Narrative introduction free essay sample

Abstract: In the first part of this paper, we will introduce the theoretical framework for analyzing autobiographical narratives as it has been developed by the German sociologists Fritz Schutze and Gabriele Rosenthal3, and later has been adapted by Koleva, Popova and others. 4 In the second part we will use this methodology to analyze empirical data that have been collected as part of our MICROCON study on ethnic identity and the risk of inter-ethnic conflict in Bulgaria. We focus on the question of how people belonging to the group of â€Å"ethnic Turks† in Bulgaria define their ethnicity, between the competing contexts of the past (in the form of their experience) and the present (in the form of what they remember and how they reactualize it in their biographical narratives). The paper is based on the analysis of two (out of a sample of 120) narrative autobiographic interviews. 1 Research Associate, Department of Sociology of Religions and Everyday Life, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences; Assistant Professor in Theory of Religion, Department for History and Theory of Culture, Sofia University. Email: [emailprotected] com. 2 Project Coordinator, DVV International, Sofia. Email: [emailprotected] de. 3 Schutze [year not indicated]: Biography Analysis on the (full title see the bibliographical notes at the end of this paper). 4 Koleva 1999, Koleva 2002, Koleva 2007, Krasteva 1998, Popova 1994. 1 1. Autobiographical data as a source for sociological studies Analyzing autobiographical data became part of the methodological tool-box of sociologists especially from the late 1970s on. 5 An interesting subject (not only) for sociologists is the ways in which individuals deal with their life experience. Dealing with life experience typically includes three steps: 1) the experience itself 2) memory, 3) and the act of re-arranging experience and memory into something new: a diary, a picture, a movie, a novel, etc. Particularly interesting in this context are autobiographical narratives. 1. 1. Biographical Gestalt and biographical whole In telling their life history from their own perspective (and possibly without being interrupted by questions or being preliminarily restricted to a certain part of their life) people can, in a spontaneous way, form narratives which are self-sufficient, or, in other words, are in a specific way integral (although, of course, they always consist of selected events, and never can deliver a full report). Such a self-sufficient reconstruction of a life history is constitutive of the current identity of the respondent (the person who tells his or her life story) and his or her place in society. We call this a biographical Gestalt. For interpreting the elements of biographical Gestalt, Schutze (and others) have developed a methodology which will be outlined below. Following Schutze’s terminology, the researcher interpreting a biographical Gestalt creates a biographical whole [German: biographische Gesamtformung]. This is in order to differentiate between what the respondent has produced (the biographical Gestalt), and what the researcher derives from it (biographical whole). In order to come to a biographical whole, the researcher first describes the chronology of the respondent’s life. Second he produces a structural description of contents (â€Å"strukturelle inhaltliche Beschreibung†) which means, he analyzes what topics are particularly important for the respondent, which ones he or she mentions with less emphasis or casually, and which ones he or she does not mention at all. As a last step, the researcher compares all elements which have been found in the narrative and shows what are the dominating structures, beginning with the past, and step by step approaching the present (c. f. Schutze 1983: 288). 1. 2. The present as the leading temporary structure for the past In his narrative, the autobiographer actualizes his interpretation of the past (Koleva 2007: 11-13). His life experience is a specific form of knowledge, accessible only 5 See Koleva 1999: 7-30; Zeleva 2006: 193; Dzamdzieva 2008: 49-52; Eliot 2005: 22-27; Bryman 2008. 2 through remembering. Orienting the remembering of the past (and forming the narrative), however, is the present, with its markers for success/failure, normality/deviation etc. Hence the present becomes the dominating order for restructuring the past. (This includes also expectations for the future, since they have their own impact on how the individual acts in the present. ) Forming a holistic autobiographic narrative (a biographical Gestalt) does not mean just linking a number of events one to each other. The biographical narrative is not (solely) directed towards the past. Also, it is not – as another common misconception would hold – the mere result of present circumstances influencing the individual. Rather the autobiographic narrative should be seen as an attempt (and ability) of the individual to re-contextualize the past (and past events), including the various social roles the individual once had, and currently has. (Alheit 1997: 944). An individual who lives in multiple social worlds has to act in various roles, and has nevertheless to preserve his or her identity. Re-interpreting one’s own biography is an opportunity to internalize new approaches to one’s life. This opens the door for new ways to act and make plans. Such a re-actualizing of events (relevant for the individual), may lead to restructuring (partly, totally, or with respect to a certain situation) the selfconceptualisation of the individual, and the way in which it positions itself in the world. It may even lead to a shift of personality. In other words, a biographical Gestalt is not so much a constant and deliberately constructed entity. Rather it is an act of dynamically linking of three strata: the sedimented experience of events, the remembering of events, and their reproduction in form of a life history narrative. (Rosenthal 1995: 20). We could call this linking of the three elements a linking of temporary layers. 6 1. 3. Remembering as a selective activity For the purpose of interpreting biographic data, we propose that remembering is a process composed of several steps (Rosenthal 1995). The construction of an autobiographical narrative (i. e. creating a Gestalt) starts from reflective remembering. Remembering the past (in form of circumstances and events) in the course of an autobiographical narrative includes, as a rule, various types of transformations such as blending experience and emotions, aggregation of diverse ideas into a unified order, and suppression / selection / interpretation of events. Hence one might be sceptical about the â€Å"objectivity† of an autobiographical narrative. However, those transformations can help us uncover the motives which shape the process of creating the autobiographical self-construction. An autobiographical statement will be meaningful for the researcher not so much because of the factual information it offers. More important is how the respondent (who tells us the story of his life) forms a consistent, holistic narrative by selecting and (re-)arranging various remembered 6 Schutze, in his English papers, uses temporary structures, or temporary structures of the biographical storytelling. 3 events or circumstances of his life, which then appear as sequences in the narrative (Bohnsack, Marotzki, Meuser 2006: 17). The act of creating the narrative may be called a biographical action. A biographical action uses time frames (meaning: for any given element of his life story, the respondent himself decides what he sees as the starting point and the end point7), and it is shaped by the decision of the autobiographer to preserve, uncover or neglect spaces of action (physical places where his actions took place) and life options (opportunities to choose between one or another way to act). In his biographical action (which is, in plain words, the act of telling one’s life) the individual uses both his (or her) experience and expectations. Thus, the autobiographer develops a specific attitude towards the flow of events in his life. It is exactly this concept of an attitude, which made Schutze introduce the notion of biographical action schemes (Schutze 1984). (On biographical action schemes, see below). 2. A model for interpreting biographical narratives 2. 1. Biographical process structures From Schutze’s perspective, the key elements of biographical narratives are biographical process structures [German: Prozesstrukturen]. Schutze identifies exactly four different types: a) institutional expectation patterns b) biographical action schemes c) trajectories of suffering and d) creative metamorphoses of biographical identity (Schutze 1982: 67). They are four basic models of how people, when forming their biographical Gestalt, arrange and interpret the elements of their narrative. In what follows we will briefly discus the four types of biographical process structures. a) Institutional expectation patterns The phases of a life cycle are usually predetermined by a dominating cultural model which ties the life of the individual to certain (societal) institutions. This model generates expectations what phases a life cycle should have, and what would be â€Å"success† or â€Å"failure† of a given phase. Such phases may be school education, military service, starting a family, upbringing of children and professional career. (And we find exactly such phases in the two interviews which will be analysed later in this article. ) They are legitimized (and regulated) through institutions such as school, army, family, or economy. They are marked by rituals of transition. So-called conflicts of expectation may appear when the standard path of personal development is obstructed, for example through unemployment, health problems, or political 7 For example, when talking about emigration to another country, the respondent himself decides whether the living conditions in his home country are part of this process or not. 4 restrictions. Conflicts of expectation are discrepancies between the moral concepts of the individual, and reality. The individual (the respondent) typically believes that his cognitive and emotional orientation is similarly valid for those with whom he interacts. This expectation should be seen as another dimension of institutional expectation patterns. 8 Social groups constitute themselves through historical events which have (or are believed to have) common biographical relevance to all members of the group. This mechanism allows us to typologize individual biographies by finding such common elements (Nohl 2005). Starting from a detailed description of the processes in question (or in other words: the events in which the respondent took part, with special respect to their singularity), we try to isolate their common characteristics and thus to understand their inner structure (Bohnsack, Marotzki, Meuser 2006: 47; Schutze 2006: 161). b) Biographical action scheme In an autobiographical narrative, biographical action schemes describe an individual’s purposeful long term activities. An example for such a long term activity might be the concept of a vocational career, starting with apprenticeship, continuing with some 30 years of work and ending with retirement. Through biographical action schemes the individual is able to actively control his or her life. A biographical action scheme includes four elements: defining an objective; choosing the means to reach it; decision to implement the scheme; and implementation. Further characteristics of biographical action schemes are: 1) They are interactive: they are oriented towards the partners of social interaction (by anticipating their expectations) and thus may play a role in adjusting the selfdefinition of a person. 2) They have a specific assessment structure. For example, an event or activity, which did not seem particularly important at the time it occurred, may appear in the autobiographical narrative as a key event with particular meaning either for life before, or life after. 3) Their implementation follows a specific structure. For example, in the case of emigrants this would be something like: preparing the obligatory documents, selling the house and other real estate, organising the travel, etc. , good-byes with friends and colleagues, arriving in the new country, adapting oneself to the socio-cultural environment, organising one’s everyday life and setting up new social networks. 4) The individual evaluates the results of the biographical action scheme and tries to legitimize it. For example, this may be done by emphasizing one’s improved social or financial status and by presenting this as a consequence of following the action scheme. (Schutze 1982: 70-85). 8 On the link between the life cycle and normativity of societal expectations see Koleva 2002. 5 5) Biographical action schemes are not monologues: Their meaning becomes clear when we reconstruct the structures of the family, the group or the organisation which the respondent of an interview used to belong to. (Rosenthal 2005: 195). c) Trajectories of suffering Schutze believes that life time is an important dimension for the social activities of the individual, since a person’s identity changes in the course of life. Changes in the patterns of his activities appear when the individual is exposed to processes which alienate him (or her) from the institutional expectation patterns so that there appear discrepancies between expectations, implementation plans and the factual development of life (Schutze 1982: 89, 145). However, there are also events and processes which disturb the order of everyday life without leading to immediate action. 9 One such process is suffering. Suffering remains undisclosed in the sphere of individual experience of a person, grows into a general emotional disposition (or mood) and thus accelerates the transformation of identity. (An extreme form would be the complete disintegration of a person’s ability to act. ) It is characteristic for trajectories of suffering that in a given situation a person’s psycho-social resources become ineffective. This restricts his (or her) ability to act or react. In the case of suffering, the individual abandons the purposeful form of experience and activity (which is constitutive for social action) for a conditioned behaviour (â€Å"conditioned† meaning here that the individual is exposed to external influences beyond his or her control) (Schutze 1983: 288). These may make the individual restructure his or her basic attitudes and his or her ways of managing everyday life. In other words: Negative events means: the room for social action is restricted, and social competencies are reduced. Positive events means the opposite: there is more place for social action, and new and better social positions can be achieved (Schutze 1982: 90). Trajectories of suffering are an interesting object for the sociologist as far as they have an impact on the collective attitude and the social understanding of what is order (or rightfulness), and thus are able to contribute to the emergence of social tension or even conflict, respectively conflict between ethnic or other groups in society, or societal strata. What Schutze calls trajectories of suffering, is described in Rosenthal (1997, 2003) as traumatic experience. According to Rosenthal, traumatic experience can be found for example when respondents talk emotionally about dramatical situation, or when they mention them only fragmentially 9 An example would be the change of names which was forced upon the Bulgarian Turks during the 1980s. The victims – in fact the entire population of Bulgarian Turks – endured this without a considerable reaction. Years later, however, they left Bulgaria, in a sudden mass exodus. These events are one of the key topics of the case studies which are presented below. 6 switch between different time lines (present, past, etc. ), (which can be confusing for the interviewer) ignore violent episodes in the past describe other people’s traumatic experience (and avoid talking about their own) speak in a lot of detail about single traumatic experiences avoid â€Å"dangerous† topics by dwelling on topics or events of secondary importance. d) Creative metamorphoses of biographical identity A biographical narrative is composed with regard to both the structures which used to determine the flow of life in the past, and the structures which determine the flow of life at present (Schutze 1982: 104). Through the biographical Gestalt the individual stabilizes itself and its identity; the biographical Gestalt is a kind of self-assertion of the individual. For creating it, the individual uses its basic resources (for example his or her creativity, or just material assets which are available such as a house, a vocation, commodities), basic skills and dispositions (which he or she tends to fulfil, as a result of origin or identity; example are a disposition to have children, to travel, or to create beautiful things), basic attitudes (ways to look at matters of everyday life), and basic strategies of how to act. If one of these is changed, this may cause a collapse of the hitherto dominating life structures. 10 This may result in shifting the perspective from which the individual constructs its biographical Gestalt. Such a re-grouping of the layers of memory and of the basic biographical Gestalt may trigger self-deception (illusion) and ideologization. In cases when the alteration of the biographical Gestalt is painful, we find a tendency to (self-) disguising autobiographical narratives. This may occur in various ways. Memory can be complemented by imagination; the respondent can choose to not express every detail which he remembers at the moment when he tells his story; he (or she) can add elements which are not part of a concrete memory of the past, pieces of memory from other experiences, or arguments taken from other people’s narratives (Rosenthal 1995: 90). 2. 2. Generating the data: the narrative biographical interview The methodology of interpreting autobiographical narratives as we employ it in our study has been described in detail by Schutze and Rosenthal. 11 It is based on autobiographic narrative interviews which are recorded in a situation of an extended, relatively informal face-to-face conversation. A typical interview would last an hour 10 For example, losing his family may destroy the self-perception [identity] of a person as „I have family, I am a successful member of society, I am like othersâ€Å". 11 Rosenthal 1995: 186-207; Rosenthal 2005: 125-155; Rosenthal, Kottig u. a. 2006. The methodology usually is called biographische Fallrekonstruktion – biographical case reconstruction. 7 or more. An advantage of this way of generating data is that the researcher can trace (in the text corpus, after transcription) how the models of interpretation which the respondents use are linked to their reconstructed life history (Rosenthal 2005: 125155). 12 The basic idea is that the narrated life history is more than a sequence of randomly selected events from the respondent’s life. Rather, the events which are used to form the narrative are selected with respect to a holistic system of interpreting the world (Popova 1985: 85). Similarly, the researcher, while emphasising the subjectivity of the individual’s experience, is not so much interested in â€Å"what happened†, than in â€Å"what does it mean to the respondent† in the context of his entire life and his situation at present (Koleva 2007: 11). Therefore, in the first part of the interview, the interviewer will try to not interfere with any questions to clarify facts. Rather, he or she will try to encourage the respondent to find his own way to tell his life. The result is – if the interview is successful – a reconstruction of the life history, as it is constitutive for the current identity of the respondent, and his (or her) place in society. This is called a biographical Gestalt (Bohnsack 1991: 93). Established in this way, the biographical data show how people in fact behave (in their respective social environment), as opposed to what they tend to display as their intentions (Popova 1994: 84). 13 Whereas in the first part of the interview the respondent should have the opportunity to create his biographical Gestalt without unnecessary interference by the interviewer, in the second part questions may be asked, aiming at a more precise reconstruction of those events which are important for the overall topic of the study. This helps avoid the risk that the interview becomes too poor a source of information because it is only up to the respondent to choose the topics of his narrative (Schutze 2006: 159; Holf 2008: 45). Crucial for an autobiographical interview is the relationship between the interviewer and the respondent. It is the interviewer’s task to provide an atmosphere which helps the respondent feel comfortable. Moreover, the interviewer should support the respondent to concentrate on telling events (narration), rather than giving his opinion about things (assessment) or explain his behaviour (argumentation). Only by re-actualizing as many details of events as possible the respondent will enable us to reconstruct his strata of experience which are decisive for his present identity. 14 Additionally, concentrating on the description of events allows the reduction of the asymmetry of the interview situation. In interviews, respondents usually tend to seek 12 For example, a model of interpretation would be â€Å"everything in socialism was fine and well-done†, whereas an element of reconstructed life history would be â€Å"the most important period in my life was when I was the secretary of the party and I managed to organize all the cultural life in our village over a period of about ten years†. 13 For example, a respondent may tell us that life in his village is boring and that e would like to emigrate to America. However, more important, for a biographical analysis, is what he really did, and why. 14 An example to illustrate this: In one of our interviews a women living in a village expressed strong dislike of Turks, more than other people in this community. Later it turned out that she had a Roma mother, which is, in the established hierarchy of ethnic groups, even â€Å"lower† than being a Turk. 8 recognition, and tend to give answers which – as they believe – match what is socially acceptable and especially what fits the anticipated expectations of the interviewer (Taylor, Bogdan 1998: 101-103). Sequential analysis A biographical narrative consists of a sequence of biographical process structures. 15 As we have seen, biographical process structures are variable. 16 (Schutze 1984: 88). When the dominating biographical process structure changes, the respondent accordingly will put other accents on the interpretation of his life history. Such changes are not necessarily experienced as dramatic or highly emotional. They may be just some â€Å"outer† changes, for example moving to a new apartment, getting into a new position in society, or a disturbance in everyday communication which lets the respondent feel unsure about his social skills and thus reduces his self-respect. Changes in the interpretation of process structures may be brought to light through a type of text analysis, called sequential analysis. This means analyzing how the autobiographer himself arranges in his narrative the changes he experienced (Schutze 1982: 132; Popova 1994: 85). A sequential analysis has three steps: 1) In the course of transcribing the interview we identify text units and classify them as either narration, description or argumentation (Rosenthal 1995: 240-241). Narration is related to consecutive chains of factive or fictive events. They are linked to each other either by a timely or a causal logic. The respondent uses narration in order to actualize how things (actions and events) happened, with a beginning and an end, with a concrete time and place (Schutze 1987: 146 ff). Descriptions are related to a repeated action, or to the unvarying state of things (circumstances). The main difference between descriptions and narratives is that descriptions are static. Any processual characteristics of the object of description are â€Å"frozen†. (Kallmeyer, Schutze 1977: 201) Argumentations can be seen as theoretical constructs. Koleva (2007: 17) calls them ideological meta-narratives. They appear either as assessment of the respondent’s own or other peoples’ actions, or as a presentation of a respondent’s general ideological (in German: weltanschauliche) attitudes. Argumentations appear in interviews depending on the communicative setting (atmosphere) at the time of recording, since they reflect today’s point of view. (Schutze 1987: 149) After having established the transition points of sequences (for example the change to another class of text units), we continue the analysis by searching for answers to questions such as: why does a given topic appear at a given place in the narrative? What determines its length? Why does the text appear in this form? To what thematic areas could a given sequence be assigned? What spheres or periods of life does the 15 See above, where this notion is introduced. 16 Different events in your life may seem important to you today, and of minor importance tomorrow. 9 narrative deal with, and, reciprocally, what spheres and periods are excluded? What spheres or periods are mentioned only because the interviewer, later in the interview, asks additional questions? (Rosenthal 2005: 185). The last and final step is interpreting the biographical Gestalt of the narrative. This is what we will do in what follows. 3. Biographical reconstruction and ethnic identity. The methodology outlined above is used in social sciences to better understand how an individual forms his or her identity, and how various factors influence this process. Such factors are gender, religion, language, migration, generation gaps, etc. Much emphasis is also laid on biographical analysis of ethnic identity. Ethnic identity is often seen as a key element for the creation of meaning in the life-world17, and thus for stabilizing the self-perception of the individual (Fotev 1994: 17-22). Interesting are not only such dimensions of ethnic identity which are related to the individual (for example an individual’s affirmative or traumatic experience of ethnic identity), but also such dimensions of ethnic identity which make it function as collective capital. The latter are important because they bear the potential to bring about conflicts, particularly when people start to occupy new spaces in society, are included in or excluded from societal processes, legitimize their access to resources or impose on others restrictions to the access to resources. In our study, we try to employ a non-substantialistic approach to ethnic identity. To that end in our biographical interviews we avoid the notion â€Å"ethnos†, since â€Å"ethnos† implies an ontologically stable unit that directly includes its members who, by virtue of heritage, belong to a quasi ready-made cultural context. We prefer the notion of â€Å"ethnicity† which emphasises individual choice and the freedom of self-definition. It also gives the opportunity to interpret ethnic belonging outside of monolithic master narratives. For us, ethnic identity is not a mono-dimensional feature which is incorporated into the members of a community (Krasteva 1998: 158; 2004: 31; Nedelceva 2004: 47-61). Rather, we see ethnic identity as dependent of individual, mutative biographical constellations and their actual, meaningful re-interpretation in the present. In this perspective, it would be misleading to believe that individuals have an invariable self-conception. (Kohli 1982: 157-168). The two narratives which we are going to analyse in this paper are to be seen as prototypes of life experience (Rosenthal 2005: 75). Typicality means that the â€Å"biographical case† represents one of potentially countless possible ways of relating oneself to the social environment. The biographical case is part of the social reality, even though it occurs, by definition, in this form only once (Popova 1994: 84; Rosenthal, Kottig et al. 2006: 36). 17 German Lebenswelt. 10 3. 1. Some historico-political background: Turks in Bulgaria, and the assimilation campaign in the 1980s The respondents whose biographical narratives we present in this paper, belong to the group of Bulgarian Turks18. â€Å"Belonging† means that they define themselves as such. In the 1980s, Bulgarian Turks became the victims of an assimilation campaign, instigated by the communist regime under Todor Zivkov, which did not proceed without various forms of violence, including the police and the military. The campaign set off a mass exodus into neighbouring Turkey. The background of this campaign (which seemed quite irrational even from the perspective of the communist regime) are not finally clarified. Today, the campaign and its effects are usually referred to as vazroditelen proces. 19 The choice of â€Å"Bulgarian Turks† as a reference group is based on the assumption that the vazroditelen proces had powerful (and even violent) effects on the entire community, and thus marks a common trajectory of suffering. However, the reactions to this trajectory of suffering are not uniform. The two autobiographical interviews presented below show that the respondents use considerably different biographical action schemes and have different expectations of the future. 20 Two of the most outstanding events during the vazroditelen proces in the 1980s were a) the campaign to change the traditional Turko-Arabic names of the Bulgarian Turks to Bulgarian ones (particularly in December 1984 and January 1985), and b) the public protests in North Eastern Bulgaria in May 1989 which were followed by a mass emigration of nearly 360 000 to neighbouring Turkey. 21 Since then, scholars have collected a huge corpus of documents from archives and so on, and have tried to reconstruct the events and their political background. Detailed studies have been written about what effects the state policy of a â€Å"uniform socialist nation†22 and the official historical discourse (which has been aiming to prove that the Turkish population in Bulgaria actually were â€Å"descendants of islamized Bulgarians†) had on ethnic markers such as language, names, attire and religion (Jalamov 2002; Gruev, Kal’onski 2008: 167-176). 18 According to the official census of 2001, „Bulgarian Turksâ€Å" are, by size, the second ethno-religious 19 20 21 22 group in Bulgaria, counting 9,6 per cent of the overall population. As usual, the methodology of such census includes that the individual may take a free decision as for what is his ethnic belonging (if any). The term vazroditelen proces is in common use in Bulgarian public life and academic writing, although it is historically problematic and carries ideological impetus. See: Baeva, Kalinova 2009: 5); Fotev 1994: 88-102; Jalamov 2002: 360; Dokumenti ot archiva na CK na BKP, 2003; Kalinova 2004: 52-64; Gruev, Kal’onski 2008: 131-176. As part of Microcon project No. 6, a team of the Sv. -Sv. -Kliment Ohridski-University in Sofia (Institute of History and Theory of Culture), led by Teodora Karamelska, Daniela Koleva and Christian Geiselmann recorded in 2008 and 2009 about 100 biographical interviews in those five oblasti in North East Bulgaria which have the highest percentages of Turkish population. Many of them returned after weeks or months, others remained in Turkey. This notion had been shaped at the Plenum of the CK of the BKP in January 1974 when a task was devised to â€Å"ideo-politically integrate those with Turkish descent† as well as to â€Å"make the Bulgarian Muslims aware of their nation, and to educate them as patriots† (cit. in Baeva, Kalinova 2009: 27). 11 We believe, as a hypothesis, that this historical context has heterogeneous effects on the way that people, through their biographical narratives, individually construct their ethnic identity. The two respondents whose narratives are introduced here form their social positions in two different ways. For both of them, the vazroditelen proces caused a loss of biographical orientation. For both of them, it provided an opportunity to re-think the question â€Å"who am I, and how did I become who I am†. However, they end up with entirely different results. As a