Preamble Narratives and Social Memory - Universidade do Minho

Narratives and Social Memory from the Perspective of Social Representations of HistoryJames H. Liustrongly on the communal ordering principles that seem to be handed down from generationto generation in the form of communally-shared plot lines, making their way into thelives of ordinary people and their stories of personal experience” (Bamberg, 2007, p. 3). It isthis second strand that I would like to draw into a conversation with social representationstheory (SRT) and social representations of history (SRH). For it is the complex relationshipbetween individuals, their communities, and society that SRT is designed to address, and Iwould like to consider how narratives and social memory may be part of this relationship.The dominant literature on narratives is both interdisciplinary and, according toJosselson (2007), qualitative: “narrative research, rooted in interpretive hermeneutics andphenomenology, strives to preserve the complexity of what it means to be human and tolocate its observations of people and phenomena in society, history, and time”...“the practiceof narrative research, rooted in postmodernism, is always interpretive, at every stage” (p.7). She struggles, however, with the problem of how to “add up” narrative studies and theiraccompanying interpretations, putting together a “joint multilayered jigsaw puzzle” ratherthan “a gallery of finely wrought miniatures.” The “question that occupies me, though, is howdo we build a knowledge base out of these proliferating [narrative] studies?” (p. 8).In fact, the third chapter of the volume opened by Bamberg and Josselson is written byDan McAdams (2007), a personality psychologist who is comfortable with both quantitativetechniques and their interpretation as well as more qualitative methods. He has developeda significant cumulative body of research (McAdams, 2006) examining the structure of individualstories and their relationship to a grander narrative of redemption that serves as a“plot orientation” for American culture in Bamberg’s (2007) terms.It is at this juncture between the individual and society, between the quantitative andthe qualitative, between the life-worlds experienced by ordinary people and scientific microworldsconstructed by social scientists that social representations reside (Moscovici, 1961).Social representations theorists strive to build the connective tissue between the naturalscience epistemology of psychological science and the inter-subjective epistemology ofnarrative research (see Ho, Peng, Lai, Chan, 2001). In Doise, Spini, & Clémence’s (1999) terms,“SR can be considered as organizing principles of symbolic relationships between individualsand groups” (p. 2) consisting of three basic principles: first, that “various members of apopulation share common views about a given issue” and therefore “An important phase ineach study of SR therefore is a search for a common cognitive organization of the issuesat stake in a given system of social relations.” Second “differences in individual positioningare organized... we search for the organizing principles of individual differences in arepresentational field.” Third, “such systematic variations are anchored in collective symbolicrealities... Individual positionings in representational fields cannot be exhaustively studiedwithout analyzing their anchoring in other social systems of symbolic relationships” (p. 2).The purpose of this chapter is to narrate how I have studied social representations ofhistory (SRH) using quantitative methods to provide empirical building blocks that functionto 1) assist in the process of cumulative hermeneutic interpretation and 2) operationalizesocial representation in new and sophisticated ways as a symbolic interface between individuals,their groups, and society.Narratives and social memory: theoretical and methodological approaches12