Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

NARRATIVE

See also: Alterity, Consciousness, Culture, Qualitative and

Quantitative Methodologies, Science, The Unhomely, WorldMaking, World-View

NARRATIVE

Conveyed variously by way of language, image and gesture, human narratives are ubiquitous.They are to be found in myths, legends, fables, tales, novels, epics, histories, tragedies, dramas, comedies, mimes, paintings, films, photographs, stained-glass windows, comics, newspapers and conversations. Humans may be said to: dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, believe, doubt, plan, gossip, revise, remember, anticipate, learn, hope, despair, construct, criticize, hate and love by narrative (cf. Hardy 1968). Human beings, Roland Barthes concluded (1982:251–2), are ‘narrating animals’, since: ‘narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society…. [N]arrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.’

Notwithstanding this, narrative is one of a number of concepts which have gained prominence in anthropology primarily since the literary turn of the 1980s. Its study has accompanied an increasing appreciation within anthropology of the practice of ‘writing’ social reality, both by the subjects of anthropological study and by anthropologists themselves.

A definition of narrative

For a definition of narrative, one might turn to Kerby (1991:39): ‘Narrative can be conceived as the telling (in whatever medium, though especially language) of a series of temporal events so that a meaningful sequence is portrayed—the story or plot of the narrative’. A narrative account involves a sequence of two or more units of information (concerning happenings, mental states, people, or whatever) such that if the order of the sequence were changed, the meaning of the account would alter. It is this sequentiality which is used to differentiate narrative from various other forms of conveying and apprehending information about the world: from the general abstraction of ‘theory’, the momentariness of ‘feeling’, the simultaneity of ‘sensation’, the semantic vault of ‘metaphor’, and the elemental fixity of the ‘model’.

Narrative is also understood as giving onto a particular way in which the world is ordered and understood: temporally. Narrative is the form of human representation concerned with expressing coherence through time; it provides human lives with a sense of order and meaning within

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and across time. By describing an orderly developmental sequence of events (etc.) temporal expanses are made meaningful.

Thus, narrative can be said to transform the potential discord of humanly experienced time: the experience at once of fragmentation, contingency, randomness and endlessness. But more than this, narrative makes time an aspect of socio-cultural reality; time becomes human in being articulated within a narrative sequence. Time comes to have a certain texture, a way of its being humanly experienced, due to its being home to and punctuated by a certain flow and development of events.

Again, an eventful sequentiality is key. Narrative provides a way of temporally experiencing the world by the way it records and recounts, defines, frames, orders, structures, shapes, schematizes and connects events. A beginning, a middle and an end is a common structure for events to come to possess, then, and this unitary closure assists the transformation of an inchoate sense of formlessness in experience. Furthermore, ensuring sequentiality between events also assures human lives of direction and growth. At the least, as Barthes put it (1982), what is narrated is ‘hemmed in’.

The ubiquity of narrative

This makes of narrative a powerful tool, a means of eschewing the experience of fragmentation and of structuring the world over time; narrative is an instrument of doing as well as saying. Moreover, since narration presents an account of how the world is, it also represents a site of possible contest. For one narration of the world can be seen to repress or replace or otherwise obscure preceding or alternative ones. Perhaps it is the power of narrative to create temporal order coupled with the potential of narrative continually to offer new versions of that order which makes narrative so universally pervasive in human life.

Rendering experience in terms of narrative is seen as a meaningmaking activity which dominates much of human practice, and (as Barthes and Hardy have noted) as taking many forms. Besides those listed above, then, writers have made distinction between real and imaginary narratives: ‘histories’ as distinct from ‘novels’ (Nash 1994); also between more and less consciously written and finished narratives: histories, novels, biographies and autobiographies which we work-up to a polish as distinct from the less conscious narratives of everyday circumstance in which we live on an ongoing basis (Kerby 1991); and again between sacred and profane narratives: ritual re-enactments of mythic, stylized, conventional and communal events, in an allusive, dramatic, corporeal language, as distinct from mundane articulations of

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commonsensical reality which people tell one another and themselves by way of gossip (Crites 1971). In short, within the same narrative form (and with similar power and potential) can be found a plurality of types of ‘referential commitment’—epistemological, logical, make-believe, etc. ‘Writing’ narratives helps us to make sense of the world, but we can be aware of different kinds of possible relations between that narrated world and the actual one we live in, and maintain any number of relationships, intellectual and emotional, to the particular narratives we have made.

The argument is also made that the ubiquity of human narration, the human ‘readiness or predisposition to organize experience into a narrative form’ (Bruner 1990:45), tells us something significant about human consciousness. Consciousness can itself be seen as an incipient story, and narrative as the form of its own experiencing; past, present and future are the inexorable modalities of human experience. Our present consciousness absorbs the chronicle of memory and the scenario of anticipation into a layered narrative which guides and also absorbs our present actions; in the narrative of our consciousness, action and experience meet too.

We humans are temporal beings, in short, with our perceptions, understandings and identities embedded in an ongoing story. Our conscious lives constitute dramas in which our selves, our societies and our reference groups are central characters, characters whose significance we interpret even as we live out their stories: ‘[N]arratives are a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world, of experience, and ultimately of ourselves…. It is in and through various forms of narrative emplotment that our lives—…our very selves—attain meaning’ [Kerby 1991:3ff.]. This is a never-finished project, and our conscious lives are taken up with self-narrating, with continuously rewriting, erasing and developing the definitions of our own stories.

The socio-cultural derivation of narrative

If narrative mediates our conscious human experience as individual sentient beings, then further argument surrounds the question of whence such narrative derives. Is it primarily socio-cultural in origin or individual? Many commentators have plumped for the first option, emphasizing the way that extant narratives precede the birth of particular individuals and influence, if not cause, their coming to selfhood. The self arises out of signifying practices, the argument runs; contra Cartesian or Judaeo-Christian notions of autonomous mind or soul, the self does not exist prior to its being represented. Hence, the self is given content, is delineated and embodied, primarily in narrative

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constructions or stories. What we understand as individual persons are simply the result of ascribing ‘subject status’ or selfhood to those ‘sites of narration and expression’ which we call human bodies (cf. Kerby 1991).

In large part, this narrative history is self-mediated; the self is a reflexive being which comes into being through its own self-narrating. In other words, individuals become human persons by means of participating in a narrative history of themselves (and to the extent that they are seen to do so).We tell the story of our lives, from the point of view of a first-person narrator, and through this description and emplotment actually create our individuality. Through our telling, in a public language, our lives emerge into meaning and reality. Furthermore, our lives maintain their coherence only to the extent that we continue to narrate them. We understand ourselves and know ourselves insofar as we construct narratives of and for ourselves which develop over time, which possess internal coherence and accessibility: we must present our stories well to ourselves.

Of course, the sense that we have of our self-identities as continuous also depends on the story we tell ourselves, and can be seen to be ethnographically variable. Over and above the fluidity and mobility which narrative identity affords—the temporal dialectic which speaks to process and change in ways that more fixed ascriptions of identity, derived from structure or substance, do not (cf. Ricoeur 1996)—use of that fluid potential will vary. It might be that one lives in a series of fragmentary, discontinuous narratives and takes oneself to be a different character at different times (to have a multiple personality). And it might be that self-scrutiny and self-narration is more of a marginal concern; there are other stories with which one is more involved (collective ones, sacred ones) and only at rites of passage or at times of personal crisis does one turn one’s attention to the narrative of one’s particular life.

However concerned the individual is with the narrative of self, and however coherent the result, the above line of argument is assured that social and collective practices of narration are the source. The stories individuals tell of themselves are seen as being influenced by the vocabulary and grammar of the language in which they are expressed, by the broader cultural conventions of context, style and genre of expression, and by the other stories in circulation. In this way, individuals come to consciousness within a conventional narrational context, and within a narrational space which they are expected to occupy Indeed, even their self-narrating represents them becoming conscious of stories in which they have been narrated before their birth. Individual selves have been narrated from a third-person perspective long before they gain competence to narrate their own first-person ones. Hence

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individuals produce second-order stories of themselves which intersect with numerous preceding first-order ones. Indeed, even individuals’ most personal stories are but segments of other stories: parents’, kinsfolk’s, enemies’, strangers’.These other narratives set up expectations and constraints on an individual’s own; at least they contribute significantly to the material from which the latter narratives derive, and at most they cause an individual’s own narrative identity as such. As Barthes concludes (1982:293), drawn from ‘the centres of culture’, individual narratives amount to nothing but ‘a tissue of quotations’.

Within this line of argument, much anthropological work has gone into an examination of the narrative stock which a society or culture can be expected to possess (its classificatory forms and genres, its conventional structures and typical contents), the norms regarding its use, and the functional consequences of that use.Analogous to Propp’s (1968) analysis of the conventional morphology of the Russian folk-tale and Lévi-Strauss’s (1969b) analysis of South American myth, then, Labov (1972) identifies six elements of universal narrative structure: an abstract, an orientation, complicating action, an evaluation, a resolution and a coda. Barthes (1982) theorizes that all narrative contains different structural levels, specifically a horizontal plot-line in contradistinction to vertical points of punctuation into which alternative possibilities of character and action are slotted. In any particular socio-cultural setting, Greimas continues (1983), listeners will know not only the story presented to them but also reflect on the alternatives which were passed over. Any narration thereby alludes to much beyond itself—both sociocultural situations and other narratives. In fact there are four components which will be present in any narrating situation, Bruner suggests (1990): time or sequentiality, narrative voice or ‘agentivity’, narrative structure or canonicality, and point of view or perspectivity. It is in an operation of contextualization, Genette explicates (1980), by which relations between these components of the ‘narrating situation’ come to be fully elaborated, that a sufficient analysis derives. Indeed, as Georges concludes (1969), the content of the narrative, the performance, the listeners and the knowledge, the interpretive procedures and aesthetic mechanisms which they bring, the setting, the use of the narrative to persuade or to negotiate social relations, rights or whatever, all add up to one ‘storytelling event’.

The consequences of such events are seen to be that members of a society or culture come to share the same ways of organizing, presenting and remembering information, and so knowing the world.The narrative stock of a culture is thus seen as embodying what are socially recognized to be typical behaviour patterns. This will also involve assumptions for

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