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

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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