An Autoethnography of and in Solidarity: Post- and Decolonial Critique and Autoethnographic Positioning Analysis

Abstract

This article explores autoethnography as a critical research methodology in dialogue with post- and decolonial critique. It draws on an (auto)ethnographic research on and within the transnational solidarity network of the Mapuche people in which encounters of solidarity across difference are understood as postcolonial “contact zones.” This contribution hereby suggests three important opportunities for autoethnographic positioning analysis by looking at (a) different layers of the author’s field access, (b) the author’s strategic membership within the international solidarity activism, and (c) experiences of being rejected. This article argues that the careful and systematic analysis of such ethnographic episodes is able to (a) generate important epistemological insights within a particular research field, in this case transnational solidarity and networked social movement activity, and (b) highlight and reflect upon the researcher’s “complicity” within fieldwork. The first part of this contribution briefly introduces post- and decolonial debates on solidarity across difference and moves on to suggesting autoethnographic positioning analysis as a methodological approach for studying/supporting the transnational solidarity activism, drawing upon the author’s research with the Mapuche.

In the very first encounter during my fieldwork on the transnational advocacy network of/with the Mapuche, ¹ I was asked a subtle yet powerful question: “What brought you here?” A Mapuche gentlemen inquired about my motivations when I joined him and a small group of people gathered for mate tea on a damp October afternoon in Cologne. With a similar question in mind, I hoped to meet non-Indigenous supporters of the Mapuche at that gathering, the so-called Academia Mapuche in 2014, to study their solidarity network with the Mapuche. To my surprise, this was rather an event of a small but well-organized Mapuche diaspora in Europe, and only visited by interested non-Indigenous guests and supporters. So, before I was able to pose this question of “What brought you here?” to potential research participants, my first interlocutor challenged me to answer it first for myself. At the same time, I realized that solidarity with the Mapuche in Europe was basically solidarity among the Mapuche themselves.

The Mapuche are the largest Indigenous population in Chile and represent approximately 10% of the country’s population. They employ a vast set of political strategies with different degrees of organization to fight for their recognition as an Indigenous nation, their political autonomy and self-determination, and the return of their ancient territory, the Wallmapu (Pairican, 2014). Among their strategies is transnationalizing their struggle. They do this by making their demands and the Chilean state’s human and Indigenous rights violations internationally visible, and by weaving relations of solidarity beyond Wallmapu (Garbe, 2022; Habersang & Ydígoras, 2015). When I started my research, I was convinced that solidarity action in Europe was done mostly by non-Indigenous people living in Europe. Not only did the Mapuche diaspora’s actions prove me wrong, but they also troubled my initial research design. I subsequently began to focus on the limitations and possibilities of interracial solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors. What is more, the question “What brought you here?” showed me that I did not solely rely on other non-Indigenous actors’ experiences, and invited me to take my own experience and positioning as the point of departure for researching the potentialities and pitfalls of international solidarity against the backdrop of post- and decolonial critiques.

In the following article, I would like to revisit some autoethnographic episodes from my contact and engagement with the Mapuche solidarity network that illuminate three important opportunities for autoethnographic positioning analysis. In what follows, I share some epistemologically challenging yet fruitful experiences of (a) gaining field access by analyzing different layers of “What brought you here?” (b) un/becoming a solidarity activist as an expression of strategic membership, and (c) experiences of being rejected, which highlight crisis, troubles, and situations of uncomfortable complicity during fieldwork. According to the methodology of autoethnographic positioning analysis (see Greschke, this issue), the careful and systematic analysis of such ethnographic episodes is able to (a) generate important epistemological insights within a particular research field, in this case transnational solidarity and networked social movement activity, and (b) highlight and reflect upon the researcher’s “complicity” (Marcus, 1997) within fieldwork and in dialogue with post- and decolonial critiques. In this case, this complicity takes place within the “conflicted commitments” (Mahrouse, 2014) of White solidarity in decolonial or antiracist struggles in which solidarity is “both a central element for effective political movements and a set of practices that rely on racialized and gendered structures of colonialism and imperialism” (Mahrouse, 2014, p. 152).

The first part of this contribution briefly introduces post- and decolonial debates on solidarity across difference. This article then intervenes by suggesting autoethnographic positioning analysis as a methodological approach for studying/supporting the transnational solidarity activism, drawing upon my research with the Mapuche.

Post- and Decolonial Debates on Solidarity

This contribution intervenes in an increasing body of academic literature on solidarity, particularly within (transnational) social movement studies (Anderl, 2022; Conway et al., 2021; della Porta, 2018), social philosophy (Derpmann, 2021; Laitinen & Pessi, 2015; Rothberg, 2019), and activist literature (Land, 2015; Sitrin & Sembrar, 2020; Susemichel & Kastner, 2021). It does so by suggesting autoethnographic exploration as a methodological approach for studying solidarity with a particular sensitivity toward racialized, colonial, gendered, and other forms of differences.

Instead of foregrounding theories on solidarity that imply a universal or partial solidification between or within social groups, and subsequent mutual identification, division of labor, or common struggles (Bayertz, 1998; Brunkhorst, 2002), post- and decolonial perspectives highlight how these normative and universalizing claims still remain unfulfilled within colonial modernity due to racial social stratification (Mills, 1997; Quijano, 2014). Particularly, if we consider transnational relations of solidarity, post- and decolonial critiques contribute to understanding how imaginations of regions or people in the Global South are influenced by colonial representations and interests (Said, 2003), and how well-meaning advocacy reproduces paternalism and silences subaltern voices (Alcoff, 1992; Spivak, 1988). Such critiques trouble and complicate ideas of solidarity across differences because they understand its practice as located within colonial and racial structures, not outside of them (Mohanty, 2003). Relations of solidarity across difference therefore happen within such postcolonial contact zones “in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt, 2008, p. 8).

Only a few contemporary studies have taken up the challenge to empirically study expressions of (international or domestic) solidarity, with a focus on the racialized and colonial differences between the involved groups and actors (Davis, 2010; Hamann & Karakayali, 2016; Land, 2015; Mahrouse, 2014; Vaz & Lemons, 2013). The scarcity of empirical, ethnographic research on and within spaces and encounters of solidarity justifies the need for critical positioning analytic autoethnographic inquiries in these terrains. Yet, what is more, a critical conceptualization of solidarity as a conflicted commitment, “a set of practices that rely on racialized and gendered structures of colonialism and imperialism” (Mahrouse, 2014, p. 152), welcomes autoethnographies’ potential sensitivity toward (post)colonial, racialized, and gendered inequalities (Chawla & Atay, 2018; Pathak, 2010; Reilly, 2021; Toyosaki, 2018). This is because such an approach focuses on “the disharmonic, rather than the harmonic, the frictional, rather than the holistic, the disputable, rather than the undisputed, the contradictory rather than the unchallenged [as] constitutive elements of cultural (re)production and change” (see Greschke, this issue).

Toward an Autoethnography of and in Solidarity

The following section describes certain moments and dimensions of gaining field access during my research by engaging with the aforementioned critical intervention: “What brought you here?” Detailing stories and stages related to acquiring field access offers several heuristic opportunities within autoethnographic positioning analysis. As outlined in the introduction of this article, these can include (a) the (self-)presentations of the researcher and communication with gatekeepers, (b) different positionalities of the involved actors, and (c) the conflictive elements and feelings of discomfort within cultural contact zones.

The first answer to the question, what brought me to such “networked spaces of transnational encounter” (Juris & Khasnabish, 2013b, p. 5), is invitations by representatives of the Mapuche diaspora in Europe and of the regional group of a German nongovernmental organization (NGO) invested in Indigenous rights issues. Influenced by post- and decolonial critique, I suspected that their efforts were reproducing paternalistic relationships as well as colonial stereotypes about indigenous people. I subsequently considered a critique of such postcolonial entanglements within solidarity as the goal of my research. But some of these actors’ self-identification as Mapuche living in Europe challenged my initial assumptions.

This initial contact can be read as an expression of a metainvective circle (see Greschke, this issue) within (auto)ethnographic fieldwork: I framed practices and discourses of solidarity with the Mapuche as potentially paternalistic and colonial, and thus made a metainvective assumption, which was challenged by the presence of a Mapuche diaspora in Europe. I oversimplified the different positionings within the research contexts and even reproduced a colonial and patronizing strategy: a White researcher saving indigenous people from other White activists’ misled solidarity. ²

This initial contact thus made me focus more and more on the experiences and (dis)encounters between Mapuche and non-Mapuche people coming together in solidarity within networked spaces of transnational advocacy. These included conflictive and challenging situations, fueled with unquestioned assumptions and ignorance. They also included the uncertainties and discomforts within a complex transnational and translocal setting full of heterogeneous, oscillating, and shifting positionalities. Moreover, and because I had planned to actively support the solidarity efforts beyond my mere research interests, I found myself bound in the middle of that relationship. Thus, the focus shifted toward a critical reflection on my own and other non-Indigenous actors’ engagement in (potential) solidarity action in which the Mapuche diaspora were the protagonists and gatekeepers of that advocacy network.

After the initial contact, two members of the Mapuche diaspora living in Germany either cautiously or enthusiastically gave me the consent to pursue my research while supporting their efforts, connected me with other solidarity activists in Europe, and invited me to solidarity events, where I conducted interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors.

With the aim to ethnographically follow the solidarity efforts in Europe back to Chile, and to understand solidarity from different angles, I did two research trips to Chile and Wallmapu, ³ where I conducted fieldwork within spaces of the Mapuche society that are connected to international solidarity and advocacy efforts.

A second possible answer to the question, what brought me into that context, is my scholarly and intellectual interest in researching and understanding the limitations and possibilities of solidarity across difference. That is, what an autoethnography of solidarity actually means. To (auto)ethnographically study solidarity means to shift the focus away from investigating a particular group of people toward a specific sociopolitical and cultural problem (Casa-Cortés et al., 2013). The focus of this “multi-sited” (Marcus, 1995, p. 95) and transnationally networked (Juris & Khasnabish, 2013b, p. 5) (auto)ethnography subsequently comprised the complex and contradictory forms, translocal encounters, and practices of international solidarity between unequally positioned groups of people.

In ethnography, the researcher’s social and cultural relationships within the field become the central tool for gathering knowledge. One promising way of turning this implication into an object of critical analysis is through autoethnographic positioning analysis as proposed in this Special Issue. Building on the insights from evocative and analytic autoethnography, autoethnographic positioning analysis proposes a set of distinctive features, which are mobilized in this contribution. It includes the strategic membership within solidarity activism, for example, the pursuit or squandering of a solidaristic standpoint. In light of my position as a researcher in solidarity, I am thus no longer only the subject analyzing the solidarity of others, but I also compose my own position in (possible or limited) solidarity and as an object of study that equally might undergo processes of transformation within the ethnographic encounter.

Autoethnographic positioning analysis further activates the epistemic potential of the presence of the ethnographer’s body in the field as a rich empirical resource, understood both as a recording device as well as a carrier of signs and symbols. In that setting, the “ethnographer herself/himself becomes as much the topic of reflection as the research resource” (Atkinson, 2004, p. 108). In the case of this contribution, a positioning-analytic reflexivity of my presence in the solidarity scene helps to uncover and differentiate the heterogeneous and shifting positionalities of non-Indigenous solidarity activists that are detailed in the following section on un/becoming a solidarity activist.

This article thus showcases three core opportunities of autoethnographic positioning analysis as a research methodology. The first section analyzes my field access and the methodological design toward an autoethnography of and in solidarity. The second section discusses my experiences of un/becoming a solidarity activist by looking at the (shifting) roles, negotiation of positions, as well as different possibilities of being involved against the backdrop of the involvement other non-Indigenous supporters. The last section engages with moments during my research in which I felt rejected as a researcher and solidarity activist and therefore highlights the potential of autoethnographic positioning analysis in examining moments of crisis, troubles, and uncomfortable positions.

What is more, post- and decolonial approaches argue that another strength of autoethnography lies in its capacity to (re)claim and empower subalternized positionalities by disrupting “the idea that these stories are not legitimate knowledge” (Pathak, 2010, p. 4), “engaging more diverse voices and employing more variant storytelling techniques” (Chawla & Atay, 2018, p. 2), and “decolonizing colonial discourses, practices, and history(ies) of both academia and the social sciences” (Toyosaki, 2018, p. 3). Although these arguments, in accordance with other critical research programs within critical feminist (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1994) and Black feminist epistemologies (Hill Collins, 2002), make sense for subalternized, oppressed, or subjugated positionalities, a critical autoethnographic approach from a standpoint of racialized and gendered privilege demands another perspective. ⁴ In the discussions for this Special Issue, we argue that autoethnographic positioning analysis is a particularly useful research methodology to study different phases of field research, such as field entry, crisis, and conflicts in loyalties and interest. This includes the “complicity” (Marcus, 1997) of the ethnographer in the field, understood as the contradictory, conflictive, and critical entanglements and encounters within postcolonial “contact zones” (Pratt, 2008), as a constitutive element of the research process, and thus critical to scrutinize in close detail.

Finally, a third possible answer to the question, what brought me into the networked spaces of solidarity of/with the Mapuche, is my political commitment with the aim to support decolonial and antiracist struggle from my privileged positionality as a White German researcher. That is what an autoethnography in solidarity refers to. But what are the epistemological foundations for doing research about oneself within political commitment?

The justificatory strategy for such a research methodology is based on the argument that the social reality can be investigated more adequately from a politicized standpoint. This argument has been developed foremost within Marxist standpoint theory (Lukács, 2012), Participatory Action Research (Fals-Borda & Rahman, 1991), critical feminist (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1994), and Black feminist epistemology (Hill Collins, 2002). These traditions argue that a particular standpoint has an epistemological advantage that is achieved by theorizing the positionality of the subject who is a political actor and conducts the research. In other words, only with the aim to change reality it is possible to understand that reality properly.

This argument against universal objectivity and in favor of a “strong objectivity” (Harding, 1994, pp. 165–168) as “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 1988), demands an epistemological standpoint of the researcher that is constantly and critically reflected upon (Juris & Khasnabish, 2013a, p. 373). This means recognizing and highlighting (a) my own location and positionality; (b) my knowledge, its formative contexts, constraints, and products; and (c) my social background and bodily inscribed meanings (Haraway, 1988). A committed, “activist ethnography” (Routledge, 2013) therefore not only enables to reflect on my sociocultural positionality and its limitations and privileges, but also on that of other fellow non-Indigenous solidarity actors. This fuels a positioning-analytic reflexivity within autoethnographic research in which my own roles, trajectories, and implications in the field can be analyzed against the backdrop of others. In such a field composition, I become one of several solidarity activists who are equally positioned by others, placed into dialogue, and attributed with certain roles, expectations, and meanings.

An autoethnographic account therefore combines the thick description of ethnography (Geertz, 1987) with the researchers’ personal experiences as primary data and brings them into transnational activism and networked spaces of solidarity. Not only does this provide “a deeper cognitive understanding” of a political movement (Juris & Khasnabish, 2013b, p. 26), but it also might contribute to the self-reflection of a movement’s aims, goals, practices, or imaginations (Juris, 2013, p. 77; Pleyers, 2013, p. 112). It may have further practical political outcomes, such as supporting a court case, generating concepts, establishing contacts, and recording conversations (Casa-Cortés et al., 2013).

Thus, the result of such a politically engaged autoethnography is not only an academic product, but also the practical and political contributions for the movement that are created within research. This ultimately leads to the fact that the researcher’s positionality oscillates between spaces within and outside of academia and weaves the ethnographer “into the relational web that constitutes his or her own research topic intermeshed with her or his life trajectory” (Casa-Cortés et al., 2013, p. 224).

In the remaining sections of this article, I address two expressions of my complicity within the transnational solidarity network of/with the Mapuche as both a researcher and an activist. Departing from very concrete autoethnographic experiences, a critical reflection on my complicity within these spaces helps me to generate insights into the possibilities and limitations of solidarity across differences. Looking at different stages and struggles of becoming a member of the transnational solidarity scene as well as the slippage between in- and outsider status of different individuals, is crucial to uncover the sociocultural and political dynamics at play and how the Mapuche manage access to their community of solidarity. In addition, the final section seeks to show the ways in which careful analyses of moments of crisis, troubles, and uncomfortable situations can contribute to ethnographic research. Intentionally going against ethnography as a story of success, I dive into my own experiences of being rejected as a researcher/activist to track down the empirical value of ethnographic “failure.”

Un/Becoming a Solidarity Activist

From the get-go of my research, I offered my support to actively contribute to the transnational solidarity efforts of the Mapuche diaspora, particularly in Germany, and assisted them with translating texts and event organizing. Based on that engagement in Europe, they equipped me with their trust and contacts to travel to Chile not only to do research, but also to engage as a human rights observer. In the latter role, I was expected to deliver reports, visit political Mapuche prisoners, and attend court trials against them. Of course, to engage in and support solidarity activities does not automatically grant me some sort of “solidarity badge.” Rather, I consider the efforts of antiracist and decolonial solidarizations by White people as constant processes of negotiation, failure, and un/making. Inspired by Sara Ahmed (2004), I suggest being suspicious toward the assumption that to claim solidarity is to be in solidarity. To be in solidarity is rather a constant process of un/becoming—a shifting and oscillating positionality that can be highlighted through an autoethnographic positioning analysis. The following autoethnographic story not only highlights both the fragility of non-Indigenous solidarity with the Mapuche, but also how they weave durable relations of solidarity with non-Mapuche outsiders.

While preparing for my first field trip to Wallmapu in early 2016, I conducted several interviews with non-Mapuche solidarity activists. After having interviewed Clarissa, a White German woman and intern at a human rights NGO, she offered to connect me with a Chilean family in Temuco, where she had stayed during her university exchange in Chile. I gladly accepted and soon arranged my accommodation with them. However, after a few days in their house, I decided that I had to leave as soon as possible. I was shocked by the many derogatory and racist remarks they made about the Mapuche in my first moments with them. I knew I would not be able to stay with them any longer. Fortunately, I had already met and encountered several welcoming and friendly people among the Mapuche movement in the town who helped me to find a new accommodation within a few hours.

Besides my frustration about the racism of White Chileans, I could not stop wondering about the meaning of this experience. Why did Clarissa, who claimed a position in solidarity with the Mapuche for herself, stay with—and even recommend—this family to me? She must have heard many more similar comments during her considerably longer sojourn with them. I tried to make sense of this story, and thus shared it with some of my Mapuche interlocutors in Temuco. I also situated it as an important point of departure for my reflections and observations about relations of solidarity.

So, after deciding to become a “race traitor” (Alcoff, 1998, pp. 14–21) and moving out, I was lucky that one of my contacts introduced me to Rayen Kvyeh, who at that moment was subletting a room in her house, where I would stay for the following weeks. Rayen Kvyeh is an internationally known Mapuche poet who lived in exile in Germany for several years during the military dictatorship. She still travels to Europe regularly to present her poetry and talk about the situation of the Mapuche. We immediately got along very well and began to cultivate a friendship that still lasts today. During my stay at her house, I became acquainted with her friends from several political, artistic, and academic circles in the region as well as with other international visitors in solidarity. Living with her and becoming her friend was thus a crucial experience to understand processes of solidarization not only with, but also among, the Mapuche.

One central aspect of everyday interactions among the Mapuche and with non-Indigenous friends are different sharing processes. Sharing, particularly the Spanish word compartir, has a threefold meaning: It includes not only sharing and exchanging material and immaterial goods but also spending time with each other. Mapuche interlocutors used the notion of compartir in numerous statements to describe a positive relationship with non-Mapuche people and indicate its quality. Such processes of sharing can be interpreted as a form of gift-exchange, which essentially aims to produce and perpetuate social relationships (Mauss, 2013). One community spokesman, for example, did not mind if some projects with partners in Europe did not work out, but he appreciated that those people continued visiting his community.

Two Mapuche concepts or ideas, keyuwvn and mingako, are particularly helpful to decipher the importance of social and communal bonds for a critical notion of solidarity. These concepts can be roughly translated as to work among everyone (keyuwvn) or collective work/labor in the countryside and community (mingako). What is important about both notions is the fact that they assume relations of solidarity to take place within an already established social setting. The possibility to work among everyone or to fulfill communal tasks assumes at least some sort of social bond from which such activities can take place. This logic can be easily applied to the encounters between Mapuche and non-Mapuche actors within transnational advocacy: there needs to be a communal bond with a certain amount of trust from which mutual support can develop.

After coming back to Germany from this trip, I revisited the audio recording from my interview with Clarissa and realized that it encompassed several narrations about failed attempts of her wanting to spend time, compartir, with Mapuche people during her stay in Wallmapu. The ideas of keyuwvn and mingako help to explain why she did not succeed. As an outsider to the Mapuche society, she would have needed to first establish social relations of proximity and longevity to offer her political support in a next step. So, despite the possible political solidarity with the Mapuche she claimed for herself in our conversations, she preferred to maintain social relations of solidarity ⁵ with a White Chilean family. She chose this relationship over the ones she could have built with the Mapuche.

Clarissa’s and my experiences represent both possibilities of a broad spectrum of un/becoming a solidarity activist and reflect how transnational advocacy and international solidarity provide spaces of (dis)encounter between Mapuche and non-Mapuche actors in a conflictive postcolonial contact zone. In these encounters, the political practice in solidarity has the potential to produce and transform the relationships between the involved actors connected across unequal power relations and geographies and to weave continuous, reciprocal, and horizontal relations of solidarity (Featherstone, 2012; Garbe, 2022). This is because (international) relations of solidarity with which the Mapuche work in was similar to the political dynamics of alliance-making and social recruitment within Mapuche society (Stuchlik, 1999). International non-Mapuche actors are eventually woven into this social network on the basis of their political engagement and become socially attached to and assembled with Mapuche communities and organizations as a result of the latter’s general “openness towards a possible social horizon” (Díaz Fernandez, 2012, p. 69) with the non-Mapuche world.

During my research/activism, I also became slowly woven into the social fabric of my Mapuche interlocutors/friends. Yet, and at the same time, conceiving solidarity as primarily a social relationship instead of a form of political action, leaves much room for frustrations, disappointments, and affective overload: each encounter must involve at least the promise of a lengthy, reciprocal, and intimate relationship, which might include constant visits, gift exchanges, or care responsibilities. At times, this felt quite frustrating because I eventually expected more concrete and ambitious outcomes of solidarity due to my engagement instead of “only” building social relations. Other fellow non-Indigenous activists expressed such feelings to me as well. Conceiving solidarity according to keyuwvn and mingako and as mutual support only within a communal effort challenges such imaginations of the “white savior,” where an individual effort from a position of privilege easily leads to the improvement of the other’s living conditions. Instead, (re-)creating and caring for the communal bonds needs to be conceived as a political act not only of resistance but also of solidarity (Tzul Tzul, 2018).

Un/becoming a solidarity activist also addresses my complicity within the constraints of an academic project. The contradictions between activism and research are one of the main difficulties of an engaged and committed ethnographic approach (Juris & Khasnabish, 2013b), particularly within those traditions that demand a horizontal and equal participation between researcher and research participants.

In this case, only certain elements were designed in a participatory and horizontal way. For example, the interviews to critically discuss the role and vision of non-Mapuche supporters involved in international solidarity and advocacy were designed in collaboration with Alina Rodenkirchen as part of a decolonial and critical race approach to solidarity (Land, 2015; Mahrouse, 2014). We even joked about how that role transformed my position into an anthropologist working for the Mapuche diaspora and researching non-Indigenous people.

Beyond such a reciprocal dynamic, I mostly remained in control of the overall research process and at the same time depended on others to be able to access or to participate in the field of international solidarity. This dependency counters the modern/colonial ideal of the independent, self-confident, and determined researcher. ⁶ Engaging in a different positionality as a researcher thus implies a process of “unlearning one’s privilege” (Spivak, 1990, p. 10) by starting to understand the need to rely on others. On several occasions, I had to wait until a solidarity event was organized that served my research interests. Several of these events were planned on very short notice and sometimes I found out about them only a few days before. This made it difficult for me to attend because those events took place in Belgium, the Netherlands, or other cities in Germany. Especially during my first research stay in Wallmapu, I immediately got sucked into the contingency of the political struggles. Within the first days, I was invited to meet several important people, visit the court trials and the political Mapuche prisoners, and barely had time to write down any notes or press pause. My commitment as a human rights observer was warmly welcomed and demanded by local Mapuche activists. This activism thus created its own flow of events, and my research agenda could barely keep up.

Thus, some valuable empirical material did not find its way into a recorded interview or my field notes. This does not make these experiences worthless. Instead, “[t]he connections and affinities forged with resisting others form a key part of activist ethnographic research” and are even able to “nurture a politics of affinity with others” (Routledge, 2013, p. 255). According to the notions of keyuwvn and mingako, this approach highlights activism in solidarity as a transformative relationship that creates social and affective ties based on a political commitment. Solidarity thus does not only aim at political change, but also toward forging social relationships within activism.

Being Rejected as a Researcher/Activist

Stories of how we fail during our (auto-)ethnographic exercise can bring important insights into our research (Toyosaki, 2018) and may uncover disharmonic and conflictive aspects of ethnographic engagement. Nevertheless, we mostly tend to tell the successful aspects of our ethnographic encounters and how they affected the ways in which we gathered knowledge. In the following section, I focus on situations in which I was or felt rejected by potential Mapuche interlocutors during my research. I interpret these moments as Mapuche actors’ claim-making and materialization of their autonomy.

Before beginning this research, I presented my study proposal before a scholarship-granting committee at a graduate center in Germany. During my presentation, one scholar asked me whether and how I planned to access Mapuche society and culture. He shared that he spent time in Chile, and witnessed how non-Indigenous scholars and researchers were not easily accepted or welcomed by potential Mapuche interlocutors. His question resonated with me in several instances in which I was denied an interview, a conversation, or even bits of information. Besides such acts of resistance against potential “epistemical extractivism” (Grosfoguel, 2016) by Western researchers, the “epistemic violence” (Brunner, 2020) perpetrated within interview situations was evident in several occasions. For example, after I finished an interview with a Mapuche leader during a public rally, I was approached by a Mapuche man who observed the situation and asked in a challenging tone whether I was leaving already. I did not feel that he actually wanted to know whether or when I was leaving (the rally or Wallmapu), but rather whether I was abandoning the situation now that I had done my interview and successfully “extracted” knowledge. This question can be further read as the flipside of being asked, what brought me here: For what did you come if you are leaving already?

One experience, early on in my research during the Academia Mapuche, heightened the urgency for me to productively engage with the feeling of being rejected as a non-Indigenous actor. Indigenous Mapuche community members from Wallmapu, members of the Mapuche diaspora, and non-Indigenous, European supporters for a political and sociocultural exchange participated in the event. On the last day of the gathering, the Mapuche community leaders from Wallmapu and the people from the Mapuche diaspora gathered in a room to organize a protest a few days after the event and to prepare a public statement. Non-Mapuche people, including me, were not invited to attend this meeting. As the evening went on, I became increasingly impatient, as I did not know how much longer the gathering would continue. I decided to leave, but not without informing two Mapuche women who I promised to drive to their accommodation in my car. After some hesitation, I decided to interrupt the meeting and ask how much longer it might take. When I stuck my head into the room, it felt like everyone was immediately silent. I perceived a tense atmosphere in the room and that something important was going on. Now that everyone was staring at me, I realized that I was disrespectfully intruding on the meeting. Before I could say anything, one of the Mapuche leaders from Wallmapu, apparently at the center of the discussion, raised his voice and asked ⁷ without looking at me, “Is he with anyone?” Before anyone could reply, I quickly tried to explain the reason for my intrusion. I apologized and left the room as soon as I finished talking.

Besides the obvious awkwardness of the moment, I felt ashamed of claiming that I did not want to interrupt the meeting but nevertheless did. I ignored my own intuition about the importance of the Indigenous activists having a unique opportunity to meet among themselves and privileged my individual needs. I was also made aware of my discomfort of having only limited access to the solidarity network as a non-Indigenous supporter.

This experience is illuminating regarding how international solidarity with the Mapuche transnationalizes their struggle for autonomy. Solidarity action with the Mapuche here is essentially solidarity work headed by the Mapuche and not dominated by non-Indigenous actors. The gathering I interrupted was a space created by Mapuche living in the European diaspora to discuss with community leaders from Wallmapu how solidarity action with their own people should be carried out under specific circumstances. European NGOs and individual solidarity activists like me would only be invited to support these efforts. Solidarity action with the Mapuche, as this anecdote reveals, is centered around the efforts of the Mapuche community to maintain their autonomy within solidarity. In that moment, I experienced in practice how Mapuche actors struggle to gain a sense of autonomy without necessarily negating the support of non-Indigenous actors or organizations. Finally, they managed to create an autonomous space within the context of international solidarity, thus transforming it.

This autoethnographic experience is not an isolated expression of the Mapuche’s struggle to gain or maintain their autonomy. Rather, autonomy is a political concept that is deeply rooted in Mapuche history and cosmology (Marimán, 2012; Tricot, 2013). What this ethnographic episode shows is that claims for autonomy are not only happening in Wallmapu but are also transnationalized within relations and gatherings of solidarity. Therefore, the transnationalization process of solidarity needs to be reconstructed and interpreted in dialogue with Mapuche cosmology and political thought in which conceptualizations of and discussions about autonomy are crucial. This requires a careful process of translating conceptualizations of autonomy into academically formalized contexts (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010), so that differently positioned and situated knowledges are put into dialogue without claiming an authority over those other knowledges through practices of representation that would silence subaltern voices (Spivak, 1988). This effort is thus “a critical step of putting distinct spheres of knowledges into conversation” by “spreading, sharing, and building connections among transnational nodes of engaged knowledge producers” (Casa-Cortés et al., 2013, pp. 222–223). This type of ethnographic translation is best described as a process of transculturalization that “reflects our positionalities, in which commonalities but also differences are made known,” thus creating a “simultaneity of creative exchanges and social conflict” embedded in the ethnographic encounter (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010, p. 24).

Following these insights, I understand moments, in which I felt or was rejected, as expressions of such conflicts in which Mapuche actors struggle to maintain their autonomy, resist extractivist practices of epistemic violence, and make the complicity of the researcher visible. Such moments could lead to important insights concerning the political practices and ideas that shape these encounters if put into productive dialogue through a process of ethnographic translation. Interpreting these episodes as transnationalized expressions of the Mapuche claiming their autonomy, some features of the international solidarity network become visible that are quite similar to the political mobilization of the Mapuche in Wallmapu, such as their decentralized form of organizing or the constant production of a “hidden transcript,” in which solidarity “takes place ‘offstage,’ beyond direct observation by power-holders” (Scott, 1990, pp. 4–5). The Mapuche diaspora and representatives from Wallmapu hereby establish clear boundaries to others, produce an inside and outside sphere of solidarity, make their network partially unintelligible, keep information safe, and reaffirm their own agency and autonomy.

Autoethnographic stories of how access is denied and how outsiders are rejected can therefore provide an analytic foundation for understanding, first, how differences between Mapuche and non-Mapuche at the external nodes of the solidarity network are (re)produced. Second, it can also be useful for identifying how different positions and roles of in-and outsiders are distributed.

Conclusion

The aim of this article was to suggest autoethnographic positioning analysis as a methodological approach for studying relations of solidarity by attempting to compose my own position within a relation of solidarity. By critically reflecting on “what brought me here,” this approach achieves a particular sensitivity toward racialized, colonial, gendered, and other forms of differences, and is able to make my own, the researcher’s, and the White allies’ complicity within unequal relations of power within transnational advocacy, visible. Although autoethnography can be a powerful tool for marginalized voices and biographies to decolonize research and academic culture, the question, what it means for White researchers “to fuse their postcolonial subjectivity into their text” (Chawla & Atay, 2018, p. 5), remains open. With this article, and by narrating autoethnographic stories about what brought me into this solidarity network, un/becoming an activist, and being rejected, I propose a way of doing autoethnography, in exchange with post- and decolonial critiques, which is productive, yet self-critical, and analytic, yet emotionally guided.

The autoethnographic approach proposed in this article operates from a privileged standpoint, but attempts to create sensitivity toward post- and decolonial, gendered, and other forms of inequalities by taking the different socially and culturally contingent roles and positions as analytic points of departure. I therefore argue against swiping away unequal power relations within research and solidarity activism, against only acknowledging our complicity without drawing any consequences, or simply declaring my “White guilt” by lamenting about failures and missteps. In contrast, I suggest making my complicity, and acquired or attributed position as a power- and resourceful actor, as the point of departure for understanding relations of solidarity across and eventually beyond difference. Instead of telling a story of (autoethnographic) success, this article sought to “document our different failures to reenvision our subjective, cultural, and institutional histories and engage our subjective, cultural, and institutional future” (Toyosaki, 2018, p. 4).

The lack of (auto)ethnographic research about White activists within (transnational) encounters of solidarity between unequal groups might stem from the idea that a critical review of such engagements means to be against them. Instead, there is a need to hold them accountable for their engagement and scrutinize “what brought them here.” I am convinced that we might achieve a better understanding of similar contexts of solidarity across difference, for example, with BlackLivesMatter in the United States and Europe or feminist movements, such as #niunamenos in South America, through first-person, in-depth, and self-critical autoethnographic research. The scarcity of such empirical, ethnographic research on and within spaces and encounters of solidarity therefore justifies that need for further critical and analytic autoethnographic inquiry.