What is Anthropological Autography?

This article is about anthropological autography, which is defined as writing about oneself by oneself, with a view to understanding human beings and not necessarily social facts. The author differentiates autography from auto-ethnography and from the reflexive discourses of the researcher on his field. He makes anthropological autography a key exercise in existential anthropology. After showing how little Lévi-Strauss was sensitive to writing in the first person, the author focuses on the work of Michel Leiris. He shows, above all, Leiris’ tension between his literary objective and his anchorage in ethnology, without really succeeding in considering his autographs as an anthropological issue.