The personal is political, but is it academic?

Journal of American Ethnic History

Volumn 26, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 7-23

  Erdmans, Mary Patrice ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 57749158105     PISSN: 02785927     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (96)

1. Daniel Bertaux, ed. Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences (Beverly Hills, CA, 1981), 6-7.
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York, 1965).
3. For examples see Susan Krieger, The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships Among Women (Berkeley, CA, 1996);
4. Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart (Boston, MA, 1996);
5. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bocher, "Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject," in Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, 2d ed., ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA, 2003), 199-258;
6. and Storytelling Sociology: Narrative as Social Inquiry, ed. Ronald J. Berger and Richard Quinney (Boulder, CO, 2004).
7. See Ronald Grele, "A Surmisable Variety: Interdisciplinarity and Oral Testimony," American Quarterly 27 (August 1975): 275-95;
8. Robert Atkinson, The Life Story Interview (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1998), 6.
9. See Ronald J. Berger and Richard Quinney, "The Narrative Turn in Social Inquiry," in Storytelling Sociology, ed. Berger and Quinney, 1-12;
10. Daniel Bertaux and Martin Kohli, "The Life Story Approach: A Continental View," American Review of Sociology 10(1984): 215-37;
11. Behar, Vulnerable Observer, Daphne Patai and Sherna Gluck, eds., Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York, 1991);
12. Mary Romero and Abigail Stewart, eds., Women's Untold Stories: Breaking Silences, Talking Back, Voicing Complexity (New York, 1999).
13. Norman Denzin argues that these new forms "make problematic two key assumptions of qualitative research. The first assumption presumes that qualitative researchers can no longer directly capture lived experience. Such experience, it is argued, is created in the social text written by the researcher. This is the representational crisis. The second assumption makes problematic the traditional criteria for evaluating and interpreting qualitative research. This is the legitimation crisis." See Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1997), 3.
14. See Valerie Yow, "'Do I Like Them Too Much?' Effects of the Oral History Interview on the Interviewer and Vice-versa," The Oral History Review 24 (Summer 1997): 55-80.
15. Ellis and Bocher, "Autoethnography, Personal Nanative, Reflexivity," 201.
16. For an example of this see Mary Patrice Erdmans, The Grasinski Girls: The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made (Athens, OH, 2004), 11-14.
17. For further discussion see Sarah Alpern, Joyce Antler, Elisabeth Israels Perry, and Ingrid Withner Scobie, eds., The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women (Urbana, IL, 1992), 11. The first-person voice does not automatically make the writer reflexive nor the relations less hierarchical; sometimes the first-person narrative is more self-centered egoism than reflexive analysis. Ruth Behar discusses the problems (and criticisms) that come from the use of the first person in Chapter 1 of Vulnerable Observer.
18. See Caroline Brettell, "Blurred Genres and Blended Voices: Life History, Biography, Autobiography, and the Auto/Ethnography of Women's Lives," in Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social, ed. Deborah E. Reed-Danahay (New York, 1997), 223-46;
19. Norman Denzin, Interpretive Biography (New York, 1989) and Interpretive Ethnography;
20. Behar, Vulnerable Observer;
21. Ellis and Bocher, "Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity."
22. Bertaux and Kohli write that the life story "refers to the totality of a person's experience." See Life Story Approach, 215.
23. See also Atkinson, Life Story Interview, 67;
24. and Catherine Kohler Reissman, "When Gender is Not Enough: Women Interviewing Women," Gender & Society 1 (June, 1987): 172-207.
25. For discussions on the blurring of the researcher/researched dichotomy that includes a critique of positivism, a discussion of reflexivity, and an analysis of the interaction effects of the interviewer and interviewee see Kathryn Anderson, Susan Armitage, Dana Jack, and Judith Wittner, "Beginning Where We Are: Feminist Methodology in Oral History," in Feminist Research Methods: Exemplary Readings in the Social Sciences, ed. Joyce McCarl Nielson (Boulder, CO, 1990), 94-112;
26. Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule, Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (1986; New York, 1997);
27. Romero and Stewart, Women's Untold Stories;
28. Patai and Gluck, Women's Words;
29. Yow, "'Do I Like Them Too Much?'";
30. Reissman, "When Gender is Not Enough";
31. and Alpern et al. Challenge of Feminist Biography.
32. For an example of a negotiated text see Erdmans, Grasinski Girls.
33. See James Clifford, "Introduction: Partial Truths," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, 1993), 3.
34. Norman Denzin discusses and then succinctly organizes these messy overlapping forms in a table that defines the key features of twenty-six terms. See Interpretive Biography, 47.
35. Brettell, "Blurred Genres and Blended Voices";
36. and Bertaux, Biography and Society.
37. For an overview of the key issues in oral history see David Dunaway and Willa Baum, Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (New York, 1996);
38. Alistair Thomson, "Fifty Years On: An International Perspective on Oral History," Journal of American History 85 (September 1998): 581-95;
39. and Ronald Grele, Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History (1985; New York, 1991).
40. A field developed around the method of collecting, transcribing, storing, and getting funding with the focus on the production and storage of oral histories rather than their analysis. See Donald Ritchie, Doing Oral History (Cambridge, 2003);
41. Barbara W. Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan, The Oral History Manual (New York, 2002).
42. In the 1920s and 1930s, historians began to record the oral histories of former slaves. The Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration collected 2,300 first-person narratives from former slaves. See Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938;
43. Ken Lawrence, "Oral History of Slavery," Southern Exposure 1 (Winter 1974): 84-86.
44. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin shows that although some historians collected oral narratives in the first part of the century, most historians were positivist rather than phenomenologists. See "Metaphors of Self in History: Subjectivity, Oral Narrative, and Immigration Studies," in Immigration Reconsidered: History; Sociology, Politics, ed. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (New York, 1990), 254-90.
45. The Oral History Association, founded in 1967, issued its first set of guidelines in 1968, and continues to update them. Its most recent guidelines were adopted in 1989 and revised in 2000. The OHA has published The Oral History Review since 1973, and it now maintains the listerv H-ORALHIST (on H-Net). From 1987 to 2002, the Journal of American History devoted its September issue to oral history.
46. Grele, Envelopes of Sound, 6-7.
47. For further discussion on the interpretation of narrative data see Anderson et al, "Beginning Where We Are";
48. Gary Y. Okihiro, "Oral History and the Writing of Ethnic History," in Oral History, ed. Dunaway and Baum, 199-214.
49. For more discussion see the comprehensive collections of essays in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds, The Oral History Reader (New York, 1998)
50. and Dunaway and Baum, eds, Oral History.
51. Bertaux and Kohli, "Life Story Approach";
52. Norman Denzin, Interpretive Biography;
53. Theodore Abel, "The Nature and Use of Biograms," The American Journal of Sociology 53, no. 2 (1947): 111-18;
54. Charlotte Linde, "Private Stories in Public Discourse: Narrative Analysis in the Social Sciences," Poetics 15 (1986), 183-202;
55. Rainer Munz and Monika Pelz, "Narration in Social Research," Poetics 15 (1986): 25-41.
56. The overlap among these categories often makes these two terms interchangeable; both life histories and life stories have also been referred to as autobiography, life records, and case history. An autobiography differs from life stories and other biographical accounts because it has only one author, while life stories, oral histories, and any other interview method have two authors. Two fascinating but different expressions of the life-history method (they differ in terms of how much of the story is retold in the narrator's words) are by Glen H. Elder, Children of the Depression: A Social Change in Life Experience (Boulder, CO, 1999);
57. and Stanley W. Mintz, Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History (1960; New York, 1974).
58. William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918; Chicago,1958).
59. Berger and Quinney, "The Narrative Turn in Social Inquiry";
60. and Charles Lemert, Social Things: An Introduction to the Sociological Life, 2d ed., (Lanham, MD, 2002), chapters 4-6.
61. For a discussion of the importance of turning points see Norman Denzin, The Recovery Self (Newbury Park, CA, 1987);
62. and Jerold Starr, "Peace Corps Service as a Turning Point," International Journal of Aging and Human Development 39, no. 2 (1994): 137-61.
63. The life story continued to thrive in Poland during the twentieth century. Józef Chałasiński, a disciple of Florian Znaniecki, organized the collection of pamiecombining ogonektniki (written memoirs) through memoir competitions from peasants, industrial workers, unemployed men and women in the 1920s and 1930s. In Poland, the use of diaries and biographical materials continued throughout the twentieth century and began to include in-depth interviews and narrative interviews as well as methodological critiques and refinement of the biographical method.
64. Józef Chałasiński, "The Life Records of the Young Generation of Polish Peasants as a Manifestation of Contemporary Culture," in Biography and Society, ed. Bertaux, 119-32;
65. and Krzysztof T. Konecki, Anna M. Kacperczyk, and Lukasz T. Marciniak, "Polish Qualitative Sociology," Forum Qualitative Social Research 6 (September 2005) (accessed online at www.qualitative-research.net on February 10, 2007).
66. For a discussion of the definition of a personal narrative see the Personal Narratives Group - a group of female academics who were located at the University of Minnesota - and their publication, Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Indianapolis, IN, 1989).
67. Other good discussions of personal narratives include Sherryl Kleinman, "Essaying the Personal: Making Sociological Stories Stick," Qualitative Sociology 20, no. 4 (1997): 553-64;
68. Kristin M. Langellier, "Personal Narrative: Perspectives on Theory and Research," Text and Performance Quarterly 9, no. 4 (October 1989): 243-76;
69. Barbara Laslett, "Personal Narratives as Sociology," Journal of Contemporary Sociology 28, no. 4 (1999): 391-404;
70. and Berger and Quinney, "The Narrative Turn in Social Inquiry." An excellent example of the use of personal narrative in essays is Susan Krieger, The Family Silver.
71. Langellier, "Personal Narrative," 244.
72. For examples of personal narratives in sociology, see the essays in Qualitative Sociology as Everyday Life, ed. Barry Glassner and Rosanna Hertz (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1999). In these narratives, academics use their own lives as data and their training as scholars to understand the everyday world.
73. see also Glassner and Hertz, Qualitative Sociology as Everyday Life
74. and Personal Narratives Group, "Interpreting Women's Lives."
75. Deborah E. Reed-Danahay, ed, Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social (New York, 1997);
76. Ellis and Bocher, "Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity"; Behar, Vulnerable Observer.
77. Reed-Danahay, Auto/Ethnography, 2.
78. Cunent good examples of social journalism include Jason DeParle, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare (New York, 2004);
79. Jonathon Kozol, Amazing Grace: Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (New York, 1996);
80. and Katherine Boo, "Swamp Nurse," The New Yorker, February 6, 2006.
81. Gay Talese, in his article "The Origins of a Nonfiction Writer," writes about how he learned to listen as a child and from listening he found the stuff of essays: "I learned to listen with patience and care and never to interrupt even when people were having great difficulty in explaining themselves, for during such halting and imprecise moments ... people are often very revealing - what they hesitate to talk about can tell much about them. Their pauses, their evasions, their sudden shifts in subject matter are likely indicators of what embarrasses them, or irritates them, or what they regard as too private or imprudent to be disclosed to another person at that particular time." Quoted in The Writer (January 2005), 27.
82. See Yans-McLaughlin, "Metaphors of Self in History."
83. See also Denzin, Interpretive Ethnography;
84. Trevor Lummis, "Structure and Validity in Oral Evidence," in Oral History Reader, ed. Perks and Thomson, 282.
85. Even when they speak only for themselves, individuals represent a collective. Schrager writes, "A migration story can be a very personal account and at the same time an incarnation of the peopling of an era." See "What is Social in Oral History," 298.
86. See also Lummis "Structure and Validity in Oral Evidence."
87. Ellis and Bocher, "Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject," 206.
88. See Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York, 1998).
89. Thomson, "Fifty Years On."
90. Schrager has argued that objections about validity and reliability "hide ideological considerations about what aspects of whose experiences are to become part of the record." Italics in original. See "What Is Social in Oral History?" in Oral History Reader, ed. Perks and Thomson, 294. While this can be the case, especially when discussing ethnic histories, it is not always the case.
91. Thomson, "Fifty Years On," 581.
92. Reference is to the early oral histories by Nevins at Columbia. For race and gender variations in interviewing styles see Akemi Kikumura, "Family Life Histories: A Collaborative Venture," in Oral History Reader, ed. Perks and Thomson, 140-44;
93. Kleinman, Essaying the Personal, 560-61.
94. Belenky et al., Women's Ways of Knowing, xvi.
95. Denzin, Interpretive Biography, and Interpretive Ethnography;
96. For a critique of narratives that focuses on their weak methodology as well as limited analysis see Paul Atkinson, "Narrative Turn or Blind Alley?" Qualitative Health Research 7, no. 3 (August 1997): 335.