Читать книгу Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences - Katherine Bischoping - Страница 14

Broadly different research questions and different ways of conceiving of time inform how we have divided this chapter into sections. We start off with the oral historian’s question: ‘What exactly happened?’ The strategies for answering all orient to time as though it were a river that flows clearly forward from a fixed, knowable past into the present. As we will explain, to believe that this question can make sense in the first place is to rely on positivist/realist paradigms.

Next, we take heed of how time can instead be conceived of as a river’s eddy. That is, from the standpoint of the storytelling present at the eddy’s center, narrators can be thought of as looking back upon their past experiences. What they see there informs how they gaze toward the future; likewise, what they today imagine or hope their futures will be whirls back to inform how they look back upon their pasts (see Ricoeur, 1984). With this conception of time, narratives do not track the ‘real’ course of the past, but instead speak to the perspectives of the present and to projections of the future. Exploring narratives in this way involves shifting – to various degrees – toward a constructionist paradigm for research, one that values the multiplicity of narrators’ possible subjective interpretations and meanings, and the processes by which they arrive at them. The three broad strokes strategies that we set forth use narratives to explore: present-day meanings of the past; the transitions, turning points, and interconnectedness of lives; and the relation of narrative to the self and its mutability over time.