn it? Throw it in the trash can? How does he tell? I cannot
remember. The words weigh so heavily, his story is told so hastily and driven by
forces over which he is about to lose control. He doesn't want to, but he has to finish
the story. It demands its well deserved ending. Suspicious he is, here, but not yet
alarmed. But I must have been. Otherwise I would remember, wouldn't I?
He fishes the tape out of the trash can, the ash tray, the drawer, in to which she has
pushed it in panic. He realizes it is a strategically important order. He raises his eyes,
meets hers and immediately recognizes the enemy. The enemy of the German
Reich, the war criminal, la femme de resistance. He feels torn. He could finally win
respect from the authorities by demonstrating faithfulness. He could become the

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FQS 3(3), Art. 10, Christiane Kraft Alsop: Home and Away: Self-Reflexive Auto-/Ethnography

eternal hero in this woman's life by showing mercy. Both ends seem immensely
rewarding. He trembles for seconds. And alerts his lieutenant. I hear the pride in his
voice, the pride of the righteous one. And now also and painfully perceptible the
alarm, the fear. He is afraid of me, his daughter, the involuntary witness, who, tangled
up in shame, longs to make herself invisible, turn the clock back and start all over
again so that he does not need to be afraid of me.
We are far beyond Sperlings Pond and onto the alley between the orderly houses of
the Schmidts', the Beckers' and the Schneiders', where father and I used to secretly
steal each fall, with our plotted gangster glances, some asters off the stems that
protrude from between the wired fences. Here, it blurts out of me.
'What happened to the woman?'
'No idea. Probably death sentence. They showed no mercy back then.'
They.
Back then.
Silence.
His averted body, the head slightly bent forward under his felt hat. The hat Anne
Beyer, my classmate, used to joke about, because he lifts it whenever he encounters
one of those well respected members of the community. Those a decade younger
than he, the lucky ones who had been too young to get involved in the bloody
business of war. His body posture commands that I forget. And I will forget as eagerly
as I will listen at school tomorrow when Miss Polinski will feed us more of the
gruesome deeds of those Nazi thugs. My fear of losing his closeness turns me into
his willing accomplice in our joint mission to widen the gap between him and history.
History is something that happens to others. And, walking through the silence
emerging from that gap, we turn back onto Birkenstrasse. (ALSOP, n.d.) [44]

What becomes obvious in BOYM's as well as in my memory, is yet another

dialectic that auto-/ethnographers have to tackle. It is the dialectic between the
personal and the cultural. That dialectic is the purpose as well as the challenge of
our work, a challenge as a language is lacking that captures both levels, the
personal and the cultural. Auto-/ethnographers who set themselves the task of
relating cultures are boundary walkers: they crisscross between the boundaries of
being home and away, of being insider and outsider, of being personal and
cultural selves. There is nothing more difficult than this back and forth between
ways of living, speaking, thinking and feeling. There is nothing more risky than
switching between various identities and practices of estrangement. We expose
ourselves, we make ourselves vulnerable and we are constantly in danger of
remaining on one side of the border:

• Getting personal for the sake of getting personal,

• Sticking to the aloof criteria of being objective,
• Circling our ego or, at the other extreme, circling the "other" without getting
any further (see BEHAR 1996, ELLIS & BOCHNER 2001). [45]

However, it is at those crossroads, at the bottom of these difficult paradoxes, I

believe, that we have a chance at understanding. [46]

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FQS 3(3), Art. 10, Christiane Kraft Alsop: Home and Away: Self-Reflexive Auto-/Ethnography

6. Conclusion

Having outlined both the necessity as well as the risks of becoming personal
when relating cultures, the question remains: How can this particular form of self-
reflexivity—the auto-ethnographic account—be practiced? [47]

In order to answer this question I first have to re-define what it means to practice
ethnography. According to EMERSON, FRETZ and SHAW (1995, pp.2ff) the
ethnographer in the field gets to know people and participates in their daily
routines while regularly excluding herself to reflect by creating written records of
others' lives. This immersion leads to some degree of re-socialization. The
ethnographer tries to connect the personal life of the observed with their social
context and their culture without ever becoming an insider herself. In a way the
ethnographer learns a new language but speaks it with an accent. No matter how
fluent she feels, she will never blend in completely (see ROTH & HAMARA 2000).
The others will always hear the accent both in the literal sense of the word and in
the metaphorical sense of remaining an outsider, because the connection
between the personal and the cultural is constructed and re-constructed. The
daily interactions happen against the background of a different horizon that can
only partially overlap with the new one. [48]

The same can be said for the auto-ethnographer, be that the anthropologist who
goes native (see KENNY 2000), the social scientist of any provenance (see the
historian EKSTEINS 1999) or the auto-biographer (i.e. CHERNIN, 1983).
Presenting ourselves and our own culture with a re-defined version of itself
changes our language, widens our horizon and makes us an outsider to those we
re-visit. We find ourselves re-socialized. [49]

The auto-ethnographer's self-reflexivity comes into play at various levels:

• on the level of the actual ethnographic fieldwork, be that away or at home;

• in the process of writing, both in order to transform the multi-channeled
experience to the linear mode of the written language, as well as to translate
from one experiential world to the other; and
• in the process of discovery, in the state of creative uncertainty that is present
throughout all phases of the research process. [50]

EMERSON et al. (1995, p.27) recommend that in the process of ethnographic

fieldwork we should take notes, particularly when events run counter to our
expectations, when events excite, shock, anger us, or cause feelings of isolation
and alienation. It is in those events that our inner compass fails and we are
inclined to refer to our original template for meaning and explanation.
Consequently it is in those moments that auto-ethnographic work is needed. [51]

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FQS 3(3), Art. 10, Christiane Kraft Alsop: Home and Away: Self-Reflexive Auto-/Ethnography

When I first moved to the US, I was not only shocked by the fact that the death
penalty is still a legally practiced form of judicial punishment but also by the
approval this form of punishment meets at all levels of society. I felt threatened
by this cultural practice to a degree that surprised me. It was my look back
home, my connecting my personal background with the cultural framework in
which I grew up that allowed me to understand the roots of those feelings (see
above, and see ALSOP, n.d.). [52]

All ethnographic writing transforms the multi-channeled real life experience into
the linear form of the written record. Many things happen in the course of this
transformation which lend themselves to auto-ethnographic reflection. I will focus
on the inner censorship and the envisioned audience here. This inner censorship
can relate to our real or imagined ideal of the proper scientist incarnate, the one
who knows it all and has it all. The categories of the good and the bad, the
objective and the subjective, the fact and the fiction—all the categories we
acquired over the course of our academic training—come along in various
impersonations. And we are engaged in an inner dialogue with them while
deleting sentences and denying ourselves certain thoughts while others are
celebrated and underlined (see ALSOP 2001). And last but not least there is the
invisible audience, a significant person or a group of significant people we
unconsciously or consciously dedicate our work to. We write for them, we
converse with them while writing. RICHARDSON refers to this form of reflexivity
as writing-stories or microprocess writing-stories (2001, pp.931f.). [53]

Reflecting on his work as a member of a study panel SHWEDER (1997, p.162)

concludes that the central criteria for funding research should be the process of
discovery and the creative uncertainty. It is the dormant, the unknown emotional
and cognitive structures that are activated in ethnographic fieldwork because of
our lack of anticipation, because our inner compass fails us. To unveil these
structures is what the auto-/ethnographer is striving for. Post-modernism taught
us that when researching we are engaging in a continual co-creation of self and
social sciences. "Knowing the self and knowing about the subject are intertwined,
partial, historical, local knowledges" (RICHARDSON, 2000, p.929). [54]

In this article I attempted to show one way of being self-reflexive: the look back
home. The Turkish psychologist Aydan GULERCE (as in STAEUBLE 2001, p.4)
puts it this way: Once "the West has gained sufficient self-reflexivity to prevent
further patronizing and the rest of the world has gained sufficient self-assertion
for emancipation, we can hope for a genuine intercultural interchange." [55]

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the constructive criticism of Susanne M. FEST, Cassandra S.

GOLDWATER, Wolff-Michael ROTH and Katja MRUCK.

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FQS 3(3), Art. 10, Christiane Kraft Alsop: Home and Away: Self-Reflexive Auto-/Ethnography

Author

Christiane K. ALSOP works as an adjunct teacher Contact:

at Lesley University's Graduate Program for
Intercultural Relations and as a freelance writer. Christiane K. Alsop, Ph.D.
Her academic interests are interdisciplinary, Lesley University
spanning theoretical and methodological studies in GSAS – Program for Intercultural Relations
the social sciences to intergenerational and 29 Everett Street
intercultural communication. She has done Cambridge, MA 02138
research in the area of the meaning of objects, U.S.A.
places and rituals and the social psychology of
love and relationships. She is currently working on E-mail: christiane@alsop.com
an auto-ethnography about the relationship
between World War II participants and the second
generation.

Citation

Alsop, Christiane K. (2002). Home and Away: Self-reflexive Auto-/Ethnography [55 paragraphs].
Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 3(3), Art. 10, http://nbn-
resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0203105.

© 2002 FQS http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.