Identity Construct Dialectics

Book excerpt: This ebook contextualizes autoethnographic film in its appropriation of an epistemics of subjectivity. This is analyzed in terms of autoethnographic film’s methodological appropriation in systematic fourfold discourse construction relational to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Such discourse is constituted through autoethnographer-as-filmmaker participant-observer praxis of a “self-as-Other” identity-construct, the positionality and performativity of which enacts a progressive destabilization, deconstruction, reconstruction and self-actualization structural modeling of subjectivity epistemics through which to meta-textually engage the spectator. Autoethnographic film’s split from ethnographic film is correspondingly examined in deference to the central question of the representation of self-as-Other interpretivist phenomenology through montagist cinematic aesthetics which locate such praxis within a mimetic social reality the delimiters of which inform identity construct formation as context-specific variables. Examples are given from selected key ethnographic and autoethnographic film texts chronicling the still-evolving progression of ethnographic film into autoethnographic film as a specifically post-modern genre.