Methodenstreit refers back to a more than 200 year long dispute over epistemological issues. It is about objectivity versus subjectivity, human and cultural sciences versus natural sciences. In this sense the argument over methods actually refers rather to the underlying methodology.

I was wondering whether even the meaning of auto-ethnography has been changing as ethnography itself refers to the intense immersing of the researcher into a culture and engaging with practices and individuals that – decades ago was much more of the clearly separated arena or a more sharply distinguished sub-culture. Nowadays we witness an increasing number of melting-pot cultures and mosaic societies (not least to new national formations, globalisation and travel), also the boundaries between sub-culture and dominant culture seem to be rather getting blurred (perhaps just an illusion, though).

I find Ellis and Bochner’s (2000) definition of ‘an autobiographical genre of writing that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural’ a very helpful one, yet, the problem starts with the application to past analyses (say Freud, Foucault, Mauss) where reflexivity was not as explicitly required and applied as it is nowadays.