Comment

Comment by 就是冷門 on September 24, 2021 at 10:39pm

Finally, following recent advances in ethnography, and in feminism and postcolonial studies, reading ‘Quiet Eilat’ raises issues concerning the discourse of tourism studies, that is writing about tourists and tourism. Although the poem was written naïvely, the question as to what is naïveté and whether there is indeed such an objective, ‘naïve’ perspective rises poignantly. Consider the power matrix that underlies the triadic relations between (1) the people who are described in the poem ‘Quiet Eilat’ (who traveled to Sinai in the late 1970s and to Eilat in the early 1990s) – mainly Nathan and myself; (2) the person who wrote the poem (in 1994); and (3) the person who wrote the academic text – the autoethnography, about the poem (in 2006–2007). Power relations and inequalities between the researcher, the writer and those represented in the text (the ‘field’), are clearly at stake here, complicated by the particular arrangement of power relations within the family.

By way of epilogue I wish to return to the interconnection between professional life and disciplinary academic socialization, on the one hand, and personal life and familial relationships, on the other, an interconnection which is characteristic of autoethnographic inquiry (Ellis, 2007). In the professional sphere, writing an autoethnography amounts to an empowering and emancipating act, because it assumes a public state (i.e. publication). It positions the scholar within a particular field or sub-discipline, ties her or him to a particular social network etc. The autoethnographic text assumes, beseeches, and cultivates a particular type of (academic) readership, which can radically change the discursive and interpretative practices of academic writers and readers.

On the personal sphere, I have not been in touch with Nathan in the last few years. He has refused the invitations which I extended before and during a post-doctorate year spent in the US in 2001. Yet my invitations were admittedly sparse: coping with Nathan’s severe illness is difficult for me, and I had and still have other needs to satisfy – my own growing family and my academic career.

I was initially furious with my relative, blaming his refusal to receive therapy (and recurrent institutionalizations) for the continuous deterioration in his health and for causing a deep divide in our relationship. I guess this is what psychologists call the ‘denial phase’. Only quite recently, and as a consequence of writing this autoethnography, I came by way of self-reconciliation to view Nathan’s crude rejections as expressing perhaps an agentic decision to avoid contact with me in this period of his life, or to establish a different type of relationship, one which is yet to be conceived. （Chaim Noy，2007，The Poetics of Tourist Experience: An Autoethnography of a Family T...，Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. January 2007, P141-157)

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