Anthropologists, Education, and Autoethnography

Autoethnographies place personal experience within social and cultural contexts and raise provocative questions about social agency and socio-cultural constraints. Several authors are discussed who write about educational settings that are quite familiar to them, thereby positioning themselves as insiders to the milieus studied. At the same time, each book considered here poses dilemmas for the construction of an insider/outsider divide, leading to questions about how to evaluate an insider perspective. For the wider discipline of anthropology, these texts remind us that our scholarly production takes place in the context of particular social fields within which we negotiate as social actors.