Narrative Approach

Locating Narratives
 Narrative Analysis

Interdisciplinary
Organising principle of human action
Narrative turn
Object of investigation - story
Narrative -
first person accounts by respondents of their
experiences
How respondents impose order on the flow of
experience
Why was the story told that way?
Narratives are interpretations
Because Narratives are representations
Post-positivist research - no hard distinction between fact and interpretation
Human agency decides -
What gets included and what gets excluded
How events are plotted
What they are supposed to mean?
Individuals claim identities and construct lives
Personal narratives as
data
 Personal narratives
We encounter all the time
Conversations
Psychotherapists -
encounter narratives
Change lives by constructing new and more fulfilling ones
Universal human activity
Learnt in childhood
Used throughout the life
Impulse to narrate is natural
 Suppression of narratives by
traditional methods

Interviews
Respondents will hold the floor if not interrupted
Fracture texts
By taking bits and pieces out of context
Eliminate the sequential and structural features
 Narrativization
When does it happen?
When there has been a breach between
real and ideal
Self and society
Examples -
divorces explained in terms of narratives about marriages
Chronic illness - reconstruct a coherent self
 Difficult experiences

Political conditions
Atrocities
Survivors of torture, war, and sexual crimes
Rape survivors
Pre-narrative - does not progress in time
Does not reveal the story teller’s feelings or interpretations of events
Social movements help individuals name their injuries
Making sense of experiences
Difficult life transitions
Isak Dinesen - “all sorrows can be borne if we can put them into a
story”
Creation of plots
Give unity that neither nature nor the past possess
Narratives must be preserved not fractured
Respondent’s ways of constructing meaning must be respected
Studying Narratives
 Difference between narrative studies,
ethnographic accounts and textual analysis

Ethnography
Traditionally - first person accounts
Realistic descriptions
Much like scientific descriptions
Different only in formats
Events important not the stories informants create about them
Language - viewed as a transparent medium
Stable singular meaning
Critics of realist assumptions

Challenge this view of language

At the basis of narrative studies
Language -
constitutive of reality
Not a technical device for establishing meaning
Stories are not out there but are instead constructed
 Textual analysis
semiotics, hermeneutics, conversational and discourse analysis, textual
approaches to documents
Deconstructive method
Narrative analysis distinguished by an interpretative thrust
“how protagonists interpret things”
Researcher will interpret their interpretations
Approach gives prominence to human agency and imagination
Well suited for studies of subjectivity and identity
Investigators do not have direct access to another’s experience
Five kinds of representations in the narrative research process
Attending
Telling
Transcribing
Analysing
Reading
 Limits of representation

All forms of representation of experience are limited portraits

No direct access to access to the experience
The agency of the teller is central to composing narratives
But also the actions of listener, transcriber, analyst and reader
are important
We have talk and texts
Represent reality partially, selectively and imperfectly
Narratives as representations

No binding theory of narrative

Conceptual diversity
Key concepts, debates and interpretative
dilemma
 Definition

Broad -
just about anything included
Systematic methods of analysis and
detailed transcription is lacking
Aristotle - narrative has a beginning, middle and
end
Labov and Waletzky - stories follow a
chronological sequence
Chronological sequencing
Thematic sequencing
Entrance and exit talk
“Once upon a time”
“They lived happily ever after”
Stories told in research narratives are not so
clearly bounded
 Genres of narratives

Genre - persistence of certain conventional elements

Protagonists, inciting conditions, culminating events
Habitual narratives
Hypothetical narratives - events that did not happen
Topic centered narratives
Narrative Structures
 Narrative structures
Labov’s structural approach
Formal properties - they have functions
Six common elements
Abstract (summary of the substance of the narrative)
Orientation (time, place, situation, participants)
Complicating action (sequence of events)
Evaluation (significance and meaning of the action, attitude of the narrator)
Resolution (what finally happened)
Coda (returns the perspective to the present)
Burke’s structural approach
Act - what was done?
Scene - when and where it was done?
Agent - who did it?
Agency - how did he or she do it?
Purpose - why?
Violent incidents in marriage

Husbands
Emphasise purpose - why he did it
Wife
Agency (how he did it)
Consequences of the act - physical and
emotional
 Forms of telling

Tragedy, comedy, romance, satire

Warding of the question - “so what?”
Three functions of language

Ideational - dominates communication

Interpersonal function -
Textual function
“but the meaning of what someone says is not simply
its content (ideational); how something is said (textual)
in the context of the shifting roles of speaker and
listener (interpersonal) is critical also”
 Context
Larger social context is important
Scholars differ in the extent to which it is included
Contexts - multilayered
The historical moments of telling
Race, class and gender systems that the narrators
manipulate to survive
It is within this that their talk has to be interpreted
 Example

Divorce narratives
Difficult to interpret without reference to
social discourses and politics
Transformation in marriage and gender
relations of the last 150 years
 Telangana People’s
Struggle

The armed resistance of women nd men to the

feudal oppression in the Telangana region of
the princely state of Hyderabad.
Hyderabad princely state
Telangana, Karnataka and Marathwada
 Telangana Struggle

Led by the communists

Struggle against
Autocratic rule of Nizam
Feudal oppression of Zamindari system
3 million people in 3000 villages came under its
influence
 Feudal order
Feudal ownership of land
Ownership of all the people who lived on that land - men, women
and children
Women suffered doubly
If the landlord fancied a woman she was taken
When she married it was the prerogative of the landlord to
sleep with her on the first night
Jagirdari system of land tenure
 Land tenure
Jagirdari system
Inams
Sarf-e-khas lands
Khlasa or Dewani lands Ryotwari - 60 percent of the land
Deshmukhs, sar deshmukhs, desais, sar desais collected
land revenue
Amassed huge tracts of land
 Vetti system
Prevalent in jagirs and Khalsa areas
Free services by different castes
Agricultural labourers - malas and madigas
Tribals exploited under bhagela system
Tied to the masters by debt
Worked as domestic or menial labourers generation after
generation
Andhra Mahasabha
Gave organisational form to people’s
resentment against autocratic rule of Nizam
An armed struggle against the oppressive
feudal system and armed fundamentalist militia
of the Nizam - the Razakars
Kamalamma
My name is Kamalamma. I come from the village
Mainala in Manikota Taluka. My husband is
from Rampuram. Ours was a bonded family. It is
painful to tell the story of my life.
Great Grandmother, Grandmother, Mother -
all slaves to Brahman landlords
Father - a Brahman Unlike other landlords
Sister’s story
Goldsmith woman’s story
My father was different
Mother-in-law - similar story - bonded to a
Reddy family
Husband - cooking and serving them
“Unable to bear the trouble in these landlord’s houses we
came into the struggle. This showed the way….I didn’t
suffer like that. My mother, sister and my brother all had
to do this kind of work. My mistress wanted to make me,
my younger brother and sister also, into slaves but my
father did not allow them to…it was because we were not
able to bear troubles like these that we came into party.
And it is this struggle that showed us the way”
“First my brother came
into the movement”
Brother joined
Then husband joined
….I too joined the party
Cultural squad
 Son

I kept him with my father -

Later explained
The doctor was taking class
He began crying
“take him to my sister-in-law”
 Second child
Asked by the comrades
Either to give away the child
Or leave the comrades
Decided to give away the child
No-one to take the child
Comrades
Koyas
Decided to give up the child
‘This is not the correct consciousness for the
working class’
My head reeled. Why should I have to listen to
such accusations?
‘Your story would also be
history’
Comrade sent to buy supplies
Brought police
The squad had to escape
Koya woman - Venkatamma
Took part in raid for the revenge of killing of the
organizer
Took part in many guerrilla attacks
 Cultural squad

Worked with shantamma

Never carried weapons
“It was the beginning of 1952. The
struggle was to cease in a few
months”
 Stranger

I couldn’t bear the thought of killing him.

Pleaded with Appanna
Let him go
Police came and set fire to the village
Criticised by Appanna
Party gave a call to stop the struggle
The comrades refused
“You take our guns and shoot us instead. We had lived
for years without meat or vegetable or rice, drinking a
bowl of gruel between us. How could we lay down
weapons after so many years of hardship?”
But the struggle was stopped
No means of livelihood
Party gave - bullock and 120 rupees
Appanna joined Naxalites
Arrested
I went from house to house virtually begged for
things to keep my children fed and clothed.
Wealth doesn’t matter it is your strength and
your conviction
We still haven’t left our party
“….but these last two years, I don’t feel strong
enough and I’ve stopped going around singing”