Today’s program
• Part 2 of the series:
– Part 1: Metaphors
– Part 2: Stories
• Meaning generating devices. Devices that create
meaning. We construct realities and identities
• How stories give meaning to experiences and
mediate experience
• How stories tell us who we are (who we aren’t)
and function as the binding glue for social
identities
Stories are the essence of humans
• Telling stories is a human universal of discourse
• Stories generate meaning. We give our world and
personal/social life meaning by narrating
experiences through stories
• Stories are binders, connecters, carriers of culture
• Stories or narratives are discursive accounts of
factual events or fictional events that take place,
have taken place or will take place at a particular
time
Stories mediate experience
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8PBx7isoM&feature=player_embedded
• It is easy to relate to the stories of others.
Stories paint an experience, they carry images
and emotions.
What is your favorite story?
• Can you recall how the story goes?
• Can you recall the characters, the main event
in the story? What happens in the story?
• What is the moral of the story?
• Why do you like this story so much?
• And what does this say about yourself?
What is a story?
• A narrative with a certain specific syntactic
shape (e.g. beginning, middle and end or a
situation, transformation and a new situation)
• With a subject matter which allows for or
encourages the projection of human values
upon this material
• A story has a structure and this structure is
dynamic
What is a story? (2)
• Narratives can be verbal (spoken or written)
• Musical
• Mimed or pictorial
– E.g. in children's picture book, a painting or a
photograph can tell a story (mediate an
experience)
– Take a look at the stories these 3 pictures tells us
What is a story? (3)
• Narratives sometimes have many voices in a
single storytelling event
– E.g. recounting a family holiday may involve
several members presenting their versions of
events
Functions of storytelling
Among others:
• Carriers of information
• Device for self-presentation (who you are)
• Plain entertainment
• Connect people, they strengthen in-group ties and
position us from others (e.g. history, gossip, ideologies)
• They provide therapy (healing and connecting to others
in order to heal, counseling)
• Help with problem-solving
• Act as tool for socialization (ideologies and moral
agency)
Structure of narratives/stories (Labov)
Labov formulated the following structural
features of narratives, although it is clear that
some narratives don’t display all of the
following elements:
1. Abstract (a summary of what is to be said)
– E.g. ‘my brother put a knife in my head’
2. Orientation (‘this was just a few days after
my father died’)
Structure of narratives/stories (Labov)
3. Complicating action (‘I twisted his arm up
behind him…’)
4. Evaluation (‘ain’t that a bitch?’)
5. Result or resolution (‘after all that I gave the
dude the cigarette, after all that’)
6. Coda (‘and that was that’)
Communicative power of stories
• Stories are fundamental to the way we learn
and the way we communicate
• They are the most efficient way of storing,
retrieving, and conveying information
• Because hearing a story requires active
participation by the listener, stories are the
most profoundly social form of human
interaction and communication
Communicative power of stories (2)
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Stories empower a speaker
Stories create an environment
Stories bind and bond individuals
Stories engage our minds in active listening
Stories negotiate differences
Stories encode information
Stories are tools for thinking
Stories bring about healing
Stories serve as weapons (persuasion) (carriers of ideologies)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjYnT105qjc&
(the story behind a billboard)
Stories as carriers of ideologies
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq7XbKd3
21I
• Systems of ideas and believes can be
manifested and reproduced over and over
again in the form of stories
• Socialization of ideas and the moral agency
Stories are carriers of ideologies
Stories come in many forms thanks to
the evolution of media technology
• Spoken: In the early days of telling stories around the campfire after a day
of hunting and gathering, today we do pretty much the same thing at the
local bar after work.
• Written : As language developed, people started writing and delivering
letters and writing books by hand to distribute stories to other people.
• Theater: Storytelling eventually turns into an art form and a new approach
of live performance is developed which reaches larger audiences (e.g.
Shakespeare)
• Printing Press: A breakthrough in communication as the ability to
efficiently and cost-effectively distribute copies of stories allows everyone
to get news and ideas from a newspaper or magazine. (graphic design)
Stories come in many forms thanks to
the evolution of media technology (2)
• Radio: Transmitting news instantly and expanding live performances
and the art of storytelling. And let’s not forget what it’s done for the
creation and distribution of music.
• Movies :Live performances being filmed and shown to a wider
audience at the same time taking the art form even further as
technology in this area alone greatly advances. Part of which is
animation which also turns into its own art form.
• TV: Being able to watch something in the comfort of one’s home,
with more choice than ever before of what to watch. Also created a
new medium of interactive storytelling, video games.
• Internet: the Internet is changing communication and storytelling.
From easy communication through Email, to everyone being able to
publish their ideas with a Blog. It’s like the printing press with
limitless possibilities (all the above)
New media give storytelling new life
• The Future of Storytelling. A few years ago this
would have been a scene from a sci-fi movie,
The new possibilities that a new medium
(here: I-pad) can bring
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mfm9dw
LzdU&feature=player_embedded
Haiku: “The meaning of Life”
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uho0Wu4
_SH0&feature=player_embedded
• “She asked me about The meaning of life,
• Didn’t Know what to say
• --- blank ”
What is the Self?
WHO ARE YOU? WHO AM I?
• What is the different between these 2
questions?
• WHO ARE YOU (in the eyes of the other)
• WHO AM I (in my own eyes)
• Are these different selves?
Identities are socially produced
• Identity is a contested concept in terms of definitions
and approaches
• Social and collective approach to the development of
an identity (sociological approach to identity)
• The concept of identity hinges on the paradoxical
combination of sameness and difference. Two modes
of understanding. People are understood to be
simultaneously the same and different.
What is the ‘self’?
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Describe yourself, e.g.
In terms of ‘I am’ statements
What do I stand for?
What do I defend?
What am I not?
Identities are socially produced (2)
Sameness:
• Latin idem (same): identical: not only are we identical to ourselves (that is, the
same being from birth to death) but we are identical with others.
• We share common identities: as humans, women, men, Aruban, students etc.
Difference:
• The uniqueness of identities: difference from others. These boundaries makes us
unique
• “ people work with awareness that one’s humanity is simultaneously the same and
different (Jackson, 2002: 142).
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Within this overarching and apparently capacious category of the human, there
are various forms of identity with which people identify. Identity than involves:
identification.
– E.g. In identifying myself with a woman, I’m identifying myself with a wider
category, ‘woman’. But there are some properties of woman that I distance
myself from
Multiple identities: identity is dynamic
• Each individual is seen to have a repertoire of
‘identities’ open to them (social and personal)
• Each identity informing the individual of who
he is and what this identity entails.
• Which of these many identities is most salient
for an individual at any time will vary
according to the social context.
Social Self, Social identity
• Usually it includes social categories, group you
belong to and don’t belong to
• E.g. Gender, ethnicity, different social group,
ideologies you identify with etc.
• When we belong to a group, we are likely to
derive our sense of identity, at least in part, from
that group. We also enhance the sense of identity
by making comparisons with out-groups.
• Social identity is different from personal identity,
which is derived from personal characteristics
and individual relationships.
Approaching Identity through
narratives
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQZwZVBDAHI
Stories convey identity components
• People feel common ground through stories
(‘we share the same story’)
• Because stories require active listening,
people are able to share a depth of experience
otherwise not possible through normal chit
chat
• Stories can emphasize shades of meaning and
feeling revealing who you are, where you
come from and where do you belong
Let’s here some stories about who you
are…
• The stories we tell about ourselves, about our life are
rich in meaning
• Relationship between narratives and identity:
• You are engaged in processes of producing an identity
through assembling various memories, experiences,
episodes within a narrative
• Identities are made up through making a story out of
life
• Identities are being creatively produced through
various raw materials available:
• MEMORIES, UNDERSTANDINGS, EXPERIENCES and
INTERPRETATIONS
‘Emplotment’
• Narratives are composed of MEMORIES,
UNDERSTANDINGS, EXPERIENCES and
INTERPRETATIONS
• Narratives are composed of 3 main elements:
1. Characters
2. Action
3. Plot
• The plot is the central feature of narrative:
• The plot is what makes the narrative: it brings
together different episodes into a meaningful whole
• Events and episodes are not thrown together at
random, but are linked together
Narrator and audience
• Both narrator and audience will participate in
the processes of linking, this is called
emplotment
Emplotment is social embedded
• There is a shared culture understanding that
these events have a place in this narrative
• Shared symbols
– E.g. “I grew-up in the working class family’,
– “ My father fought for the Status-Aparte, he always
dreamed of an other Aruba”
– “ I always had to share what I had with my sisters,
material stuff were scare in those times”
• The narrative cannot stand alone but must refer
to and draw on wider cultural narratives
Shared meaning, stories are
embedded in relationships
Memories are mere interpretations
• In narrating a story social actors organize
events into episodes which make the plot,
they do this based on memories
• Memories are themselves interpretations,
they are social products
• Reconstructions.
• That part of the ‘mediation of experience’ that
sticks…
Memory is reconstructive
• “Memory is not like a video record. It does not need
images, and images are never enough, moreover our
memories shade and patch and combine and delete
[the best metaphor (analogy)to remembering is
storytelling”
• (…)“ We constitute our souls by making up our lives,
that is, by weaving stories about our past, by what we
call memories. The tales we tell of ourselves are not a
matter of recording what we have done and how we
have felt. They must mesh with the rest of the world
and with other peoples stories, at least in externals,
but their real role is the creation of a life, a character.”
(Hacking, 1995)
Self and other
• Breaking the line between the self and the other
• The story of the self, identity:
• A person enmeshed in and produced within webs of
social relationships
• Life stories must always incorporate the life stories of
others
• They will not be the same, they will always be part of
our own but others’ stories must always be part of our
own
• Shared Social framework of meaning: both to interpret,
produce our stories and to borrow stories in order to
make it our own from a rich source of stories
E.g. Stories have different voices and
angles. The story of war
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http://vimeo.com/13786605
http://vimeo.com/13787612
http://vimeo.com/13787881
http://vimeo.com/13764307
18 and Enlisted
Children Left Behind
PTSD Experience
all that lingers