Intersections: A Journey

The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another. [Donna Haraway 1988:193]Introduction: An Autoethnographic ImperativeThis article is divided into two parts. The first is a personal account of my journey with my family to New Zealand/Aotearoa, to scatter the ashes of my late partner, Marianne MacKinnon, at a sacred Maori site at the tip of the North Island. The furthest thing from my mind at the time was to produce a narrative, much less a subsequent analysis. took no field notes; in drafting the account afterwards, relied entirely upon my very recent memory of events that stood out. The second section is an attempt to theorize various aspects of the narrative. It is the very reverse of John Van Maanen's confessional tale: it is an easing of the spirit after suffering from the rigid confines of conventional ethnographic discipline but, rather, an attempt to engage ethnographic concerns after the fact. It is an impressionist tale (Van Maanen 1988:73, lOlff), which, with its analysis, is presented as one overall exercise in autoethnography.Mindful of Donna Haraway's summary demolition of the god-trick of objectivity (Haraway 1988:584), endeavour to make the I central to both sections, while at the same time attempting to make it my theme. This is not, then, what Fine dismissively calls me-search (1999:534) but a look through two lenses at issues of culture, hybridity and dialogics, with the latter providing an alternative to the former two and informing the description of a context for individual encounters with Otherness that call the city.Autoethnography is, in fact, a clear instance of a Geertzian blurred genre (Brettell 1997:223; Ellis and Bochner 2000:742; Geertz 1980). It contains elements of autobiography and literature, as well as social science, and makes use of literary conventions. And through it, a kind of truth, however contingent, is pursued: as Ellis and Bochner put it:Narrative truth seeks to keep the past alive in the present. Stories show us that the meanings and significance of the past are incomplete, tentative and revisable according to contingencies of our present life circumstances, the present from which we narrate. [2000:745]This implication in a living history, by means of which the present and the past are imbricated, seems to be identical to Hans-Georg Gadamer's notion of a fusion of horizons in historiography (1975:306). In autoethnography, the goal is no longer description per se but communication, to portray facts but meanings attached to the experience. And such ethnography is not a project you'll ever complete or get entirely right (Ellis and Bochner 2000:748, 751, 752).The overall aim of the autoethnographer, according to Ellis and Bochner, is toproduce narrative, evocative, dialogic texts that show human beings, including ourselves, in the process of creating, negotiating, and performing meaning in a world of others, making our way through a world that poses obstacles, interruptions, contingencies, turning points, epiphanies, and moral choices. [2000:748]I shall return to this point in the second part of my article. But my own immediate purpose in writing this article can be stated rather more succinctly. needed to speak, for deeply personal reasons. But then needed to understand what spoke.Preparing for the JourneyAt some point during Marianne's dreadful battle with pancreatic cancer during the late summer and fall of 2006, she told me that she would like her ashes to be scattered in Cape Reinga, known in Te Reo1 as Te Rerenga Wairua, the jumping-off place of the spirits. Neither of us could bring ourselves to believe that she would actually die, but our thoughts were dark as the ravenous cancer rapidly progressed. …