I, Too, Have "A Need to Know: Confrontations With the Autoethnographic Shadow

7/31/2019 I, Too, Have "A Need to Know: Confrontations With the Autoethnographic Shadow

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I, Too, Have A Need to Know:Confrontations With the Autoethnographic Shadow1

Sarah Amira de la Garza

brown beautiful birdpelican swooping through the airhow do you fly so gracefullycarrying such a load?being so mesmerizedI fail to see exactly how you look

* * * * *

Sometimes it takes a whack on the head to wake up to what we cant see, what we dontrealize were missing, what we work so diligently not to see. Roger van Oech used thephrase, a whack on the side of the head as a metaphor for the little jolts we often needto awaken our creativity, to escape the locks that limit our creative thinking. I cringewhenever I read his books title; just the notion of a whack to the head triggers me. Astudent first brought the book to my attention in 1989. I never opened the copy of thebook he gave me. He had thought it a humorous parallel to the head injury Id recentlysuffered in 1987. Im sure I laughed when he gave it to me, but it really wasnt funny tome. I wasnt ready to see my head injury, not only as a wake up call, but as a permanentdetour in my life, and had no awareness at the time of its role in transforming the waysI would think, create, and come to experience even the person I was at any given

moment in time.

All the while at an unconscious level I was hurting, and I avoided without consciouschoice, those things that would make me visit the prickly relationship I had withmemory. Even before that brisk autumn day when my head felt the impact of theautomobile that did not stop for me on a crosswalk in New Jerseyeven before thatday, I was already wired to avoid and forget.

* * * * *

As an ethnographer, one of the most difficult things to admit is that despite my abilityto account for so many things in what Gilbert Ryle called thick description, I canrandomly and unknowingly lose significant pieces of my memory. Its ironic thatbecause of Clifford Geertz prominent use of the term thick description, weve forgottenRyle. Ive come to focus intensely on accountability in my work, on the avoidance ofintentional obfuscation or glossing or spinIve become so aware of how easily

1This essay appears in De la Garza, S.A., Krizek, R.L., and Trujillo, N. (eds.) (2012)

Celebrating Bud: A Festschrift Honoring the Life and Work of H.L. Bud Goodall, Jr.

Tempe, AZ: Innovative Inquiry.


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distortion occurs that I want to be sure Im not intentionally helping to make it happen.I am easily triggered by careless citations and failure to give credit to primary sources.I know that the indigenous oral traditions I treasure and honor are an emergent processwith no style manual; why have I developed this knee-jerk obsessiveness with precisionin accountability?

It is precisely because I know of my own inability to account for many things thatdisappear from my awareness and memory that I believe I have focused so intently oncontrolling and demonstrating that which can be remembered.

* * * * *

Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagineshimself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in theindividual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, onealways has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests,so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from

consciousness, it never gets corrected.Carl Jung, Psychology & Religion.

In a number of ways, I never wanted to be like my mother. Its odd, because in manyother ways, I am delighted to be like my mom--my organizational skills, my talent forcooking and my public speaking ability. But there have always been a number of ways Iprided myself in notbeing like her. For instance, unlike her, I didntforget bad things.It has always driven me crazywhen Id recall an incident from childhood or adolescence,and eager to recount and process the events, Id ask Mom a familiar, Rememberwhen...? Her responses were more often than not either, ...I dont think so, ...whendid that happen? I dont remember! or I dont have a memory like yours --you havesuch a good memory.

Mom was supposedto remember these things, wasnt she? I wanted her to rememberwhen I stepped on a sewing needle in the living room at about age 3. I wanted her toremember she told me there was nothing in my foot as I screamed and cried in pain. Iwanted her to remember when she slapped my face for talking back to her when I wasabout five, and how it made my nose bleed, and how Mama Fina took me to her houseso I would stop crying. I wanted her to remember these and other things because theyhurt me, and I wanted a penitential cycle of atonement to confirm that I had reason tohurt inside. I wanted to hear an apology, an explanation, or at least some sort ofawareness of what had happened. But I never did. I never have. I never will, really.And over the years, I silently applauded myself for my ability to recall difficult things--essentially blaming her for those things forgotten, for forgetting.

That is why I was so proud of my ability to remember family events. In some smallway, this pride in the ability to log details and chronicle them for use in just the rightstory at just the right time probably helped make me an ethnographer, a performer, ateacher. But it didnt make me unlike my mother, despite what I might have thought.

* * * * *


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The unconscious mind is a bit of a trickster. It knows things that becausetheyre un-conscious, I cant know--unless they somehow become conscious. But these things leakinto my awareness through my behaviors, feelings and thoughts. I get hunches aboutthings I should have no reason to know; I am triggered by things I see or experience,

that seem, on the surface, quite innocuous; I have dreams, Im attracted to persons andplaces and things intensely and automatically. And all the time, I like to imagine, thereis this little guy, this little brat, this little trickster agent I call my unconscious mind--and he, or she, holds the keys to these unknowns, but wont let me see them. Imsupposed to float in the sea of liminality and ambiguity that surrounds me and wait forthe day I can finally see the shore. For all that Carl Jung wrote about the shadow, justexactly how and when it shows up in conscious experience remains a random tricksterscript.

* * * * *

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy,but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does notbecome enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.Carl Jung, The Philosophical Tree.

My pride should have been the first sign that my amazing not-like-Mom memory wasnot all I held it up to be. I was an undergrad at North Texas State University, andduring my last two years there, I worked as a resident assistant, or R.A., in Bruce Hall,the dorm that housed students who wanted to be surrounded by the sounds of jazz andpracticing musicians--those who were artists and poets and actors, dancers and writers.I loved living there, an oasis of bohemian creativity in an otherwise highly conservativecultural environment in Texas.

While at Bruce Hall, I was pulled aside by a fellow R.A., and invited to attend a Biblestudy. My soul, I learned from him, was in peril. I was associating with sinners, andhe thought I might enjoy learning more about the Bible. Having been raised Catholic, Ihad not studied much Bible. And this fellow R.A. I found quite adorable (despite hisapparent judgment of my soul), so I accepted his invitation to go to church with him,and when there, I accepted an invitation from a young woman I met there. She invitedme to meet with her for early morning Bible study. Shed even come to my dorm,meeting me there at 7 am. (When I look back at this, I wonder exactly what wouldmake a young woman of about age 20 organize her life around meeting with otheryoung people at 7 am in order to teach them about Bible studyif she were Catholic, Id

have assumed she wanted to be a nun.) She came to my dorm room, and we sat on mybed, with the new Bible I had bought for my learning, and I was actually quitefascinated. Id never learned to study with an emphasis in hermeneutics--so althoughher purpose was to change the way I lived my life, my real interest was in how I waslearning to study words and language and meaning.

It was when I learned how to use a concordance that my fascination really grew. Myinterest in Denton Bible Church and the early morning Bible studies waned quickly, but


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my passion for the study of words was intense. I had read dictionaries andencyclopedias for fun throughout my childhood. I bought a giant blue book, StrongsConcordance, with Greek and Hebrew lexicons, which would help me to discover themeaning of the original Greek and Hebrew words in the Bible. While I would enjoyusing it over the years, my real reason for purchasing this book was because I wanted tosee with my own eyes something that Id heard several times from these Bible scholars.It had to do with the wordpride.

The preacher at Denton Bible Church, Tommy Nelson, had a strong Texas drawl,seasoned with the sound of his persistent smile. Looking a bit like one of the brothersQuaid, he paused with dramatic flair when making the important points. He explainedto us why pride is a problem, why pride is a sin, ...pride comes from the Greek wordtuphoo, meaning to envelop with smoke... to inflate with self-conceit... to be high-minded ... to be lifted up with pride. He went on to talk about the way we could learn theattributes of pride by understanding this Greek root--that when we are proud, it is as ifour vision gets clouded as with smoke--pride keeps us from being able to see clearlywhat we think we are seeing.

* * * * *

...I was so proudof my ability to remember... Yes, that about sums up my consciousrelationship to my memory, in particular when I encountered my mothers inability toremember things--as if they had never happened. My unconsciously guided attractionto the hermeneutic study of words held a wealth of insights. But I was beyond blind tothem--I was completely unconscious of even the possibility of their existence, much lessmy need for them. Still, my fascination with the Greek word tuphoo (pronounced tu-fo-o) and how it demonstrated the power of learning the roots of the words we used, waspersistent.

That trickster in the unconscious--she doesnt let up, but she also doesnt ever just tellyou what you need to know. Its taken over 30 years for me to begin understandingwhy this was so persistently interesting to me. My pride in my memory was in fact,quite like a smoke screen, clouding the fact that I was justlike my mother when it cameto these memory lapses, these holes in the fabric of the way I recalled my life experience.And just like my mother, the way in which I remember things has had majorimplications for the ways in which I can influence the feelings of another around theevents that Im not even aware of forgetting.

This is important. Even though I might not have thought so, I need to know these

things. As an autoethnographer, I stand on very shaky ground by telling you storiesthat from the get-go, as they say, Im now aware are possibly filled with large holes inthe way Im recalling events. Its important that I share how I came to realize that Imjust like my mother. Because it matters, and because I think it will help to demonstrateexactly how complicated and critically challenging the implications of this are. It allbegins in the telling of a story about the wayI told a story, in my book, Maria Speaks.The book I dedicated to my mother, in fact.


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* * * * *

When we must deal with problems, we instinctively resist trying the way that leadsthrough obscurity and darkness. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, andcompletely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into

and emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon allthe powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offerCarl Jung, The Stages ofLife

To this day, one of the most powerful examples of autoethnographic writing Ive read isthe sections describing his mother and his relationship to his wife in Casing a PromisedLand, by Bud Goodall. I remember not being able to put the book down for long untilId read it all. Sometime in the mid 1980s, my doctoral advisor, Larry Browning, toldme he had heard some work at the Alta conference in Utah that he thought he shouldtell me about. He recommended that I consider writing my work narratively. You seemto engage with your material deeply, in a way that could make good stories, good

reading, he told me. Reading Goodalls book, I realized Larry had more than likelybeen talking about Buds work. I greatly admired Buds ability to write personalnarrative and devoured his little red book, Writing the New Ethnography, when it wasreleased in 2000. Id asked Bud, in 1998, to be part of my committee for my seconddoctoral degree, this time in spirituality, excited by the idea of having him read myethnographic work. In 2002, when we needed a new director at the Hugh DownsSchool at Arizona State University, I began working to recruit him. I was happy mycolleagues supported the idea of having another ethnographer, and a creative writer, onour faculty. I wasnt ready for something I learned from him after he arrived, however.

I never studied ethnography, and I dont do field work, he told me, when I was visitinghim in his office. He obviously did research on his topics; that was clearly part of thepremise of the idea of being an organizational detective that he wrote about. But hehad not trained in qualitative research methods, and when he was assigned to teach thebeginning methods course for our graduate students, many of them found their way tomy office for help with methodology. I was absolutely confused, resentful, and quiteangry. This was not the first organizational ethnographer in the field who hadconfessed to me of no experience with systematic fieldwork, of no establishedmethodological background in ethnography. What about accountability, I askedmyself?

Meanwhile, I kept teaching about the shadow, kept working on my own shadows,insisting on accountability. What I didnt know yet was that there has to be a little

light for one to see ones shadow. The shadows protected by the darkness of totalunconsciousness are free to reign over our perceptions of our experience and the waythose perceptions influence, direct, and determine how we behave and feel.

Back to Mara Speaks, and how she didntspeak.

* * * * *


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So, would you like to meet and have a cup of coffee and talk? The sound of Dennisvoice was like water to a parched piece of earth. Id wanted to talk to him for aboutseven years. I knew Id committed some sort of gaffe, was afraid of what it might be. Iwas more afraid of the idea that Id forgotten something really important, an aspect ofmy head injury and resulting trauma with which I was sadly familiar. I feel crazy whenI tell people I have no memory of something they remember fully well. I feel like a liarwhen they have been obviously affected by that which I seem to have so cavalierlyforgotten.

Yes, I told him. I dont know if I nodded or said the word, but yes, yes, yes. Weagreed to meet in the hotel lobby a few hours later. I needed to know what Id done,what Id said.

* * * * *

By the time Bud Goodalls book, A Need to Know, was released, Id had time to let myfeelings stew for a couple of years. I felt like I was keeping a huge secret about him, and

I wanted to tell everyone what I knew. I felt like a traitor for having read themanuscripts he shared with me as he was working on the book. He trusted me. I wasstewing inside as I tried to bite my tongue each time he was called an ethnographer.These are the ugly parts of the shadow. It always comes out in intense feelings,obsessive feelings, feelings of absolute certainty. These should have been my red flags.If I was being triggered by his lack of method, shouldnt I have wondered where myown method was lacking? I was blind even to the ways in which these judgmentalcertainties I was feeling were in complete contradiction to what I believe and writeabout with respect to ethnography as spiritual practice. Perhaps I should have paidmore attention to Matthew Foxs teachings on the spiritual path of the via negativa.But I didnt. Thats the ugly part of how the shadow worksin cahoots with the ego;

its quite nasty, really.

* * * * *

I assumed my problems with memory started with the head injury suffered in 1987when a car struck me. They were then exacerbated in 2002 when a large 2x4 woodenbeam fell on my head. Somehow I didnt include the three years of amnesia around mysexual molestation at age 12 as one of my problems with memory. I didnt include theblank spot in my memory of what happened when my godmother took me to visit theparish priests home when I was very young, the recurring dreams and fear of men wholooked like him. Sometimes the shadow is responding to everyday socialization; othertimes it is an automatic defensive response to trauma. But we dont really know what

we need to know about these things until after the shadowed behaviors have becomepart of our life history.

* * * * *

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people areas we imagine them to be. In this latter case, unfortunately, there is no scientific test thatwould prove the discrepancy between perception and reality. Although the possibility of


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gross deception is infinitely greater here than in our perception of the physical world, westill go on naively projecting our own psychology into our fellow human beings. In thisway everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships basedessentially on projection.Carl Jung, General Aspects of Dream Psychology

Dennis had stopped talking to me in 2005, shortly after I had given him a copy of mybook, Mara Speaks. I liked telling myself that it wasnt because of something Idforgotten, that it was rather because of the fact Id told a story he preferred to be secret.But I knew that the chance was far greater, from what I knew of my life thus far, that Iddone or said something, forgotten something importantsomething I had no memoryof whatsoever. His silence hurt, and I wanted to know what Id done.

I was right andwrong. I hadnt done anything since giving him the book. That was arelief. He wasnt upset that I told the story, either. He began to explain why he wasupset: the story that I had told left out self-incriminating details very conveniently.And it altered the way readers viewed us.

How could I remember so many details so precisely and yet then leave out incrediblyimportant events?

What did I leave out? I knew Id tried to write it carefully so it focused on myinability to make a choice consciously rather than imply intentional coercion or pressureon his part. I made a decision in 1986 to have an abortion, which until I awoke in therecovery room afterwards, I did not consciously realize. It was one of the few mostpainful experiences in my life, one whose memory tortures me still in a small corner ofmy mind. But that wasnt the problem. In the story, I allude to the painfulness of thoseevents by referring to his marriage proposal shortly after the abortion.

You dont remember? he asks, looking at me over the small table at the excessivelypublic restaurant full of friends and colleagues from the conference we were attending.I had no idea what he was talking about, and I was afraid. I was afraid to tell him I didnot, indeed, have any memory of what he was telling me. I was afraid he would think Iwas lying. But more so, I was afraid of the fact that I did not remember something soimportant. I was afraid because if I could forget this, what else might I have forgotten?It was so seemingly convenient to forget something so ugly, something thatembarrassed me, something that in my heart of hearts did not feel like me, was notpresent in any of my memories of how I processed those days.

You toldme to ask you to marry me. My mind began to reel. This was impossible to

me. I recalled myself sitting on the floor of the room we were staying in at his parentshome that Christmas, writing furiously in my journal about my confusion after theproposal. Id been angry, hurt, and couldnt understand why he would propose so soonafter the abortion. If he could propose then, why couldnt he have allowed our child tobe born? That is what I recall journaling in the dark. But it was not just the journalthat was in the dark; I was in the dark. Ask me to marry you, you said to me. I did?My whole sense of my experience was enshrouded in darkness, and I had no way to finda light just then. I looked at his face again. Was I really a conspirator in my own


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experience back then? Was I the instigator? As we talked, things made more sensebutI felt I was hearing a story about someone else. I wanted to scream.

Instead, I cried. This man never lied to me. He is an honest and good man. Even as helooked at me skeptically as I repeatedly expressed my alarm and shock and remorse, Icould do nothing but see in his eyes the man who saved me after my accident. He droveme daily to doctors and therapists for months of physical therapy and tests. He enduredthe outbursts and erratic behavior caused by my head injury and never complained. Hewas telling me the truth. And I have no memory of it. I can envision it; can adjust mymemories to squeeze in the details he provides, but no matter how much he tells me, Ido not remember it. I want to know why I did it, especially feeling as I did thenwithno memory of it, I cant know.

He tells me that reading my book made him question the value of autoethnography. Iunderstand. I am horrified.

Havent you ever heard of member-checking? he asks me. Yes, of course I have. I am

the champion of the member-check. I warn myself and countless students of the abilityof an ethnographer to write what he or she wishes to be the case if the shadow aspects ofwhat one is studying are not examined and embraced. I warn them that one neverknows what one might leak unconsciously about the self. I tell stories about field notesfull of details that never make it into ethnographies because theyve been written tosupport preferred accounts of events. But I never take into consideration the power offorgetting as an ethical problem, because quite frankly, it had never crossed my mindthat ones shadow could move one not just to avoid, but also to completely forgetwhatone has done.

Id like to say that I would have member-checked if I had known I needed to, but it

sounds so foolish to do so. I am dizzy inside myself, trying to find my way out of thatdark room with no doors or windows. How could I know I left out details, if I did notknow that even my reference to events was clouded by the very omission of facts ofwhich I have no memory? I am defenseless. How do I account for this?

We talk.

Is thereanything else? I ask him. There were, and he shared a series of accounts, allequally horrifying to me because of my absolute lack of memory. Was I really so neatlypackaged into the person I remember, and kept separate from the person who said anddid the things he told me? As we talk, it becomes clear that the underlying theme thattied my behavior together was an obsession with not being seen as sinful or damned by

the Church. I have no memory of forcing him to attend services with me one Sunday. Icry again as he tells me of these things. A former student sees him across the room andruns over to greet him. I know her; I must muster the emotional and muscular strengthto appear there is nothing of concern being interrupted. The irony of the difficulty Ihave monitoring my self presentation is not lost on me, as I continue to reel from theawareness of an aspect of myself that seemed quite able to monitor not only how, butwhat, I remember.


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Are you going to forget we had this conversation? he teases me as we begin to closeour conversation. I say no, but I have encountered something about myself that makesme feel vulnerable in answering.

* * * * *

In 1991, not even five years after the events depicted in Mara Speaks, my reflexivepractices had given me enough self-awareness to know I should make the ethical choiceto avoid writing about my experience with the Catholic presence on the Pine Ridgereservation. I explain to my students that I was so obviously triggered by what I wasexperiencing that I knew there were shadow issues related to the Church lurking, issuesthat would make me an untrustworthy storyteller. By the time I wrote Mara Speaks, Ihad practically gutted myself psychologically with respect to the narratives that haddominated me as a woman of Mexican Catholic ancestry and acculturation, and haddevoted many years to intensive work with a wide range of experts in delayed grief,trauma, and PTSD. But prior to those years, any memories triggered by my goodgirl shadow self are apparently well-hidden with my active shadow of myself as a

sinning, immoral little girl who cant remember what a certain priest did with her in theback room of his house.

What other shadow selves might be lurking?

In service to my hyper-vigilant ego and out of my fear of forgetting, an overly self-righteous shadow self developed after my head injury. This time my shadow was myown human frailty, and the price I paid was in trying to believe some standard ofabsolute precision could be maintained. While I valued the notions of emergence andunpredictability, of naturalistic creativity and holographic realities, the level at whichmy entire life was determined by my brain injury challenged my academic identity. My

shadow worked to hide the most precious and necessary part of my humanityhumility.

We forget. We are imperfect. We are living a life of emergent design. I could tout andlaud the virtues of naturalistic inquiry and holographic reality as long as I kept viewingmyself as a completed work. It was too frightening to consider that in addition tonatural synchronicities and emergence, I had a series of psychological and cognitivelandmines secretly embedded in my identity.

* * * * *

If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get

an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himselfwith new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is nowunable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he onlylearns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He hassucceeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social

problems of our day. Carl Jung, Psychology & Religion.


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Bud Goodall smiles at me lovingly when I share anything like these things. That smileirked me all these years, despite its ability to charm me at others. You dont know, Idrespond silently to myself, protecting my shadow yet again. He didnt judge; he neverdoes. Hed respond, You need to write about it. I knew he was right but I hadnt donethe field work the way I thought it should be done; my notes were a mess and randomwhen it came to this study of myself. Id taken smug pride that I was not an accidentalethnographer, as he and Chris Poulos so beautifully chronicle. But in fact, we all are ona somewhat accidental, serendipitous roadif not in the work we produce, in the waywe live our lives. And if my life is any measure for how we operate, we all have deepneeds to know. I still maintain my adherence to methodological standards in my workand teaching, but my journey with Bud is teaching me a new compassion and opennessof heart.

Encountering and embracing my shadow helps me to accept and appreciate how weeach come to the work that we offer. We all have stories, and they fit into narratives.Bud has been forever the organizational detective is solving mysteries. He needs toknow, and his method ishis writing. I am coming to realize that I have been living the

story of a mindful heretic daring to violate all she holds sacred in order to find hiddeninformation. And my method requires that I remember not to simply avoid the shadows,but to look deeply into them. Sometimes thats where Ill find the keys to my ownstories. I have a need to know, too.


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I, Too, Have "A Need to Know: Confrontations With the Autoethnographic Shadow

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