A Narrative-Discursive
Approach to
Self and Identity
michael bamberg
Clark University
Department 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:
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•
•
•
•
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
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–
–
–
–
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 shortcomings
or 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 a
H.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