Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Story
Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence by Charlotte Linde; Storied Lives: The Cultural
Politics of Self-Understanding by George C. Rosenwald; Richard L. Ochberg
Review by: Gelya Frank
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 145-148
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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ESSAYS 145
BOOKREVIEW
individual needs to have a coherent, acceptable, and constantly 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. Organizing the apparently idiographic narratives of ordinary conversation, 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 discontinuous 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 connections 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
146
1995
. VOL.97, NO. 1 . MARCH
ANTHROPOLOGIST
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ESSAYS
BOOKREVIEW
In Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self-Understanding, 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 representational 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 politicalcultural conditions "that have led to the circumscription
of discourse" (p. 2).
The first item is not unique to Rosenwald and Ochberg, but the rest of their agenda is fresh and provocative.
If the idea that lives are shaped by sociocultural opportunities 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 problematic:
The silences, truncations,and confusionsin stories as well as
the occasional outbreaksof action contradictingan individual's"official"narrative,point out to us-and to the narrator,
if only his or her recognitioncan be enlisted-what else might
be said and sought [p. 7]
Most of Rosenwald and Ochberg's contributors (including 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'sStory,"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
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148