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be therapeutic (Gersie 1991) and healing (Rosenthal 2003). They also help thenarrator to understand and face trauma (Borawski 2007) and the process of narrationcan be an emancipatory experience (Wolgemuth and Donohue 2006).The term “narrative” however refers to many different types of texts. Forinstance a biography is a form of narrative but is not a narrative in the same way asan autoethnographic account. In the first instance a writer is creating the history ofthe life of another, and in autobiography, autoethnography and self-narration thewriter is creating and inscribing
their own life
. Narrative research does not aim todefine the way in which to tell a story or what story to tell. It appears more as apragmatic politics (Squire 2005). Everyone has a story. This story tells us somethingabout the person and about the society in which they live. It is in this
something
(inthis claim to an individual and shared reality) that lies the significance for the socialresearcher.Talk of ‘biography’ in social research moreover does not always correspond tothe use of biographical methods (Boeije et. al 2001; Richardson, Ong and Sim 2006;Walter 1995). Biography here is the history of a life and the details of an individual’slife are treated as facts. In contrast, autoethnography as a ‘creative non-fiction’ (Ellisand Bochner 1996), sees the author actively moves back and forth between thepersonal and social using their memory as a resource to allow the reader to enter theexperience (Ellis 1999). Autoethnographers are aware that in the act ofautobiographical writing it is possible to create different “truths” - versions - of selfand experiences (Kehily 1995). The creative aspect of writing is thus embraced anddevices from fictional writing and poetry are employed to better capture livedexperiences. The truth that is being sought in such research is quite different, asBorawski (2007) recognizes in writing her autoethnographic piece about a traumaticexperience:
The memory may limit the details an individual can remember, but trauma isnot in the details, it is in the emotion still felt from the event (p. 109)
Narrative research and autoethnography therefore shares commonalities withfeminist ethnography in agreeing that there are
alternative
ways of knowing, withrational, quantifiable research methods as only one claim to “truth” (Stanley 1990,Ramazanoglu 1992). If we look at narratives as “factions” (Bury 2001) instead, assimultaneously incorporating both fact and fiction and being transcendent of bothterms, we can see that narratives and personal stories are not escapist, but like lifeitself
social texts
(Denzin 1989:9). As Riessman (2003) identifies, narratives containboth elements of structure and freedom. A narrative is essentially a performance thatreveals how we interact and
react
to the structures with we live. The social andhistorical context frames the narrative.This paper uses an autoethnographic approach to explore the rupture in selfand family identity following two traumatic events: the onset of a chronic illness(Multiple Sclerosis) and the death of a mother. It is the story of the life of my motherBrenda, who suffered with MS for 9 years and the story of my sister Eleanor andmyself, who cared for her throughout our childhood. The story continues through toour mother’s death in 2000 at the age of 44. This story seeks to continue mymother’s tale of suffering not only fleshing out the same story with the perspectives ofthe two other individuals who shared her experiences, but completing it by writingthose unwritten chapters, effectively writing an “interpretative biography” (Denzin1989) of Brenda and Eleanor. The end of one story leads to another as the“audience” becomes “storyteller” (Charmaz 1999). Using data from one family, I seek
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