Have you checked out the new Handbook of Autoethnography (Jones, Adams, and Ellis, Left Coast Press, http://www.lcoastpress.com/book.php?id=429)? I learned a lot by reading it, including many uses for autoethnography that extend beyond research.

Personally, I find that autoethnography is a good way to make my students think about classroom topics and how they apply (or don't apply) to their own lives.

Dear Barry, I agree with Jimmie, C. Ellis is an expert in auto-ethnography. My former Bachelor student with cerebral palsy, wrote the thesis based methodologically on autoethnography. Caroline's conclusions were indicating transformation of herself while writing process. She mentioned lot of struggles on the symbolic line involving dominant culture and  herself. Besides, she felt slightly transformed and freed after completeing work. My conclusion and answer to your question will highlight socially devaluated, deprived or excluded  individualities, groups, cultures, as interesting potential authors for auto-ethographies. The only risk of auto-ethnography is associated in my opinion with the abilities of staying true, simple and not becoming narcistic and boring while entire process of writing.

 A.J.Daniel Rambaran, Anthropologist from  Vrije University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, gave a terrific autoethnography talk in my department last spring, 2014.  I highly recommend him!

Thanks for the Rambaran reference--do you recommend a particular book or essay? I know Boylorn & Orbe, Reed-Danahay, and Ellis. In Dance Studies, there are a few precedents but not many. Perhaps scared off by Geertz warning against "diary disease" and it does feel like a risk.  I'm writing "memoir ethnography" relating to ballet, a genre emerging as I write, I think. I'm inspired by the new interest in anything called autoethnography. 

Try going to amazon.com and putting in the keywords auto-ethnography.  Several books should come up and they can be ordered from the site.

I am wondering if the Cahiers of the poet Paul Valery (261 manuscript notebooks) could be considered a pioneering auto-ethnography...

I did part autoethnography for my masters thesis about birth. It is genuinely a valuable method for representing marginal points of view and cultural practices (such as homebirth in western societies, where caesarean sections are becoming more and more common and normalised, in context of hospital birth being considered normal in general) by describing an autoethnographic point of view, that might unpack, for instance, a different worldview or philosophy or understanding about the world, as well as a different cultural practice or behaviour or experience of participation in meaningful social rituals. (It may then be similar to ethnography generally; a degree of reflexivity and critical distance from self-observations is of course required).

Another validating factor for autoethnography is the understanding that an educated person who has themselves had this type of marginal cultural experience can provide something of a representative voice that, in part at least, also describes the type of experience of others who have the same culture or experience (for instance those who have had homebirths). This is especially true in the case - which is likely more frequent for many marginal populations and marginal cultures - where the others are not usually highly educated themselves. For instance with homebirth, many women who choose this experience might be "hippies" with family or social ties to others who have already previously had homebirths as part of their overall choice of culture, or they may have been raised in a homebirth-oriented culture (e.g. on "The Farm" in Tennessee USA), although a good number of homebirthers are actually well educated women, who have gained a well-informed and critical understanding of the pros and cons of the medicalisation of childbirth.

In such a case as mine, autoethnography (representing either one's self or one's cultural group) can permit the telling of the types of stories that are generally overlooked in mainstream academic writing. Comprehensive or text-book literature about autoethnography (e.g. Ellis, Reed-Danahay, and look for stuff about your particular topic - believe me, there is quite a bit of it out there) in fact does seek to clarify the difference between self-autoethnography (about one's own experience) and group-representative-autoethnography (of one's own group's members' experiences). With the proviso that the researcher is capable of achieving both a sense of insight and intimacy in their writing, and an appropriate degree of critical distance, authoethnography can give a more authentic "emic" view of a social/cultural phenomenon than research presented by an "outsider".

If you're doing research in dance, music, photography, painting, or any other sensory/artistic field, Sarah Pink's 2009 book Doing Sensory Ethnography (Sage Publications) would make a good read. 

i just published a paper on autoethnography in food choices.

hope it helps you with your work.

Mayukh, D. (2017). My vegetarian experience: an autoethnographic approach. Asia-Pacific Journal of Innovation in Hospitality and Tourism, 6(1), 15-32.