Keywords
fiction
autoethnography
storytelling
academic writing
Abstract
The aim of this article is to recapitulate the process through which creative ethnography has taken shape—an academic variant of non-fiction that employs techniques drawn from literary fiction. The debate surrounding “writing culture” gave rise to experiments in ethnographic writing, an openness to storytelling, an appreciation of anthropological poetics, the development of autoethnographic forms of expression, a rethinking of the category of fiction, and a renewed understanding of the relationship between fieldwork and textual work. The author highlights both the benefits and risks inherent in these processes, suggesting that the absence of university-level training in creative ethnography often leads to personal disappointments and raises questions about the comfort of text production, in both professional and psychological terms
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