A Critical Ethnography on Family and War

An Autoethnography for Familial Vulnerability

Abstract

Autoethnography has been formulated as a narrative approach that explores an individual's vulnerable memories, and reorganizes and reenacts them into socially sharable narratives. The performative and interventional position of autoethnography is often associated with the word 'critical, ' and this paper proposes to explore the potential of a new form of autoethnography—critical family ethnography. To be specific, I attempt a critical intervention into my own family's historicity through a thick description of my family life related to my grandfather's war experiences. My grandfather was a veteran of the Sino-Japanese War, and memories of perpetration in China have been contentious in our family history. This paper focuses on the relationship between my grandfather and father, and my father and me. It describes how the violence of the past has been told and reenacted in the family, including my mother's experiences of being told of these memories, while placing them in their cultural, social, and historical context. Family is the field where "we" narrate our own stories and make commitments to the past and present. Through an ethnographic approach to family, I would like to clarify the implications that define "we" as historical beings.