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Pratt calls a canny “autoethnographic” consciousness: “a particular kind of cultural self-consciousness … of one’s life-ways or customs
as they have been singled out by the metropolis, be it for objectification in knowledge, for suppression or for extermination” (original italics), that is, processes of colonization and conquest. Autoethnography, Pratt shows, “selectively appropriates some tools of objectification … to counter objectification (‘We are not as you/they see us’).”
29 In splicing and recombining colonial developmental discourse with the redemptive voices of Welsh mythology, Gerald manages to exceed and disrupt colonial discourse and outlook. Gerald also frequently manages, of course, to confound his audiences. Autoethnography’s rhetorical heterogeneity makes it legible in different ways to differing audiences, thus by nature liable to semiotic slippage or indeterminacy. But it is most confounding to those who approach its representative texts, or for that matter cultures themselves, “as discrete, coherently structured, monolingual edifices.”
30 Instead of expecting the
Descriptio to express a single or “pure” position, we need to recall that autoethnographic texts are distinctly impure and inauthentic forms of self-representation. Autoethnographic texts are, moreover, frequently penned by mixed-race authors who are ambivalently positioned as cultural intermediaries in a colonial administration, figures who could as readily turn “native informant.”
31 Gerald, for instance, acted as a royal clerk for ten years, in which time he served as colonial surveyor of Ireland for Henry II, and acted as cultural liaison between the king and the various princes of Wales, many of them Gerald’s blood relations.
