anthropology and individual lives

Anthropology and Individual Lives: The Story of the Life History and the History of the LifeStoryLife Stories: The Creation of Coherence by Charlotte Linde; Storied Lives: The CulturalPolitics of Self-Understanding by George C. Rosenwald; Richard L. OchbergReview by: Gelya FrankAmerican Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 145-148Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/682393 .

Accessed: 17/12/2014 08:52

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Wiley and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to American Anthropologist.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 201.234.181.53 on Wed, 17 Dec 2014 08:52:30 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=anthro

http://www.jstor.org/stable/682393?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS 145

GELYA FRAK

University of Southern California

Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. Charlotte Linde. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xiv + 242 pp.

Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self-Under- standing. George C. Rosenwald and Richard L. Ochberg, eds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. ix + 304 pp.

Once upon a time, the life history method was an all-purpose tool in the anthropologist's kit, useful in pro- portion to its lack of specialization but not much good for disciplinary leverage. Through the 1980s and 1990s, many factors converged to push the lived experience of individuals into the academic spotlight. This repositioning of the individual in anthropological studies, along with a new interest in life stories, corresponds to the rapid transfor- mations of the poststructuralist world order. A healthy distrust has emerged of representing peoples, institutions, communities, and classes as coherent entities. Ethnogra- phies written from feminist standpoints and other critical positions now commonly argue that essentialized repre- sentations obscure members' diverse experiences, con- tested desires, and unequal resources. Thus a turn to the person-the only subject able to speak for itself-makes sense not only methodologically but perhaps for the first time ontologically and therefore theoretically.

At the same time, however, the critique that takes the coherence of groups to be a narrative construction is being extended to the coherence of individual identity. Life histories focused mostly on diachronic change within anthropology's traditional paradigm of naturalism or real- ism; research on life stories, on the other hand, focuses on the cultural scripts and narrative devices individuals use to make sense of experience. Life story research empha- sizes the truth of the telling versus telling the truth; it focuses on the strategies speakers use to fashion coherence from the disparate and potentially contradictory experiences of their lives. Such research tends to be even more phenomenological in method than life histories, presenting discrete speech acts situated in context as against narratives edited to resemble written autobiogra- phies.

Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence, by Charlotte Linde, is a paradigm-setting book, much like the works of sociologist Erving Goffman. Like Goffman, Linde presents not so much a grand theory of society as a penetrating and generative insight into a core constituent of social life: "In order to exist in the social world with a comfortable sense of being a good, socially proper, and stable person, an

individual needs to have a coherent, acceptable, and con- stantly revised life story" (p. 3).

Linde's contribution is founded on the work by her teacher, sociolinguist William Labov, concerning the structure of stories told about personal experience in conversations. His approach helped liberate narrative analysis from single-speaker, text-based models. Organiz- ing the apparently idiographic narratives of ordinary con- versation, Labov found shared cognitive structures, conventions, or rules-that is, plentiful evidence of culture and tradition. For example, a story as a discourse unit must include an evaluation of the sequence of events recounted or a "point" to the story.

In a brilliant move, Linde radically extends Labov's definition of story to the life story, which she defines as a special kind of discourse unit that is temporally discon- tinuous and that includes all the stories told by a speaker in which the point is about the speaker's self:

A life story consists of all the stories and associated discourse units, such as explanations and chronicles, and the connec- tions between them, told by an individual during the course of his/her lifetime that satisfy the following two criteria: 1. The stories and associated discourse units contained in the life stoiy have as their primary evaluation a point about the speaker, not a general point about the way the world is. 2. The stories and associated discourse units have extended reportability; that is, they are tellable and are told and retold over the course of a long period of time. [p. 21]

Linde's bold conceptualization of the life story sets up the formal problem of how a speaker creates narrative coherence between discrepant versions of his or her life story. In Linde's empirical data (narratives about occupational choice elicited from 13 American white middle- class professionals), the speakers strive to create coherence not only in relation to previous stories about themselves but to cultural assumptions about nature and the social order, especially concepts of "the self" and moral action. Since evaluation-or making a point-is a formal property of narratives, life stories necessarily al- low the speaker to reflect upon whether his or her self is (or was) good and proper. And because of narrative's inherent property of reflexivity and distancing, Linde ob- serves, "Confession may be good for the soul, but it is also excellent for the self-image" (p. 124).

Managing causality, Linde argues, is the major task in creating a coherent life story. In part the problem of causality is formal, due to the linear temporal structure inherent in Western narrative structure ("I dropped the iron and burnt myself" means something different from "I burnt myself and dropped the iron"). Linde finds that

Anthropology and Individual Lives: The Story of the Life History and the History of the Life Story



146 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST . VOL. 97, NO. 1 . MARCH 1995

character traits serve as the most adequate reason for her speakers' career decisions: "I was good at it, I like that sort of thing" requires no further explanation. However, "I was in love with a girl who was enrolled in pre-med, so I decided to become a doctor" would constitute an inadequate reason for the choice of a career. Richness of account also provides strong coherence-that is, the use of multiple but noncontradictory reasons that give temporal depth to a career choice.

Linde's treatment of speakers' problems in managing inadequate causality is the culmination of her analysis of coherence within the discourse unit. She discusses two types of incoherence: accident and discontinuity, both of which seem to impute a deficiency in intention or agency to the speaker. Linde finds that speakers manage acci- dents by such strategies as showing that the accident was only apparent, not real (that the career choice was otherwise proper or well motivated), or by distancing themselves from their earlier selves. Discontinuity between professions, another serious threat to coherence, is man- aged by similar strategies: the discontinuity is only apparent, only temporary, part of a larger chain of causal events, or (as in the following account by a professor of sociol- ogy) the result of choices made by a younger and different self:

Um I thought, as one, as adolescents without talent are prone to do, of the performing arts in various ways. Uh I was in theater for a while in high school and college and I was an actress through college and had fantasies about making that a life which were of course unrealistic. [p. 157]

It is when Linde gets into the area of common-sense beliefs concerning the self as agent that her work is most fascinating, but it also calls for systematic research and analysis far beyond that allowed by her own data. Linde argues, for example, that narratives of occupational choice have less reference to the moral self for the working class than for professionals (professionals are sup- posed to have a calling, while people in the working class are expected to work at the job that offers the best pay). She also cites Labov, who found that for working-class speakers luck or destiny seems to serve more commonly as an explanation for events than it does for middle-class speakers. As Linde herself points out: "This area merits a great deal of further research: whether indeed there are such class differences, how these differences relate to particular class positions and class histories, how narratives in cross-class interactions are formulated, and so on" (p. 129).

The two concluding chapters of Linde's book deal even more directly with belief systems or culture in the traditional anthropological sense. In chapter 6, Linde in- troduces a new concept, "coherence system," as a level of analysis above the discourse unit in the construction of causality. She defines the coherence system as "a system

of beliefs and relations between beliefs" that "provides the environment in which one statement may or may not be taken as a cause of another statement" p. 163. As semi- expert systems of beliefs more coherent than common sense, they are able to provide people with a vocabulary for creating a self. The following account, for example, is coherent only in the context of beliefs that the self is split into conflicting component parts, that real causes are found in childhood experiences, and that there are levels of personality, some of which are deeper than others. Popular Freudian psychology here provides a coherence system that corrects for the otherwise unacceptable moral evaluation of the account (that the speaker was not in control of her actions and had made a bad decision):

So I didn't really make much of a decision there. I think that's one way of looking at it I made a decision. It was the decision that I didn't like at the time, so that's why I have the sense that I was forced into it, but there are all kinds of psychological things that make you do things at various moments in your life. [p.167]

In chapter 7, Linde attempts to link her data on narratives of occupational choice to the history of Ameri- can beliefs about positive thinking, individual will, and prosperity as the just reward for hard work. Here she deals with the often-noted phenomenon of "ontological individualism" (p. 200) in American culture, the unre- flected-upon attitude that the individual is the only or main form of reality. In the final chapter, Linde makes clear that her analysis means to deal only with discourse as a linguistic object, exclusive of events and practices. She admits that linguistic analyses, when they deal with power relations, do not link local speech acts to larger- scale power relations. Indeed, Linde found that the middle-class white narrators in her study did not commonly refer to social and political causes in their personal accounts of career choice. Finally, Linde calls for linguists to historicize the investigation of discourses, as against the exclusively synchronic approach of discourse analysis to date.

Linde uses liberal doses of deductive reasoning and a somewhat idiosyncratic mix of relevant literatures to ground aspects of her argument that go beyond her lim- ited set of data. Many anthropologists will feel that Linde's cultural analyses lack enough empirical data and context to support her claims. (Cognitive anthropologists and linguists may be more sympathetic.) Much research will be needed to evaluate and elaborate upon the applicability of Linde's theories and findings to the life stories of diverse ethnic groups and subcultures within American society, members of societies outside the Anglo-American linguistic sphere, and especially, particular individuals over time. The effort will be worth it: Linde's clear reasoning, provocative arguments, and brilliant insights make her book a major contribution.



BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS 147

In Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self-Under- standing, a collection of superb essays by psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, George C. Rosenwald and Richard L. Ochberg attempt to push the research agenda for life stories beyond the formal coherence of narratives in order to relate narrative coherence to social practice. They offer a critique of life stories that attempts to overcome the kind of"ontological individualism" noted by Linde in her analysis of the life stories of middle-class white American professionals. In their introduction, Rosenwald and Ochberg use critical theory to advance an intriguing argument (1) that narratives are not repre- sentational but formative of identity; (2) that the self-formative power of personal narrative may be constrained or stunted, so that life stories may be improved; and (3) that it is possible to enlarge the range of personal narrative to make individuals and communities aware of the political- cultural conditions "that have led to the circumscription of discourse" (p. 2).

The first item is not unique to Rosenwald and Och- berg, but the rest of their agenda is fresh and provocative. If the idea that lives are shaped by sociocultural opportu- nities and constraints is not new, the idea that life stories are shaped by them is. For Rosenwald and Ochberg, this view allows the evaluation not only of social conditions, but of life stories as "good" or "bad" (or "better" or

"worse"). Though the life story may "work" for the individual, discourse "mediates between the fate of the individual and the larger order of things" (p. 2). Rosenwald and Ochberg assert that it is possible and necessary to listen critically to life stories for "the reasons and costs of stories' disfigurement" (p. 6, emphasis added).

Specifically, Rosenwald and Ochberg reject the view that all life stories stand equally as instantiations of the specific culture in which they were shaped. They propose hearing life stories as conflicted outcomes of the struggle between consciousness and repression, between individual desire and social adaptation. Judging what makes for "better" stories (and, by extension, "better" discourses and "better" social practices) is thus a central problem- atic:

The silences, truncations, and confusions in stories as well as the occasional outbreaks of action contradicting an individual's "official" narrative, point out to us-and to the narrator, if only his or her recognition can be enlisted-what else might be said and sought [p. 7]

Most of Rosenwald and Ochberg's contributors (in- cluding anthropologists Ruth Behar, Susan Harding, and Judith Modell) write without reference, however, to the editors' critical theory agenda. In "Work, Identity, and Narrative: An Artist-Craftsman's Story," Elliot G. Mishler's innovative method for analyzing decision nodes in the formation of an occupational identity is a sophisticated cognitive model (and one that begs to be read carefully in

relation to Linde's work on narratives of occupational choice). In "In The Name of the Father," Stanley D. Rosen- berg, Harriet J. Rosenberg, and Michael P. Farrell take a Lacanian point of view to explore domination by the father and by the paternal principle in the narratives and life histories of a conventional, middle-class American family. The essay is equally compelling in demonstrating how coherence work is done by members of a family as an organized social unit.

In "Life Stories: Pieces of a Dream," Mary Gergen goes beyond her previous important work on the narrative substructures of life stories as tragedy, romance, or com- edy to offer a gender analysis of popular American auto- biographies (such as those of Lee Iacocca and Beverly Sills), suggesting that men portray themselves in terms of heroic action and women in terms of relationships. Ger- gen writes in a Bernaminesque style, interposing quotes with text, but missing is a critical discussion of the problem of characterizing the language used by men and women apart from specific contexts of power. In "The Afterlife of Stories: Genesis of a Man of God," Harding presents an exegesis of Christian narrative conventions used by a fundamentalist minister who sought to convert the researcher through his shocking personal confession. It would be hard to suggest how Reverend Cantrell, whom Harding calls a master storyteller, could tell his story better; Harding does not try.

In the essay where an author most explicitly evaluates his narrators' life stories, the result is uncomfortable. In "African-Americans and the Pursuit of Wider Identities: Self-Other Understandings in Black Female Narratives," Aaron David Gresson presents accounts by two black women, both of whom had had children with white men but were disappointed and hurt by their racism. Gresson makes negative examples of the women themselves for what he characterizes as a betrayal of the race:

Marcia and Janice ... want to go beyond the constraints of traditional African-American unity by becoming intimate with white men, but they continue to ask for the support of traditional African-American unity. When their rationales for breaking with the traditional expectations are compromised by their need to remain attached to the race, they come face-to-face with their paradoxical predicament. I begin with a brief introduction of the women and follow with an exposi- tion of the form the contradiction and the rationalization takes in each case. [p. 167]

Rosenwald and Ochberg could use critical theory to question Gresson's essentialization and valorization of "tradition,"a notion he appears to deploy to keep black women in line. What is "traditional African-American unity"? Who defines it? The women's narratives give evidence that their biracial children were rejected in the African-American community only by certain black men who were potential mates. By repeatedly pointing out the failure of Marcia and Janice to "understand" their situ-



148 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 97, NO. 1 . MARCH 1995

for her. The essay suggests that evaluating life stories works best when liberation is defmed in terms of the narrator's own process of wresting power away from social authority. Ochberg's own essay, "Social Insight and Psychological Liberation," makes this point beautifully. I doubt whether life stories can be evaluated properly (be related to praxis) if they are overly textualized-that is, taken from the context of ongoing lived experience or the ongoing dialogue with the interpreter, in which the narrator retains the power to refme or respond to ideas of what would make a "better" story. After all, false consciousness is so much easier to spot in someone else.

The quest for better life stories, which Rosenwald and Ochberg propose, is the attempt to use life stories to think critically about the selves and society they help us to construct. This research agenda offers us a path away from an empty formalism that might reduce individual lives to mere data for the sake of the social science industry. However, such an agenda requires greater pow- ers of collaboration than are typically at hand if we are to avoid creating new hierarchies of judgmentalism. It will take some time to integrate and exhaust the study of coherence in life stories that is foundational to the project. And it will take effort to integrate the possibly fragment- ing tendencies of discourse about individual lives into social theory and more workable practices of social exist- ence. m

ation, Gresson sets up the myth that there is one holy, orthodox, heterosexist strategy for black women to deal with the painful realities of racism in America. In doing so, he obliterates the truth of these women's experiences of identity formation and their contributions to social process.

As a white and female reviewer, I must note my discomfort in singling out a black male's contribution for such negative comment. But my feeling signals a problem with Rosenwald and Ochberg's otherwise impressive collection, because they wish to link critical theory with narrative and praxis. Gresson's essay was the only one in this volume with an identifiably nonwhite author or narrator. Had Rosenwald and Ochberg included two or three more essays by or about African-American men and women, they would have made the struggle easier for me and for Gresson.

In "Karen: The Transforming Story," on the other hand, Jacquelyn Wiersma evaluates the life story of a woman who, in a series of interviews, clarifies her choice to pursue a doctoral degree rather than motherhood. Using a model of interaction that is basically psychothera- peutic, Wiersma is careful to keep her analysis on the level of the story, not the person. ("Can a bad story become good?" does not slip into "Can a bad girl become good?") Also, Wiersma does consider the usefulness of Karen's story to her as a matter of primary importance and uses Karen's own terms as a guide to how well the story works



anthropology and individual lives

Documents