Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
Kremer and Jackson-Paton's reflexive method braids autobiography, ethnography, and participatory epistemology into a discipline for naming where you stand when you judge.
Every appraisal of practice comes from somewhere. I will argue that reflexivity is a methodological requirement rather than a courtesy, and I will show it through ethnoautobiography, the method Jürgen Werner Kremer and River Jackson-Paton set out in their 2013 book. Their one-line definition is worth memorizing: ethnoautobiography is "storying the self in participatory visions."
The method braids three strands that usually sit in separate departments. First, autobiography: your own life story, told deliberately rather than assumed. Second, ethnography: anthropology's disciplined attention to culture, turned inward onto your own formation, except the community under study is the one that made you. Third, participatory and Indigenous epistemology: the claim that knowing is relational, embedded in ancestry, land, and community, rather than the detached view from nowhere that modern science pretends to occupy. Braid the three and you get a procedure for surfacing how ancestry, culture, and position shape what you know and, just as much, what you fail to notice.
Kremer calls a related practice "radical presence," being fully and consciously located instead of floating free of your own history. The word he and Jackson-Paton use for the work is unlearning, because the assumptions built into your formation feel like common sense until you name them. Their subtitle (Stories and Practices for Unlearning Whiteness, Decolonization, Uncovering Ethnicities) names one such assumption: whiteness, treated not as a slur but as an unmarked cultural default that quietly sets the standard others get measured against. You may be examining a different default in your own field. The discipline of finding it and marking it is the same.
The load-bearing concept is positionality: the position you occupy (race, gender, class, profession, nationality, training, faith) and the way it organizes what looks true, normal, and excellent to you. Everybody has one. The only question is whether you have examined it.
Here is where the lens earns its keep, because it lets you ask the sharp version of the question. Not "what is best practice?" but "whose best counts?" Your sense of what excellent practice looks like was formed somewhere, by someone, in a tradition. When you map a field, you will notice certain things fluently and glide past others, and both the noticing and the gliding-past come from your position. Ethnoautobiography does not ask you to escape your standpoint, which is impossible. It asks you to know it well enough to account for it.
Follow the logic. If practice knowledge is inseparable from the knower, then the knower's standpoint is part of the evidence, not noise to be filtered out. Without the reflexive move you risk mistaking your own trained preferences for universal best practice, and building an entire innovation on an unexamined "of course."
The phrase "storying the self in participatory visions" reframes self-examination as inquiry rather than confession. You are not journaling your feelings; you are gathering data about the instrument, yourself, that you will use to read an entire field. An instrument you have never calibrated is not a neutral instrument. It is just an uncalibrated one.
An honest caveat. Is this Indigenous studies again under a new name? No, and the distinction is precise. A survey gives you a field to know about, from the outside. Ethnoautobiography gives you a procedure you run on your own standpoint, from the inside: a method for the insider-scholar, close enough to a practice to understand it from within and disciplined enough to critique your own assumptions.
Two older arguments stand behind this one. American pragmatism (Peirce, James, and above all Dewey) holds that truth is what survives testing in action. "Warranted assertibility" is the pragmatist name for evidence-in-practice, and it answers anyone who calls your practice scholarship merely anecdotal. Lived religion (Orsi, Hall, McGuire, Ammerman) turns from official doctrine toward religion as actually practiced, improvised in kitchens and hospitals and streets. What people do is not a degraded version of the real thing. It is the data.
So here is the one move to make honest: your appraisal came from somewhere, and that somewhere shaped what you counted and what you skipped. Naming it makes the appraisal stronger rather than weaker. A reader trusts a judge who knows where they stand more than one who claims to stand nowhere.
The Postmodern Terminal >_