Читать книгу Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences - Katherine Bischoping - Страница 26

Table 2.1

People are storytellers engaged in a search for meaning, their memories and constructions of their experiences intimately linked to the flows or eddies of time. Table 2.1 sums up the relation between how data is viewed, what typical data are, and the paradigm informing analysis. In broad strokes, if we think of time as flowing forward like a river, talk data can help realist analysts piece together the answer to the question ‘what happened?’ If we think of narratives as constructed in the present, but eddying into the future and back into the past, then we have many choices for how analysis of talk data can proceed. Each of these is profoundly humanist in its orientation, valuing the individual search for meaning and capacity to re-evaluate the past, rather than seeing these as impediments. Through talk data, we can aim to understand the present-day meanings of the past, and how and why communities and sub-communities may remember the past in ways that align with or be distinct from official histories. Alternately, we can analyze talk data to understand how individuals experience the course and stages of their lifetimes, in terms of how their agency is conditioned by various social structures and of how their lives are linked to those of others. Our final broad strokes analytic strategies take up how the self can be understood to have continuity, yet be able to change, through its narrative essence. The structure of a narrator’s story thus becomes a clue to the state of the narrator’s self.