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How a practice of radical presence became a defensible method: its dimensions, the dissertations that built it, and the point where it meets autoethnography.
##Ethnoautobiography as Method
A practice is not yet a method; someone must defend it before a committee. I will argue that ethnoautobiography became a research design in a small set of dissertations that invented its protocols while using them. I will walk through its dimensions, three working examples, and where it meets autoethnography.
The origin story is a question. An Indigenous colleague asks Jürgen Werner Kremer, a white German psychologist working on Native land in California, who are you? Kremer has two answers available, a curriculum vitae and an existentialist biography, and neither answers what was asked. His colleague wants his people, his place, his ancestors, the stories he carries. Kremer's diagnosis is that modern European selfhood is built by not knowing those things, a severing from place, ancestry, community, history, dream, and spirit that he calls normative dissociation. We are cut off by design, and the design makes it feel normal.
The practice he proposes, from 2003 onward, is radical presence: storying the self through the severed dimensions, one at a time. The method arrives with the workbook Kremer wrote with R. Jackson-Paton: place, nature, community, ancestry, gender, hybridity, dreams, spirituality. Leda Kingfisher, whose dissertation Kremer chaired, orders them differently and adds myth, ritual, and history. That variation tells you what they are. Kremer calls them stepping stones, not a checklist, and each marks a site where a story is missing and the missing story is doing work.
Notice what happens to the "auto." In Heewon Chang's autoethnography the self is a resource disciplined into evidence: what does my life know about my culture? In Kremer the self is what is broken and the writing is the repair: can I inhabit this place honestly? Two methods, one prefix, opposite directions of travel. Hybridity keeps the repair honest by refusing the fantasy of a pure origin: every ancestry is mixed, a story of one people in contact with others.
Robert Jackson-Paton (Saybrook, 2012) argues that the national park and wilderness ideal express a settler identity denying itself, and names the result post-traumatic settler disorder. His methods chapter runs on seven protocols he calls "barbaric," a word claiming poetic warrant rather than a social scientific one. I am not persuaded that term can be recuperated; the structure underneath it does what a methods chapter ordinarily does. Christopher Boyd (Saybrook, 2015) makes the inquiry an imaginative pilgrimage and finds, without intending to, that it produces institutional critique as a byproduct.
Kingfisher (CIIS, 2019) is the design lesson. A mixed-ancestry Plains Cree woman writing on her own experience of spirit possession, she works from recordings and a sharing circle of four women under an Indigenous research program where every participant controls and approves her own transcript. Ethnoautobiography written from inside an Indigenous nation rather than toward one. She does not need to recover place; she needs to recover what colonization harmed. Same dimensions, opposite direction; the design holds.
One more caution. Search a library catalog and most of what surfaces has nothing to do with Kremer: Armenian American life writing, Nigerian migrant poetry, Afghan memoirs read as ethnobiographies of resistance. In that sense the word names a kind of text a critic finds in someone else's book. Define your term, or a reader will situate you where you never meant to stand.
Where do the two meet? In Norman Dale's dissertation, which calls itself an autoethnography and cites Kremer as a parallel inquiry. Dale, a settler whose father fled the Shoah, spent twenty-five years working with First Nations in British Columbia and inverts the old "Indian problem": the object of study is the settler mind, and the evidence is his own. His name for that position, the empathic settler, whose good intentions make the colonial structure harder to see, is where both methods arrive from opposite ends.
So use both, and know why. Chang disciplines the eye and gives a committee something to examine. Kremer repairs the eye. Ethnoautobiography is built for predominantly Eurocentered minds, and its power comes from that specificity; it is explicit that you do not borrow Indigenous ceremony as a research technique. Your ancestry, your place, your dreams. Not whose land you live on, but who are you such that you live on these lands?
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