My Methodology of the First Interview
To be honest, at the beginning of this class I had a hard time understanding the word “ethnography”, let along “autoethnography”… Elis’s book and the theories of “Interactive Interviews” helped a lot. So I chosed my topic as “life purpose”and decided to interview one of my mentor, Beau. He is a great friend of mine and had helped me and taught me in many ways. We ended up skyping for almost two hours. I took notes. As I was writing up my interview in the form of narrative, I realized that it’s length was going to be so that long that it scares people off from reading it. I cleared my mind and figured, “why don’t I become him?” I decided to write his ideas down pretending that I am him: I use first person, “I” being “he”, and take what I understood from the interview and put his ideas down as if he was writing about himself in a journal. I guess this way it can be more “auto” and reflective.
Other than solving the problem of the length, another reason that I did this is because I believe it’s a great way to understand others. I believe everybody wants to be understood—I am no exception. But if you want others to understand you, you have to first understand them. |
In fact, I enjoy understanding people and love the process of figuring things out about others. And one of the best ways to do that is to “become” others, in other words, to play their roles. For example, if you never run for a position and try to advocate yourself through flyers, you would never understand the feeling of seeing the flyers with your name on it, which you may have stood whole night working on it, are thrown on the ground and being stepped on. And once you understand how that feels, you will care-- you will not throw any flyers anymore. And by writing pretending I am my interviewee, I feel what he feels, I understand him better.
As mentioned, a great way to get to know others and understand them is to play their roles. So I try to play a lot of different roles. I try to taste what I never tried and I never dared to taste. For example, I convinced the track coach to let me join track team while I am the worst runner ever. I wanted fall in love with running and feel what the marathon runners feel, knowing that running doesn’t like me at all (yet). I enjoy this way of understanding people and things and the uncertainty and surprises it brings to my life. Sometimes I think, maybe this will end up being my purpose of living. |