Cover not available
Article published In:
Studying Identity: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges
[Journal of Language and Politics 2:2] 2003
► pp. 243–264

Storying Self and Others

The construction of narrative identity

| University of Durham
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken among British Quakers this article attempts to elucidate some of the connections between the narrative quality of everyday interaction and the local construction of self. Focusing on the Quaker Meeting, we find that the social identity of individual participants is precipitated in the interplay between three modes of discourse: the prototypical or individual, the vernacular and the canonic. For individuals to participate successfully in Meeting they are required to present and then reconstruct their autobiographical selves in response to their increasing familiarisation both with well-known canonic texts and also the local expression of these texts. The tensions which characterise this process might be said to define the politics of community in this case.
Keywords: discourse, identity, narrative, quaker, self
Published online: 18 November 2003
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.2.2.04col
References (43)
References
Abu-Lughod, L. 1993. Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bruner, E.M. 1984. Dialogue, narration and the paradoxes of Masada. In: E.M. Bruner (ed.). Text, Play and Story. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press.Google Scholar
Bruner, E. M. (ed.). 1984. Text, Play and Story. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press.Google Scholar
Bruner, J. 1986. Actual Minds Possible Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard.Google Scholar
1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard.Google Scholar
1994. The “remembered” self. In: T. R. Sarbin (ed.). Narrative Psychology. New York: Praeger. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carrithers, M. B. 1992. Why Humans Have Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, A. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Collins, P. 1996. Auto/biography, narrative and the Quaker Meeting. Auto/biography 4(2/3), 27–38.Google Scholar
2002. Both independent and connected voices: Bakhtin among the Quakers. In: Nigel Rapport (ed.). British Subjects: An Anthropology of Britain. London: Berg, 281–98.Google Scholar
Cortazzi, M. 1993. Narrative Analysis. London: The Falmer Press.Google Scholar
Dandelion, P. 1996. A Sociological Analysis of the Theology of Quakers. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. 1976. Discipline and Punish. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Franzosi, R. 1998. Narrative analysis — or why (and how) sociologists should be interested in narrative. Annual Review of Sociology 241, 517–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
1988. Works and Lives. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Gluckman, M. 1963. Gossip and Scandal. Current Anthropology 41, 307–16. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Holstein, J. A. and J. F. Gubrium. 2000. The Self We Live By. Narrative Identity in a Post-modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hopewell, J. 1987. Congregation: Stories and Structures. London: SCM Press.Google Scholar
Hughes. E. C. 1942. The Sociological Eye. Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.Google Scholar
Labov, W. 1972. The transformation of experience in narrative syntax. In: W. Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 352–396.Google Scholar
Labov, W. and Waletsky, J. 1967. Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience. In: J. Helm (ed.). Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Seattle: American Ethnological Society: 12–44.Google Scholar
Linde, C. 1993. Life Stories: the creation of coherence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lyotard, J. 1986. The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge.Manchester:Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
MacIntyre, A. 1980. After Virtue. London: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Ochs, E. and L. Capps. 1996. Narrating the Self. Annual Review of Anthropology 251, 19–43. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ochs, E. 1997. Narrative. In T. A. van Dijk (ed.). Discourse as Structure and Process. Vol. 11. London: Sage, 185–207.Google Scholar
Ochs, E. and Capps, L. 2001. Living Narrative. Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Harvard University Press: Cambridge.Google Scholar
Quaker Faith and Practice. The Book of Discipline of the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain 1995. London: Britain Yearly Meeting.
Polkinghorne, D. E. 1988. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. New York: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Propp, V. 1968 [1928]. The Morphology of the Folk-Tale. Austin, Texas: University of Texas.Google Scholar
Rapport, N. J. 1993. Diverse World-views in an English Village. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Ricoeur, P. 1990. Oneself as Another. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Riessman, C. K. 1993. Narrative Analysis. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Sacks, H. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sarbin, T. R. 1989. The narrative as a root metaphor for psychology. In: T. R. Sarbin (ed.): Narrative Psychology. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Sarbin T. R. (ed.). 1989. Narrative Psychology. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Shotter, J. 1998. The dialogical nature of our inner lives. Philosophical Explorations 31, 185–200. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stringer, M. 1999. On the Perception of Worship. Birmingham: Birmingham University Press.Google Scholar
Van Maanen, J. 1988. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations (trans. G. E. M. Anscombe). London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cited by (11)

Cited by 11 other publications

Kirakosyan, Lyusyena
2021. Negotiating Multiple Identities of Brazilian Paralympians. Social Sciences 10:8 ► pp. 305 ff. DOI logo
Kirakosyan, Lyusyena
2021. Challenging Gender and Disability Stereotypes: Narrative Identities of Brazilian Female Paralympians. Disabilities 1:4 ► pp. 420 ff. DOI logo
Dunn, Cynthia Dickel
2014. “Then I Learned about Positive Thinking”: The Genre Structuring of Narratives of Self‐Transformation. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 24:2 ► pp. 133 ff. DOI logo
Brigham, Susan
2011. Internationally Educated Female Teachers' Transformative Lifelong Learning Experiences: Rethinking the Immigrant Experience through an Arts-Informed Group Process. Journal of Adult and Continuing Education 17:2 ► pp. 36 ff. DOI logo
Brigham, Susan M.
2011. Braided Stories and Bricolaged Symbols: Critical reflection and transformative learning theory for teachers. McGill Journal of Education 46:1 ► pp. 41 ff. DOI logo
Goulet, Jean-Guy A.
2011. Présentation. Anthropologie et Sociétés 35:3 ► pp. 9 ff. DOI logo
Goulet, Jean-Guy A.
2012. Trois manières d’être sur le terrain. Anthropologie et Sociétés 35:3 ► pp. 107 ff. DOI logo
Drew, Patricia
2008. Weight loss surgery patients’ negotiations of medicine's institutional logic. In Care for Major Health Problems and Population Health Concerns: Impacts on Patients, Providers and Policy [Research in the Sociology of Health Care, 26], ► pp. 65 ff. DOI logo
Drew, Patricia
2011. “But Then I Learned…”: Weight loss surgery patients negotiate surgery discourses. Social Science & Medicine 73:8 ► pp. 1230 ff. DOI logo
Gallinat, Anselma
2006. Difficult stories: Public discourse and narrative identity in Eastern Germany. Ethnos 71:3 ► pp. 343 ff. DOI logo
Gallinat, Anselma
2022. Actually existing post-socialism: Producing ideological others in eastern Germany. Critique of Anthropology 42:2 ► pp. 154 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.