a narrative-discursive approach to self and identity michael bamberg clark university department of...
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A Narrative-Discursive Approach to
Self and Identity
michael bamberg
Clark UniversityDepartment of Psychology Worcester, MA, USA
What Is the Self?Mark Leary: Editorial in Self &Identity, 3 (1)
5 ways in which Self has been appropriated:• as a synonym for person• as a synonym for personality• self-as-knower• self-as-known• self as decision-maker and doer
Self as speaker/narrator - responding to the question: Who Are You?
Three Kinds of Narrative Approaches to the
Study of Self and Identity
• Life-Story Approaches• Life-Event Approaches• “Small” Stories
– Short narrative accounts– Embedded in every-day interactions– Unnoticed as ‘stories’ by the participants– Unnoticed as ‘narratives’ by researchers– But highly relevant for identity formation processes
Life-Stories + Life-Events
• Life-Stories– Dan McAdams (1993)
+ Gabi Rosenthal (1998)
– Elicitation Technique
– Analysis of lives
– Focus on coherence + health
• Life-Events– Most narrative research
– Elicitation is focused on particular events or experiences
– Analysis of focused area
– Meaning of event in one’s life
Merits of narrative ‘life research’life-history + life-event approaches
• Accentuates and brings to light lived experience • Forces participants to focus on the meaning of
THAT event in their lives• Accentuates the continuity of experience
• And sheds light on aspects that appear discontinuous
• Assumes a unified sense of personal identity -- against which ‘experience’ is constantly sorted out
potential shortcomingsor open questions
• How does this ‘unified sense of self’ come to existence?– How does the person ‘learn’ to “sort out”
events against what is called ‘life’?
• Overemphasis of stories about the ‘self’– Cutting out all those stories about others
• Overemphasis of ‘long’ stories– Cutting out everyday, “small” stories
why?
• Influences of ‘traditional’ psychological inquiry– Interests in selves + self-coherence
• Influences of traditional narratology – Work with texts (written texts)– Assuming authors as behind the texts– Assuming criteria of goodness for narratives
• Interviews as windows into selves
Narrative Dimensions(Ochs & Capps, 2001)
• Tellership• one active teller vs. many
• Tellability• high vs. low
• Embeddedness• detached from surrounding talk vs. situational embeddedness
• Moral stance• one moral message vs. different + conflicting messages
• Linearity & Temporality• closed temporal + causal order vs. open + spatial
with this in mind:
Let’s turn to SMALL stories• Characteristics of “small” stories
• Functions of “small” stories– in everyday conversations– in the process of identity formation– in learning to present ‘coherent’ selves
• What these small stories accomplish in everyday situations
Stories about others:the Davie Hogan story
Positioning with Davie Hogan. Stories, Tellings & Identities.
Chapter in: C. Daiute & C. Lightfoot (Eds.), Narrative analysis: Studying the development of individuals in society. London: Sage. (2003)
Topic: gay kids at school
J: actually I know a few of them I don’t know them but I’ve seen them
Ed how can you tell they’re gay
Alex yeah you can’t really tell
J: no like how do I know they’re gay
Ed yeah
J: well he’s an 11th grade student the kid I know I’m not gonna mention names
Ed alright who are they (raising both hands up)
J: okay um and I’m in a class with mostly 11th graders
Josh: and his name is (rising intonation)
• ah and and ah and um a girl who is umm very honest and nice she has she has a locker right next to him and she said he talked about how he is gay a lot when she’s there not with her like um so that’s how I know and he um associates with um a lot of girls not many boys a lot of the a few of the gay kids at Cassidy
QuickTime™ and aH.263 decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Pre-Story Negotiation +Fine Tuning
• Pre-Negotiations• “I don’t know them but I’ve seen them”
» Challenge: “how do you know?”
• “how do I know they’re gay?”• “he’s an 11th-grader” + “I’m in a class with 11th-graders”
• Fine-Tuning• Why does he claim not to “know” them (and only having “seen”
them)?• Why is his witness “honest” + “nice”• Why is she “a girl”?• Why is the gay boy not talking to her <that he is gay>?• Why is he ‘mentioning’ that the gay boy “associates with a lot of
girls” rather than boys?
Positioning
• Vis-à-vis his audience• I know about gays• I’m not “close to them” (= don’t get the wrong idea!!!)
• Vis-à-vis the master-narratives of heterosexuality + liberal discourse
• Gays as ‘others’ • Self as tolerant person
• Vis-à-vis a ‘sense of self’• Practicing/working toward/testing out a sense of “this is me”
Characteristics of “SMALL” stories
• Short• Conversationally Embedded + Negotiated
• before• during• after
• Fine tuned positioning strategies– fine-tuned vis-à-vis the audience– fine-tuned vis-à-vis dominant + counter narratives– multiple moral stances (testing out and experimenting with
identity projections)
• Low in tellability, linearity, temporality + causality
Functions of “SMALL” stories
• Practice in doing identity work• Continuous editing of experience
– Retelling of experience
– Re-tuning these tellings according to• different audiences
• Different master-narratives
• different (developing) senses of ‘who-I-am’
• Resulting in some sense of coherence• though one that is constantly reworked
conclusion
• So, rather than assuming the existence of identity + sense of self – and viewing narratives as reflections thereof, I am suggesting to study the emergence of a sense of self by way of exploring the SMALL stories people tell in their EVERYDAY interactions