Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Making sense of Life History Data: The shifting ground of
interpretation
Molly AndrewsCentre for Narrative Research
University of East LondonLondon, England
Molly AndrewsCentre for Narrative ResearchUniversity of East LondonLondon, [email protected]
Understanding life backwards: The shifting ground of interpretation
Human reality is always the reality of interpretation
“All interpretations are provisional; they are made by positioned subjects who are prepared to know certain things and not others… analyses are always incomplete”
Renato Rosaldo (1989) Culture and Truth
“…when you look back, you see the path or paths that you've taken. The path would obviously not be so clear when you're groping up and finding it, would it? I mean it's rather like going up a mountain, you're sort of looking that way and that track and it looks too steep and you're going round another one. Whereas when you're high up you can look back and see and it sort of stands out much more clearly, things you didn't realize at the time.”
Elisabeth
Multiple perspectives on our work
It is not a coincidence that the first time I returned to this set of data after more than a decade was to explore how respondents recalled their early childhood. My two small children have enriched my life – and challenged me - in many ways, but it was an unexpected gift that my relationship with them would afford me a new perspective into conversations I had had long before they were born. What I saw, and perhaps wanted to see, in the four cases I presented in my paper, gives me personally, as a mother, hope for my children; despite how imperfect we may parent, they – and we, as adult children – still have within them the ability to overcome whatever blows we may deal them, however inadvertently. The accounts of the narrators serve as an antidote to the stories of those adults who continue to see their parents as the ultimate arbitrators of the individuals they have become. We can shape our lives, but not in circumstances of our own choosing
Which interpretation is ‘right’?
There is no a priori privileged moment in time in which we can gain a deeper, more profound, truer insight than in any other moment. A secondary analysis can offer more, but it also can offer less than a third or even the first analysis…
Jens Brockmeier
The now all-knowing self: ‘I was blind but now I see’
There is never a single authorised meaning…
Catherine Riessman
…we are never in the moment of gathering data, and …we are always in the moment of gathering data… The observing, analyzing, and narrating “I” always remains an unstable, provisional, and troubled vantage point… [Moreover] every “secondary analysis” can be (and in real life, is) the subject of another “secondary analysis… we don’t have any independent criterion to judge an autobiographical story as final and conclusive… all “data” only live and breathe in the present, a present which they are delivering themselves.
Jens Brockmeier
Whose story is it, anyway?
“I attempt to free Don Quixote from Cervantes himself, permitting myself on occasion to go so far as to disagree with the manner in which Cervantes understood and dealt with his two heroes…
Miguel del Unamuno
History, time and personal narrative
We come to see and understand the world, and our experiences within it, in new ways not only because we have changed, but because the world has changed too. Indeed, psychological transformation and political change are often closely connected.
Making the social world hold still for its portrait can seem like gross violence, reducing its mutable flow to frozen moments preserved in the hoarfrost of realist description.
Les Back (2007)
...we are conscious of time and of our location within time. Humans have, and know they have, a past, a present, and a future… Precisely because human beings are conscious of time they can conceive causes and effects, and thereby act with intention upon the world… Humans can know that they have been different in the past… that they may become different in the future, and that these changes reflect transforming action by humans upon their world
Paulo Friere
The person I might have been had history been different
“I spent fifty years of my life on the wrong horse... [socialism] doesn't work the way I thought it would work, you see, it doesn't work, that's why I say I put myself on the wrong horse…. [To herself] you have wasted, absolutely wasted your whole life, fifty years of your life you could have done all sorts of things ...”
Patriotism in pre-9/11 USA
I feel now when I look back on the research I conducted in Colorado Springs that it contains far more than I could ever have realized at the time. I am overcome by a seemingly contradictory set of reactions. On the one hand, the project is marked by the absence of 9/11, an innocence of events and their fall-out which were still to happen; on the other hand, the arguments made at the anti-war vigil and at the anti- anti-war vigil mirror those which would dominate our post 9/11 world
Time and autobiographical narrative
… life must be understood backwards. But … it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time simply because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting place from which to understand it – backwards.
Sǿren Kierkegaard
Back to the future?
I looked at [my would-be narrative] through future eyes and it appeared to me as a touching and wonderful story that I had lived for all mankind.... I chose as my future the past of a great immortal and I tried to live backwards. I became completely posthumous.Jean Paul Sartre
Historical changes, as well as changes in our individual life circumstances, provide us with opportunities to see new layers of meaning in our data. This is evidence of the resilience and vitality of narrative data, as we explore the world within and around us.
