Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences. Katherine Bischoping
around the testimonio I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian woman in Guatemala (Menchú, 1984), in which Menchú depicted herself as an illiterate peasant and eyewitness to the politically motivated murder of two family members during the Guatemalan Civil War. Some years later, after Menchú had become a Nobel Peace laureate, David Stoll (1998), an American political science graduate student, interviewed other Guatemalans who said that Menchú had been attending a Catholic boarding school during these events, and that it was a family conflict that had motivated her father’s murder. A storm of controversy broke out about these discrepancies and several others that Stoll discovered (see Arias, 2001). Many who had been moved by Menchú’s testimonio returned to its first chapter to mull over the passage: ‘My name is Rigoberta Menchú. I am twenty three years old. This is my testimony. I didn’t learn it from a book and I didn’t learn it alone. I’d like to stress that it’s not only my life, it’s also the testimony of my people’ (Menchú, 1984: 1). Some testimonio scholars attempted to defend Menchú, for example, by saying that this passage pointed to a shared authority for the events she had related, and that the work spoke to the truth of others’ lives, if not entirely Menchú’s own. Others, however, felt betrayed and devastated.
The analytic tension that Stoll’s discovery brought to such a breaking point has been manifest in other projects where the stakes are high and the audience extends well beyond the local, such as in the testimonio on the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children in Australia (Attwood, 2008) or the ‘Comfort Women’ forced into prostitution for Japan’s military during World War II (Kimura, 2008). Can or should a paradigm exist wherein testimonio’s claim to capital-t Truth is sustained without subjecting narrators to positivist-style scrutiny? Your analytic strategy may be to address this tension. Recently, commentators have done so by arguing that narrators should not be conceived of as victims who passively transmit information for historians to judge. Instead, they should be regarded as active political subjects and interpreters in their own right or as people whose political subjectivity, whose self-understandings and self-perceptions as political actors, is being formed by the very process of testifying (see Kennedy, 2006; Kimura, 2008; Uehara, 2007). For example, Choi (2011: 31) describes how a survivor of a Korean War massacre, frustrated by being given only 20 minutes to testify upon her visit to the USA, surprised herself by plucking out her glass eye to make her point.
Textbox 2.1: A Summary of Strategies for Knowing the Past
Use oral historians’ past experience to assess the reliability of various types of oral evidence.
Use cognitive psychologists’ insights to understand whether the memories being studied are likely to be stable or changeable.
Assess sources in terms of trustworthiness, competence, and authority.
Triangulate among sources, being explicit about how you resolve ties.
In testimonio research, address the tension between assessing truth claims and treating narrators ethically.
Knowing the Present through Oral History
Ontology, Epistemology, and Rigor in the Constructionist Paradigm
We now make a transition from using narratives to look back in time, to focusing on what narratives about the past reveal about the perspectives of the present, which include projections about possible futures. The different strategies of doing so involve various degrees of shifting away from positivism and realism toward a constructionist paradigm. What is the ontology of such a paradigm, that is, what can be known through it? Are stories still regarded as routes to an objective reality, as they had been in the positivist/realist paradigms? The short answer to the latter question is that it is not the right question. Following Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) The Social Construction of Reality, narrative analysts understand themselves to know the social world through their research participants’ subjective reconstructions of their experiences of ‘knowing’ and ‘being,’ whether in speaking with others, or – as Frank (1979) points out – simply in talking to themselves.
Some constructionists, such as sociologist George Herbert Mead (1934) would go so far as to say that it is through language and interaction that meanings are formed, altered and disseminated: we narrate and therefore we are. Others such as Neisser (1994) and Collins (2010) would call this too strong a view, pointing out that we have experiences that we do not put into narrative or even language form. How girls experience their clitorises before having a name for them (Waskul et al., 2007) is a case in point. But constructionists all would agree that narrators engage in a host of interpretive processes before a word of a story crosses their lips. To perceive something as ‘experience,’ to recollect some aspects of it and not others, to ponder it, and to begin to express it in language, let alone to make sense of it in storied form, is to layer interpretation onto interpretation (Neisser, 1994; Ochs and Capps, 1996).
Further, any story we tell is contingent on the moment of its telling and cannot be expected to be the narrator’s last word, even if the narrator herself thinks it is. Boje’s study of how stories circulate in an office-supply company emphasizes that ‘[e]ach performance is never the completed story; it is an unraveling process of confirming new data and new interpretations as these become part of an unfolding story line’ (1991: 106). For the epistemological question ‘How do we know via narratives?’ the answer is intimately linked to ontology – we know through our relations with others. Stories must be understood to be socially constructed or ‘literally created’ (Guba and Lincoln, 1994: 111) by a teller and a listener who might never arrive at a shared understanding (Scheurich, 1995). This occurs within a social setting that influences what is salient or tellable, as well as in a broader socio-political context in which stories are inter-subjectively compared.
Given that constructionists revel in the profusion of interpretations, and that analysis is itself an act of interpretation, constructionist notions of rigor are far removed from those of realists, who aim to show that they have reduced error and are closing in on the truth. Donald Polkinghorne (2007) maintains that constructionists should seek to persuade their audiences that their conclusions about narrators’ interpretations are plausible – a softer claim than realists’, but not a simpler one. To warrant it, says Polkinghorne, involves the strategy of explaining how you’ve addressed the likely gaps between the meanings that narrators experienced and the narratives that they’ve provided. For example, if you have interview-based data, you will want to reflect on how well your interviewing methods addressed the inadequacies of language to fully and easily convey meaning, and your capacity to elicit and be trusted with narrators’ self-reflections. Being able to say that you conducted repeated interviews with your narrators, gave them the opportunity to comment on transcripts, or reflected on the differences between theirs and your standpoints (see Chapter 4) would be assets here. Moreover, says Polkinghorne (2007), you’ll want to provide an analysis that does not merely reiterate what narrators have said, but instead delves into its meaning, with claims being grounded in your data. Chapter 3 will outline strategies for orienting to spoken narratives as though they were literary texts.
Plural Pasts and their Present-day Meanings
Within the discipline of history, it was literary scholar Alessandro Portelli’s (1981/1991) study of memories of the death of an Umbrian factory worker named Luigi Trastulli that most eloquently made the case that a constructionist paradigm could be used to support research questions of an altogether new nature. Portelli discovered that although police had killed Trastulli in 1949 while he was participating in an anti-NATO protest, 30 years later, his co-workers would systematically shift the context of his death to their momentous labor protests of 1952 and 1953. They desired Trastulli’s death not to have been in vain, Portelli maintained, and turned it into a symbol of their greatest struggle. Further, since the workers had become pro-NATO