Читать книгу Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences - Katherine Bischoping - Страница 13

Is narrative analysis right for my data? What is a narrative and how is it different from a story? How do I go about narrative analysis? What do I look for? These are some of the questions that concern us when we have collected talk data and are considering whether or not narrative analysis is a suitable strategy with which to approach it. We speak to these concerns in this chapter.

Narrative analysis will appeal to you if you are a humanist, interested in understanding individuals’ and communities’ quests for meaning. Narratives tell us about the perceptions individuals and communities have of everyday life experiences and about how what is meaningful is expressed. You might equally be intrigued by how narratives reflect social norms, mores, and values about what the form and content of a ‘good story’ should be, as well as larger, more abstract social structures, and institutions. Because narratives are told in interaction between two or more people, at the same time as they are situated in wider and changing contexts, both local and global, narrative analysis will offer you distinctive opportunities to examine the theoretical juncture of the micro and the macro.

While there have been many scholarly waves of interest in narrative analysis, it is presently rising on the same tide as the social and political rights movements and identity politics of the 1960s onwards. Narrative analysis is valued because it can reveal diverse lives, including those that may be bracketed as unusual or socially deviant, those that are broadly perceived as normative, and those that are largely unsung or overlooked. To present the stories of the subjugated can be a means of witnessing and drawing attention to the social inequalities and oppression they experience. As we read for this part of the book, seeking out examples, we felt spoiled for choice, as voices and personalities came powerfully and vividly to the fore. Narrative analysis, if done well, can captivate your readers and persuade them in a distinctive manner.

Narrative analysis offers unique charms for the methodologically minded, too. The strategies we discuss in this part of the book are derived from an extraordinarily wide range of disciplines, each bringing something to the party. You will find historians and psychologists, philosophers and journalists, poets and geographers, anthropologists and more, jostling noisily and happily. The challenge is largely to synthesize their offerings. Many typologies of narrative analysis are available, most notably that developed by American sociologist Catherine Kohler Riessman (2005). But, when we compare her fourfold typology to those outlined by United Kingdom (UK) health researchers Phoenix, Smith, and Sparkes (2010) or South African education researchers Rogan and de Kock (2005), or UK psychologist Nollaig Frost (2009) we find the same terms, such as ‘structural’ or ‘performative’ narrative analysis, to have inconsistent or even contradictory meanings. Our solution has been to avoid choosing amongst the mid-range theorizing that these typologies represent. Instead, we situate NA research questions, concepts, and analytic strategies in relation to their ontological and epistemological underpinnings.

So, what is a narrative? We begin by defining stories or narratives, two terms we use interchangeably, as recountings of experiences that have taken place over time. Time is an essential element of narratives, whether we are thinking of talk about a specific period, such as this afternoon, about what has been continuous over time, such as our habit of having tea together, or about change, such as what happened after 9/11. Time matters because when narrators turn the vast complexity of their experiences into the stories that they tell, they are mustering what they now understand to be most important about what happened into a parsimonious sequence. To analyze a story is to analyze the consequences, the meanings explicit or implicit in it, to understand how narrators are answering questions such as: What is the essence of what happened? Was what happened ethical? Was it desirable – and by what system of values? Why did it happen? What caused things to differ from ‘the usual’? How did I understand it then? What does it mean for me, and others, now? What is to be learned?

We begin with a chapter on ‘broad strokes’ strategies of working with oral histories or life histories, using narratives to understand the past, or treating narratives as speaking to the perspectives of the present. The next chapter of ‘fine-grained’ narrative analysis strategies take a magnifying lens to stories and the surrounding text, drawing on literary and psychoanalytic perspectives. It is in Chapter 4, on interviewing, that we shift from thinking of stories as texts to thinking of them as told in the moment of the interview, jointly constructed by narrators and listeners who come to the interview from different social locations, and are caught up in each others’ presences as stories emerge. The interdisciplinary party that is narrative analysis smiles on all of these strategies, combining them freely, mixing grain and grape in a way that you will not see elsewhere in this book.