UNIVERSITY OF DURBAN-WESTVILLE

the story. In constructing the life histories of individuals, I have chosen not to represent
the individual in isolation, but rather the individual is represented in relation to the
"cultural systems that surround us" (Sparkes quoted in Hatch and Wisniewski,
1995: 123).
6.4. Individual stories leading to collective understanding
One of the concerns of life history work is whether the stories are individual,
solipsistic or idiosyncratic or whether they are connected to socio-historical events.
Many researchers (e.g. Schempp, Denzin, Cole, Smulyan quoted in Hatch and
Wisniewski, 1995) claim that what distinguishes life history work from other forms of
narrative is that "the life is seen as lived in a particular time, place and under particular
social circumstances rather than a simple collection of events" Hatch and Wisniewski
consider the power of life history and narrative accounts in the dialectic between the
unique experiences of individuals and the broad constraints of social, political and
economiC structures. Keegan (1988: 131) also highlights the importance of the
individual stories against larger context because, "When set in the larger historical
context, the reminiscences of obscure individuals begin to reshape our understanding of
major forces of social change."
Academics like Karl Marx and C. Wright Mills have argued that we cannot
understand the history of the individual or the history of society without understanding
both. C. Wright Mills (1967) in his book The Sociological Imagination makes the plea
that any social study must consider that every individual lives in a society and within a
historical sequence. Therefore, "no social study that does not come back to the problems
of biography, of history and of their intersections within society has completed its
intellectual journey" (1967:6). Individuals live within a context - this could be the
family, the community or the state. Any study about human and social action must shift
between the intimate features of the human self and the impersonal remote structures
present at the time. The life history method offers the opportunity for grasping the
dialectical relationship between individuals and their social, political, economic and
historical contexts.
If we recognise that individual stories ought to be connected to the larger contexts
of society we need to know how. Goodson (1992) and the Personal Narratives Group
(1989) both indicate the importance of applying theoretical frameworks to life stories to
elevate the stories from the idiosyncratic and solipsistic. The Personal Narratives Group
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