Troubles With Textual Authority In Sociology

This text raises questions about the dilemma of the authorial voice in sociology texts that presume to present factual, data-based narratives about other people and their lives. The discussion bears particularly on so-called qualitative and historical forms of sociological writing although the issues are equally alive for other sociological genres. The dilemma of the authorial voice has beer given rather wide attention of late in literary studies and in anthropology. Relatively little attention thus far has been given to the topic in professional sociology. By drawing on variant reflexive forms, the text seeks to bring its own production and grounds under examination in such a way to suggest how the dilemma is present for those writing substantive narrative texts.     

The role of the YMCA in the origins of U.S. nonprofit management education

The given narrative of the origins of nonprofit management education tends to begin in the 1970s or 1980s, recognizing earlier efforts that were limited to individual professional disciplines, such as social work administration. This historical inquiry examines whether the origins of generic nonprofit management education can be traced further back. It identifies the 1911 bachelor of association science degree from the Chicago YMCA College as at least a proto‐nonprofit management degree and a 1935 text by Ordway Tead, issued by the YMCA's publishing house, as a contender for the first text in generic nonprofit management.     

Texts and Other Symbolic Spaces

This article examines the cultural fabric of national identity in light of recent debates in the human sciences on the nature of texts and "textual realities." In discussing various political and historical examples, it argues that conceiving of national identity as a "textual reality" is to understand it (a) as a symbolic construction, (b) as a process of continuous cultural interpretation and reinterpretation, (c) as semiotic mediation, and (d) as a heterogeneous composition of different, often contradictory, layers of meaning. Although these issues have been discussed in different disciplines and theoretical contexts, they are viewed here as aspects of the same phenomenon, reflecting, each in its way, the conceptual scope of the textual approach. In further developing this argument, the article outlines a concept of text that covers not only linguistic phenomena in the traditional sense but also meaningful structures in a larger, cultural sense: symbolic spaces that embrace several semiotic media. Based on the idea of text as a symbolic space, a concept of national identity is suggested that, although it implies viewing identity as a discursive and narrative construction, is not limited to the mode of linguistic storytelling but also includes narrative media such as architecture, landscape design, cultural traditions such as commemorative rituals, and other symbolic and material practices.     

Actor and event orderings across time: Lattice representation and Boolean analysis of the political disputes in Chen Village,China

So far qualitative data on political disputes in a Chinese community, 1950–1980, have been presented in a narrative historical account (Chan, Madsen and Unger, 1984, Chen Village. The Recent History of a Peasant Community in Mao's China, University of California Press) and analyzed with statistical network tools (Schweizer, 1991, Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, 3, 19–44). In this paper, lattice and Boolean analyses are applied as new procedures. First, lattice analysis is used to explore the dual order structure among actors and events in different periods. This gives a systematic understanding of the power struggle across time. Second, Boolean algebra is applied to specify and test explanatory hypotheses trying to account for the success or failure of actors in the disputes. In this application Boolean analysis detects multivariate causal order patterns in a small and qualitative data set.     

The structure of everyday narrative in a city market: An ethnopoetics approach

This paper considers the value of Hymesian ethnopoetics as a means of analysing everyday narrative in conditions of mobility and change. The paper offers an account of the development of ethnopoetics as a means to make visible and valorize narrative in the Native American oral tradition, and as a method of revealing culturally specific relations of form and meaning. Hymes’ ethnopoetic approach viewed narrative structure as a reflection of a cultural tradition of meaning‐making. Hymes’ analysis proposed that traditional narrative was a culturally shaped way of speaking, and analysis of narrative structure could reveal and recreate culture. His orientation rested on an assumption that the culture of a group was more or less stable and fixed. This paper adopts an approach to analysis based on ethnopoetics, representing everyday narrative dramatically, organized not only as lines and verses, but also as scenes and acts. Representation in scenes and acts makes visible the dynamic nature of the narrative. The paper asks whether Hymes’ ground‐breaking work on ethnopoetics still has currency and purchase in 21st‐century conditions of mobility, change, and unpredictability. Analysis of everyday narrative in a city market concludes that, notwithstanding the complexity of notions of ‘culture’ and ‘language’ in such conditions, ethnopoetics can be productively applied to everyday contexts for the analysis of narrative.     

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE

This article examines the construction of ‘People’ in current and historical interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. It argues that ‘People’ is a powerful rhetorical figure constructed to sustain a narrative that transcends the realities of hard-won social change gained by living groups of people in US history. Opposing the common professional and popular conception of the US Constitution as the oldest continually functioning constitutional document, this paper posits that there have been many US Constitutions. With particular focus on the constitutional sanction of slavery and subsequent abolition amendments, as well as looking at Supreme Court cases concerning segregation and civil rights, it is argued that the Constitution does not represent a continuity, but a series of radically new documents. The Constitution(s) of the United States must, like any other text, be read and interpreted to have meaning; that is, the Constitution(s) do not have inherent, obvious meaning equally and readily available over generations. The contrary is made to seem the case by those interpreters who perpetuate an historical narrative of liberty and ‘People’ regardless of the contradictions, exclusions and hypocrisies of reality. The fights for inclusion are obscured by the sustained appearance of a history of gradual but inevitable absorption into an ahistorical ideal. Further hidden is the possibility that the perceived ideal might itself be culturally and historically contingent. The maintenance of the view that constitutional language can have consistent, available meaning over centuries is not a neutral endeavour. It is used to justify the actions of existing American power as inseparable from an irreproachable, historically legitimated ownership of democratic social values and aims. This takes on a broader significance when considered in the light of current, aggressive exportation of ideas of ‘People,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘liberty’ and so on, as if they had self-evident and transferable meanings.     

Religious Identity as an Historical Narrative: Coptic Orthodox Immigrant Churches and the Representation of History

Abstract  The Coptic Church has a very unique historical trajectory that includes an early separation from the Greco-Roman Byzantine Christian world in the fifth century followed by a legacy of subordination in Egypt after the Arab Conquest. This paper looks at how the Coptic Church narrates this history particularly as it transcends the national boundaries of Egypt to serve migrant Copts in Western societies. The historical narrative of the Coptic Church celebrates its contributions to early Christianity; defends its stance in the Chalcedon Council in 451 CE; and celebrates a legacy of triumph and survival after the Arab conquest. Building on theories on collective memory, this paper shows how the present and the past shape one another in a very complex way. The paper is based on interviews with both lay and clerical members of Coptic immigrant communities in Canada and the United States and on textual analysis of books, bulletins and websites launched on and by the Church.     

The meeting of two narratives

The post-modern paradigms, particularly regarding the nature of reality, are fast coloring our ideas regarding our client's truths. We now have an expanded understanding about the flexibility and dynamic nature of truth, and therefore of clients' narratives. Another narrative, however, that must be taken fully into account is the narrative of the therapist. In fact, what we have in a clinical hour is the meeting and blending of two narratives, that of the client and that of the therapist. This paper summarizes some of the recent thinking regarding narrative, and the nature of truth, as well as pointing to implications for clinical practice.     

A Conversation With Virus X: Outing a Malevolent and Subversive Force in Parents' Lives

The following conversation describes a narrative means of uncovering (or ‘deconstructing’) some of the invisible forces that undermine parents' capacities in caring for their children in preferred ways. In the authors' experience, parents can be hugely resourceful and provide a clear account of what they ‘should’ be doing, yet seem unable to act upon their own good advice — it is as though an external agent, named below as ‘Virus X’, prevents them from being the parents they would like to be. Through naming this external agent, identifying its influences and noticing parents' acts of resistance in the face of these influences, antidotes to Virus X can be developed. This paper describes the development of such an approach within a child behaviour management group. In keeping with the playful approach encouraged by narrative therapy, the authors of this paper join forces to act as investigative journalists in exposing Virus X to the readers.     

What do lesbians do in the daytime? Recover

This paper examines a narrative taken from an ethnographic interview, for the speaker's conversational construction of lesbian and other identities along with ideologized personal history. To tell her story, Marge shifts to the discourse style used in the meetings of addiction recovery groups. She prioritizes the recovery (twelve-step) program's coherence system, structuring her life story in conformity with its terms while narrating a complexly queered identity. Four analyses are given, beginning with a Labovian formal examination and proceeding with a consideration of three types of discourse echoing: interdiscursivity, intratextuality, and manifest intertextuality. This study demonstrates the analytical linking of nonpublic linguistic discourse to social discourses; individual identity construction to social construction (and its coherence systems); and personal history to historical eras. The paper adds the concept of a metalevel complicating action to narrative theory and develops a means of examining intratextuality for critical discourse analysis. It presents a revised view of essentialism for the sociolinguistic study of gender and sexuality.     

WOMEN AND THE INTERNET The natural history of a research project

This article represents a narrative, 'women and the internet', as a women and technology origin story with a fixed beginning, a contested centre, and an open ending. This article analyses our engagement with this narrative as a pilot study was conducted to look at women's perceptions of, and relationships to, the internet. Although this story felt like a coherent and persuasive narrative, this was questioned as the outcomes of the pilot study were reflected upon. Women coming to the 'net' led to a reconstruction of the questions that need to be addressed in researching gender and information technology. This article begins by describing and deconstructing the motivating story which was brought to this research project. Three genres are introduced-'the webbed utopia', 'flamed out' and 'locked into locality'-which are seen as forming the contested centre of this narrative. While each genre has its own narrative logic, all of them draw on a common tale of historical origins. From each of these perspectives 'Women and the internet' has an ending which is still open, but is rapidly closing. Three questions are then identified which have been raised by analysis: what do we mean by 'access'?; what do we mean by 'the internet'? and 'which women'? The seeming simplicity of these questions disguises serious difficulties which research in this area must address.     

“It Did Not Affect Me”: The (IR)Relevance of the German Reunification in Autobiographical Narratives of East Germans

How do individuals make sense of events that are associated with major social‐systemic changes? The paper explores the relationship between “German reunification” and processes of meaning making and identity formation by former citizens of the German Democratic Republic. Analyzing twenty‐six in‐depth, life‐history interviews of East Germans born in two different generational cohorts, I examine the various narrative strategies employed that allow these East Germans to embed the experience of the German reunification through means of narrative emplotment. Diverting from a notion that it is historical events that shape our autobiographical memories, I argue that historical events are selected from a historical tool kit which provides individuals with narrative resources from which narrative identity can be formulated. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/d69JXE0Ryqw .     

Curative fictions: The ‘narrative cure’ in Judith Herman's trauma and recovery and Chantal Chawaf's Le Manteau noir

Abstract

The possibility of a so‐called ‘narrative cure’, whereby a survivor of traumatic experience can begin to deal with her past through integrating it into narrative, has become central both to psychotherapy and to literary criticism on writings of trauma as a means of ethical, ‘truthful’ testimony and of healing. This article seeks to question the correlation between testimony and ‘cure’ through analysing the function of the ‘narrative cure’ in a psychotherapeutic text and in a literary text. This highlights how any notion of ‘truthful’ testimony is always underwritten by fiction, which raises crucial ethical questions about the relation between fiction and ‘truth’, testimony and ‘cure’ and psychotherapy and literature. I argue that the ‘narrative cure’ is not a privileged space of curative ‘truth’, but a point of tension between memory and amnesia and between ‘truth’ and fiction; it is precisely this tension, I suggest, which should characterize and structure interdisciplinary responses to trauma.     

Fate and Agency in Job Loss Narratives

While sociologists have emphasized the social sources of autobiographical narratives, there has been relatively little sociological reflection on the way that autobiographers themselves make selective use of accounts of social forces and pressures to explain their actions. This paper examines the way individuals' use of social pressures as explanations of their behavior are related to the structure of autobiographical narratives as a whole. The paper draws on empirical examples from interviews with people who are unemployed. Focusing on heroic and tragic narrative structures, I argue that the overall narrative structure is shaped by a number of factors, including the events of historical experience, the rhetorical intention of the autobiographer, and the structuring effects of social location.     

Challenging accounts: Public relations and a tale of two revolutions

This article provides a brief account of public relations, and of those who use its practices, in the Zionist revolution that led to the formation of the state of Israel. In relating that narrative to aspects of the American Revolution, it explores similarities and differences with a threefold aim: (1) to describe the distinctiveness of Israeli public relations development, informed by, but not determined by, U.S. accounts; (2) to clarify how different national origins continue to impact on the contemporary profession; and (3) to encourage others to put forward their accounts of their specific histories, and their specific historical actors. In Kuhn's [Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press] classic account of paradigm revolutions in science, the impetus frequently comes from activities on the margins that conflict with core assumptions. The article's specific account of the formation of Israel, and its intertwining with public relations, adds to the recent growing movement to construct accounts of other national public relations histories. In contributing to this movement, it also points to how the American experience can be reconfigured as part, albeit a massive part, of a profession that is developing differently in different parts of the world.     

Shadowing history: National narratives and the persistence of the everyday

The issue this paper wishes to address is how history, as encoded in historiography of history-writing, is actually based upon its capacity to conceal, disguise and indeed suppress the everyday. This is especially true when you consider that most history is really driven by the nation state and that far from envisaging a history free or rescued from the nation, most history-writing ends up reinforcing it. In other words, history’s primary vocation has been to displace the constant danger posed by the surplus of everyday life, to overcome its apparent ‘trivia’, ‘banalities’ and untidiness in order to find an encompassing register that will fix meaning. With Hegel, narrative was given the role of supplying the maximal unity by which to grasp the meaning of history. What immediately got privileged was, of course, the nation state in the making of world historical events or and ultimately class, subjects who can claim world historical agency. By the same measure, the surplus or messy residues of modern life, especially its immensely staggering complexities, its endless incompletions and repetitions – all irreducible – are repressed or in some instances the microcosmic is sometimes mobilized to reinforce macrocosmic meaning. (This has frequently been called history from below and what Germans have called Alltagsgeschichte.) What I would like to do is explore the category of everydayness, ushered in with the masses and the appearance of the subaltern, as a minimal unity that provides its own principle of historical temporality that easily challenges the practice of history-writing as we know it.     

SPEAKING OF BODIES,PLEASURES, AND PARADISE LOST: EROTIC AGENCY AND SITUATIONIST ETHNOGRAPHY

This ethnographic account of a love story of two elite-level bodybuilders addresses the ways in which broad cultural histories are relevant to understanding contemporarily situated problematics of sex and sexual identity. Specifically I argue that strategically placed historical and cross-cultural studies are useful in understanding in this context how: (1) subjects are configured as gendered, sexed, and sexually-oriented; (2) subjects make love; and (3) attempts to remake love outside the episteme of sexuality are confined. The love story, configured as a ‘paradise lost’ narrative, provides evidence suggesting that the occularcentric and muscularcentric practices of bodybuilding within this specific setting combined to offer the featured couple the material grounds upon which to venture temporarily beyond the pleasures circumscribed by the historical shift in subjectivity associated with Modernity. I conclude the piece by looking to the 1960's European revolutionary aesthetic movement of the Situationists to suggest how a ‘situationist ethnography’ might be used to create conditions of possibility for progressive work in the area of sexuality.     

Disability Studies: a historical materialist view

This paper presents an historical materialist view of recent accounts of disability in Western societies. This view is presented in two main parts: first, as an in-depth appraisal of the field of disability studies, and secondly, as an outline for an alternative, historical materialist account of disablement. The critical assessment of disability studies finds that recent accounts of disability are in the main seriously deficient in terms of both epistemology and historiography (though some important exceptions are identified). In particular, four specific areas of theoretical weakness are identified: theoretical superficiality, idealism, the fixation with normality, and an unwillingness to consider history seriously. It is argued that these deficiencies have prevented the field of disability studies from realising its potential to challenge the structures which oppress impaired people. From this critical epistemological perspective, an outline is made of an alternative, materialist account of disability, stressing both theoretical and political agendas.     

Cultural archaeology and historical geographies of the black presence in rural England

This paper focuses on the exclusion of black peoples from the English countryside. It particularly considers how white imaginaries of the English rural have ignored historical geographies of the black presence. Firstly the paper reflects upon the heritage of Englishness as represented in and through the rural tradition. It then presents some cultural excavations of black history undertaken by academics, community scholars and local history groups and asks how the histories they reveal challenge ideas of rural histories of England. The paper then considers how historical geographies of anti-racism may complement these new takes on rural heritage and provide a counter narrative to ’traditional’ English rurality.     

THE HI/STORIES OF HONG KONG

This paper examines the formation of modernity in three colonialist epics of Hong Kong and the recent historical and fictional works that aim to rewrite the history of the ‘local’. Adopting a challenge-response structure, the paper argues that the colonialist epics construct a monolithic discourse of modernity-as-progress via the amnesia of conflicts, tensions, and processes of domination and negotiation in the rural and everyday space of colonial Hong Kong. It is stressed that to piece together the above anomalies is not an attempt to restore a pre-given ‘native’ to but rather an endeavour to examine how the ‘local’ as divergent historical agents shaped and has been shaped by the political, social, and economic environment of Hong Kong and the larger world outside. This can be called a model of dialectics composed of an internal dialectic and a dialectic of articulation. In this regard, with the benefit of the rapprochement of history and anthropology and a non-linear view of history, this paper is a historical bricolage of the anomalous history of Hong Kong, aiming to destabilize the Hong Kong historical grand narrative. Through rethinking the impact of the colonial experience, this paper hopes to liberate alterity and diversity in historical interpretations and imaginations.