Rock Star Dreams Co-created (auto)ethnographies

Abstract

The article is a two-part piece where the first part is a narratively written composition of interview excerpts, and the second part is a theoretical and methodological reflection about this way of writing. The narrative of the first part consists of extracts from in-depth interviews conducted within the framework of an ethnological and autoethnographical research project examining grief, friendship and kinship in the wake of the deaths of two of the authors childhood friends – Marcus and Noel. The potential of the ethnographic material is explored as text by compiling it in an entirely new manner, where multiple voices are condensed into a single narrative. The point of departure is sociologist Carolyn Ellis’ ideas on co-constructed narratives and autoethnographic texts as jointly authored. The writing method is also inspired by author Svetlana Alexievich and her way of facilitating a focus on specific details of human experience from a larger empirical material. The intention is that the whole should appear to be greater than the sum of its parts. The common narrative is something new, something singular, something greater than could be conveyed by any one of the interviews, or interviewees, alone. The result is a narrative of death, grief, friendship, parenthood and kinship. About how masculinity can be intersected by the lines of class, place, mental illness and substance abuse. In the text, those who grieve for Marcus and Noel are not alone – in the text they stand together as part of a heterogeneous collective with many voices.