Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021. 238 pp. (Illustrations.) US$128.00, cloth. ISBN 9780367343798.
This volume makes a key contribution to social theory and ongoing processes of decolonization through its focus on the Global South and specifically Pacifika/Moana modes of thinking and being. Its commitment to a process of inquiry based on systematic thought and “significant otherness” embraces an essential sense of searching and vulnerability, emphasizing how the simultaneous loss, discovery, and transformation that occurs through critical autoethnography (CAE) resembles the Moana tradition of wayfinding. Part of this task involves knowing and exploring our heritages and pasts even as we seek to understand and critique existing wisdom through our own experiences.
The first CAE-based volume to focus on the Global South, Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography plunges the reader into a swirling surf of deeply reflexive, frequently artistic, journeys of self-analysis. Organized into three sections, 13 essays from contributors with diverse backgrounds and experience in a range of academic, applied, and artistic fields engage with various decolonizing processes around the world.
Just as our perspective on a sea-going vessel changes according to shifting clouds, light, wind, currents, fish, birds, and visible land masses, each chapter of this book reveals new panoramas for how the transformative experience of CAE parallels Pacific wayfinding. In section 1, “Wayfaring and Wayfinding Indigeneity in the Academy,” the wayfinding of CAE becomes a methodology for learning both new and old knowledges by doing (chapter 1, Iosefo, Harris and Jones); a cyclical search for hidden Māori wisdom based on relationships to the land, sea, and ancestors (chapter 2, Haami Hawkins); a healing and situating of the self through exploring Samoan connectivity to family, genealogy, and community (chapter 3, Iosefo and Aiga Ethics Komiti); a Fijian meaning-making that occurs through exploring relationships and cultural interactions outside the restrictions of clock-based “academic time” (chapter 4, Katarina Tuinamuana and Joanne Yoo); and an ongoing formation of identity based on relational dialogues between Western and Tongan ways of knowing that transcend positionality and the temporal past, present, and future (chapter 5, David Fa’avae).
The contributing authors of section 2, “Wayfinding and Way-Fairness in the Digital Age,” trace how CAE-based wayfinding can represent the quest for enlightenment and healing through tap-dancing performances rooted in a consciousness of ancestral spirits, racism, and academic bias (chapter 6, Denise Chapman); the transformation of mobility into a form of power and knowledge through navigating memories and spaces of belonging and social connection in Finland (chapter 7, Ann-Charlotte Palmgren); the ever-searching reflexive process of research that resists the land-based, immobile, colonizing mechanisms of traditional academia in addressing demilitarization in the Marianas (chapter 8, Sylvia Frain); and the collective reorientation of how we experience social media based on the exploration of emotion, subjectivity, and power through theatre and storytelling (chapter 9, Nicole Brown and Lisa Fay).
The essays of section 3, “Wayfinding in the Liminal Spaces,” illustrate wayfinding-as-CAE in the decolonization of self and place based on the uncomfortable, emotional exploration of silenced pasts and identities through sewing maps of storied, tumultuous landscapes (chapter 10, Christine Rogers); the navigation of multiple identities through interrogating personal narratives, belonging, and one’s own feelings, fragility, and shifting understandings in crisis (chapter 11, Julie Brien); the perspective and growth generated by navigating resistance and the storms of grief and emotion involved in teaching and writing meaningful histories that are never quite fixed (chapter 12, Christine Hatton); and one immigrant’s discovery of power and belonging in the traumatic third space through reflexive use of creative art and self-expression (chapter 13, Ying Wang).
CAE has cross-disciplinary roots in anthropology, pedagogy, communications, and performative arts, and studies of gender, culture, and race. This volume offers a broad mix of experiences, stories, and art forms that transcend these fields while illustrating a unique Pacifika interpretation of CAE. As a scholar of primarily francophone Pacifika, I hope future work will explore how CAE, wayfinding, and interrogations of the “collective self” apply to these areas as well.
One of the book’s most powerful critiques is how traditional Western academic epistemologies rely on a strict understanding of time, agendas, objectivity, and individual inquiry while tending to overlook the enormous power of personal emotion and experience. Explaining the Māori concept of kurahuna, a form of practice-based wisdom, Haami Hawkins observes how, “through methodically conceptualising and applying knowledge, one will arrive at a place of knowing, of being; of consciousness, and of truth” (29). Thus, many of the essays emphasize practice, experience, and embodiment, highlighting how both ethnographers and wayfinders must learn through doing and feeling.
This focus points to a fundamental tension within CAE and this volume itself. A cutting-edge methodology, CAE strives to engage with complex theories and academically “critical” inquiry while encouraging the decolonization of knowledge through personal practice and more widely accessible narratives. But how do we, as analytical writers, convey the complexity and theoretical meaning of CAE without slipping into the same old academic ruts of objectivity, lack of feeling, and scholarly language comprehensible to a comparatively small, specialized audience?
As a trained anthropologist, I found Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography to be highly engaging and I admired how certain passages and artistic elements, in particular, were both moving and appropriate for a broad, unspecialized readership. Yet the dense academic and theoretical language of much of the volume risks obscuring the authors’ rich autoethnographic journeys for many less academic readers. My hope is that ongoing explorations of CAE in books and other outlets such as the newly created Journal of Critical Autoethnography will address and unpack this challenge.
In the meantime, this volume offers a thought-provoking look at wayfinding and CAE in the Global South, deftly weaving together significant academic analysis with diverse personal and artistic journeys across open seas of all kinds. In the words of contributing author Christine Rogers, it encourages readers to “set out without a map” (153) on a much-needed, humbling, and transformative adventure.
Emily C. Donaldson
Independent Scholar, Montpelier