Maybe a new day is dawning. Folklorists have long been irritated by encountering books and papers about myths, proverbs, or customs. Literary historians have disregarded masses of evidence about the arts of the word, especially as these are manifested in the world’s vast production and consumption of oral folklore. In sociology, the most egregious example of vigorously ignoring the discipline of folklore is that dismal book Tradition, by Edward Shils, still being advertised by the University of Chicago Press as “the first book to fully explore the history, significance, and future of tradition as a whole.” Disciplines now are beginning to see one another. The book under review gives hope by assembling twelve wide-ranging articles about research methods for narrative in the social sciences. Two are by established American folklorists.
In all three parts of the book, authors carefully and modestly describe their methods of research to the newcomer. In Part I, Analyzing Stories, the contributors discuss content and organization in narrative texts. Dan P. McAdams, in “Exploring Psychological Themes through Life-narrative Accounts,” leads by summarizing and referring to many studies, his own prominent among them. Also reflecting himself and his human concern, Arthur W. Frank, in “Practicing Dialogical Narrative Analysis,” steals from another field the well-known abbreviation DNA for his research question, “What form of life is reflected” in the stories people tell. His mode of analysis shows much influence from M. M. Bakhtin. At one point this sociologist discovers multiple existence: “After working with stories for decades and hearing such different people tell the same stories and claim them as their own, I was forced to recognize what I long resisted: that stories have provisionally independent lives” (36). The painful experience of interviewers Andrew C. Sparkes and Brett Smith shows in their “Narrative Analysis as an Embodied Engagement with the Lives of Others.” Trying to empathize with people disabled by injury, they ask questions poignant for any researcher: “What story do I hold close to my heart? How does this story enable and constrain my knowing of what is said? Whom does the story connect the storyteller to? How do people (including myself) respond to the story, and what counts in the response?” (66). Roberto Franzosi, “On Quantitative Narrative Analysis,” examines the concept of story from the perspectives of “the rhetorician, the linguist, the journalist (and, ultimately, the sociologist)” (75). It is surprising that he labels V. Propp, Roland Barthes, Boris Tomashevsky, and Claude Bremond as linguists, until it turns out that they are listed in climactic order because William Labov’s and Joshua Waletzky’s famous article “Narrative analysis” has become the most cited work on narrative” (79). For sociologists, perhaps.
Part II, Analyzing Storytelling, takes up “the analysis of narratives generated and shared in the course of social interaction” (editors, p. 4). Michael Bamberg’s article “Narrative Practice and Identity Formation,” focusing on performance, sets forth premises of research that connect with findings in folklore studies (101-102). Arnold van Gennep, for example, who held that every social system is a whole, would have agreed with Bamberg that narratives (performances) are “parts of larger interactive activities” (101). Conforming to his second premise, folklore research into practice (performance) examines much more than words or text. If narratives, in his third, refer “to a world of actors, places, and events,” the referential in folkloristics deals with what is being named, or referred to: the “subject matter.” Looking outside a folktale to discover the facts, the history, and ethnographic data behind it was the method Boas drew attention to when he stated that a collection of folk narrative mirrors the life of the people who tell the tales. In Bamberg’s fourth premise, stories are structured--plots are created--according to “particular culturally preferred principles of formation.” The formalist and structuralist analysis of narrative sequences is part of the folklorist’s tool-kit. All fields studying narrative will agree with his fifth premise, that stories are told with a purpose. Finally, Bamberg is especially interested in identity formation through narrative, and folkloristics too asks what can be told about the life of people from the perspective of their stories. The author’s critical analysis of processes of narrative production shows them to be “at work even in situations that do not result in stories” (120-121). Folklorist Amy Shuman, in her article “Exploring Narrative Interaction in Multiple Contexts,” uses narrative analysis to explore with clinical detachment “how the political asylum process exploits the unsayable and the unrepresentable to discredit . . . asylum applicants” (142). Her patient citations and discussions of interview excerpts--a technique used in nearly all the subdisciplines represented in the book--shield her reader from the grievously distressing nature of her material. Michele Koven, in “Speaker Roles in Personal Narratives,” seeks “to determine whether individuals have routinized ways of narrating experience that they transport across contexts” (176). Her model could well be transported into other disciplines; her chart of speaker roles (page163), or register-switching, is impressively comprehensive of others’ findings. But when she creates her own system and disregards the literature on, say, reported speech, she takes her presentation into anti-psychological and inartistic directions. Concluding this part with “Situational Context and Interaction in a Folklorist’s Ethnographic Approach to Storytelling,” Ray Cashman’s historical introduction to recent folkloristics (182-185) is the crash course that sociologists and students have been needing. Similarly, his condensed account of a ceili, which allows his reader to look in on an otherwise unrecoverable past event, is aimed at a non-folklorist audience, thereby making his contribution to the book its most explicit export across disciplinary boundaries. His explanation of the difference between folklore and sociology is terse but necessary: “Tracking a chronological sequence of speech acts allows us to identify bids for and negotiations over meaning embedded in and comprising the discourse itself, but a complementary top-down perspective is necessary to account for broader influences at play and, indeed, to orient outsiders to the social worlds of others” (187).
Part III, Analyzing Stories in Society, turns to “context.” Martha S. Feldman and Julka Almquist, in “Analyzing the Implicit in Stories,” conduct close reading of narratives related to a public works project in California, reminiscent (though less microscopic) of the New Critical readings of poems in the 1940s. A folklorist doing research for example on festivals could well benefit from these authors’ application of narrative network analysis to a nonverbal routine, namely the processes of the car-parking system of a summer park concert (pages 219-226). The article by Francesca Polletta, “Analyzing Popular Beliefs about Storytelling,” promising something like Alan Dundes’ oral literary criticism, cannot deliver that, because the stories studied were not performances--in Richard Bauman’s sense, a person taking responsibility for being evaluated. Hence the researcher and her colleagues found it difficult to distinguish where “story” began and ended. She issues a welcome call for folkloristic research to frame a “sociology of popular beliefs about storytelling” (247). Donileen R. Loseke’s forbidding chapter “The Empirical Analysis of Formula Stories” deals with stories in which “plots, characters, and morals are recognizable and predictable to audience members” (253). That is, the “formulas” are an audience’s expectations, because relations among strangers are “informed by preexisting images” (252). Here is a point where sociologists and folklorists could profitably collaborate, as I can see from my research in the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. A helpful footnote lists five other terms sociologists have contrived for such stories. In dense, abstract terms, the chapter “explores analytic techniques for empirically examining the multiple and interlocking aspects of narrative identity in secular social orders characterized by heterogeneity, social and moral fragmentation, complexity, and anonymity” (251). The folklorist is relieved when Tamar Katriel orients her article, "Analyzing the Social Life of Personal Experience Stories," to Dell Hymes’s ethnography of speaking, to a genre more familiar to this discipline, and to human beings in real-life interactions.
The editors’ introduction, which adeptly finds the common threads and different approaches in the twelve articles, asserts, “narrative research is becoming increasingly complex and rigorous” (4). Their classification of the approaches in this fine collection, which shows also in the authors’ range of reference, is very much what their reader needs to find his or her way. The book speaks across disciplines, making me wonder how the discipline of folklore shall place itself in relation to sociology. “The trouble with sociology is that it isn’t a science,” someone once wrote. But folklore isn’t a science either, or not altogether one. What Wittgenstein said about philosophy could be said of folklore, that it is “not one of the natural sciences . . . not a body of doctrine but an activity” (29). Creating, performing, and preserving stories is an activity too. More relevant to the history of folklore studies is the distinction between the activity of ethnography and the tendency of ethnography to grow into doctrine (Marcel Mauss, for example). Comparable to, but different from the more universalistic Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, Varieties of Narrative Analysis comprehensively and fully documents the reach and thoroughness of sociological narrative research.
Works Cited
Herman, David, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. 2005. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge.
Shils, Edward. 1981. Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001 (1974). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge.
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[Review length: 1550 words • Review posted on May 9, 2012]