Medios de Protección Individual

Traditional narrative analysis emerges out of phenomenological-humanistic (Hiles and Cermack, 2008) and cognitive approaches (Bruner, 1990) and studies narratives as manifestations of the speakers’ subjective experiences of the world and of themselves. Structural theorists such as Labov (1972) and Gee (2005) focus on the ways narratives are structured in order to deepen the analysis of the explicit content and learn about the speaker’s style of narration and their thematic focus. According to the critical narrative approach, content cannot be separated from its context. It switches ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ and turns its attention to the cultural, political (Riessman, 1993, 2008), interpersonal (Emerson and Frosh, 2004) or biographical (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000, Frosh, Phoenix, and Pattman, 2003, Roseneil, 2006) context within which the narrative was constructed. These aspects provide additional dimensions to the analysis and deepen its interpretation. Analysing narratives critically means addressing the following aspects:

5.3.1. The tension between coherence and disruption/fragmentation

‘There is room for managing departures from the canonical’ argues Bruner (1990, p. 50); Riessman suggests that the construction of narratives becomes especially crucial ‘when biographical disruptions occur that rupture

expectations for continuity’ (2008, p. 10). However, following Lacanian theorists who see the subject (Zizek, 1998) and the nation (Bhabha 1990, 1994) as inherently troubled or split, I have argued that both ‘identity’ and ‘narrative’ are to be regarded as imaginary phenomena, serving to mask and veil the subject’s recognition of its condition of fragmentation and split or as ‘momentary assemblages of contradictory forces’ (Frosh and Baraitser, 2009, p. 159). For that end, the narrator (here the interviewee) selects certain events or articulations that will serve the plot that they want to promote and

concomitantly discards other elements or counter-narratives that will contradict and disrupt that plot. In this sense the narrative, according to Bruner (1990), is only partly committed to ‘reality’: ‘the sequence of its sentences, rather than the truth or falsity of any of those sentences, is what determines its overall configuration of plot’ (p. 44). The national narrative’s coherence as presented by Renan at the end of the nineteenth century (1882) can only be achieved and sustained through a selective forgetfulness of certain unfitting traumatic and incomprehensible events. Nevertheless, the precariousness of the narrative’s coherence and homogeneity will inevitably be revealed through various verbal and non-verbal articulations (e.g. hesitations, disruptions, verbal lapses, laughter etc.). Within a critical narrative approach attention will be shifted to these counter-narrative aspects as much as to the explicit storied content in an effort to highlight the on-going struggle among contesting narratives and ‘voices’. Rather than looking for or unravelling the organizing forces of the narrative as structuralist theorists (e.g. Labov in Riessman 2008 or Gee, 2005) seek to do, my approach accepts the linearity as well as its diversions as mutually constitutive of the narrative.

5.3.2. Narrative as a dialogical co-production

A narrative should not be regarded as a reflection of the speakers’ consistent personal ‘inner truth’, but rather as a co-production of the narrator and the audience for whom that narrative is destined. The audience can either be

physically present (the interviewer/listener) or imagined (e.g. the interviewer in the mind of the interviewee when thinking, before the interview took place, what they want to talk about) and can either participate more or less actively in the course of the interview. Roseneil (2006) argues that the ‘interview was the co-production of the interviewer and the interviewee, at a particular moment in both of their lives [and would] have been inflected differently to a different interviewer’ (p. 865). Various identity markers – age, profession (psychologist), gender, ethnic background (Ashkenazi – as my surname discloses), academic qualifications, as well as my style of interviewing, to state some of the obvious identification categories, played a role in the text production.

5.3.3. Narrative as a tool to achieve strategic goals

According to discursive psychologists (e.g. Potter, 2005), texts should be studied first and foremost for their action orientation – the effects they aim to achieve within the research encounter and the speaker’s overall self-

perception in life. Riessman cites Goffman who wrote: ‘What talkers undertake to do is not to provide information to recipients but to present dramas to an audience’ (Goffman 1974 cited in Riessman, 2008, p. 106). Patterson (2008) argues that ‘a clause that appears to be a simple narrative clause referring to an event is not necessarily present in the text just because it is what happened …’ but may have been selected for inclusion because it supports the point of narrative’ (p. 30). Finally, Squire (in Andrews et al., 2004) makes a more general claim when she argues that ‘in performing narratives we can create new possibilities for identities and action’ (p. 104). Thus the content of the narrative should also be analysed for the social benefits it aims to achieve within the interview encounter and beyond.

5.3.4. Narratives reflect broader historical, cultural and social contexts

In contrast to phenomenological, humanistic and psychological approaches that underline the subjects’ construction of the world they live in, my

psychosocial reading of narratives states that subjects are limited by a certain discursive reservoir prevalent in their culture (e.g. Israeli), for example when making sense of ‘the nation’, of citizenship, group membership, religion or ‘the state’. Gee (2005) suggests that ‘what is being communicated in the narrative

presents the clues about what is taken to be ‘normal’, ‘right’, ‘good’, ‘correct’, ‘proper’, ‘appropriate’, ‘valuable’, ‘the way things are’, ‘the way things ought to be’, ‘high status or low status’, ‘like me or not like me’ and so forth’ (p.12). In

Banal Nationalism (1995), Billig describes how a certain notion of ‘the nation’ is

constructed through the banal daily details of ‘flagging’ which go unnoticed in people’s daily discourse, media coverage and formal documents. My first research question addresses the cultural contents that Israelis draw on when defining their national identity. The interviewees in my research applied images (e.g. ‘a country of sun’, ‘tiny Israel’), signifiers (e.g. ‘Ha’aretz’, ‘reside’ vs. ‘live’, ‘ghetto’) and popular myths (‘all Jews would like to make Aliya’) that emerge out of the cultural reservoir of Israeli culture and society and also determine the variety of social identities from which we speak – i.e. who ‘we’ are and who ‘we’ are not. Thus, the interview between two Israelis was informed by the social roles that each participant was assigned by Israeli culture and

subsequently affected the outcome of the text produced. At the same time, Emerson and Frosh (2004) argue that ‘research employing critical narrative analysis, committed to privileging rather than marginalising subjective and personal narrative meaning-making, can help to interrogate personal and dominant social discourses’ (p. 168) and in this sense offer a critical reading not only of the ‘bounded subject’ but also of the social regimes of discursive power since subjects’ usage of culturally acceptable terms and signifiers is appropriated differently by each speaker (Pavon-Cuelar, 2010). In this sense, narratives describing ‘Israeli identity’ abroad can offer alternative images of ‘the nation’ and subjects’ identification with it.

These four critical readings of narratives do not exclude each other. At any given time, all of the above can be demonstrated depending on the

researcher’s theoretical preferences: social psychologists emphasize the dialogical and co-constructive aspects of narratives, culturists and political scientists stress the cultural historical and political contexts, while Lacanian oriented researchers underscore the tension between coherence and cohesion and the multiple meanings of words. At various points in the analysis I found my attention shifting between various dimensions as their significance in the text changed. I argue that such ‘inconsistency’ should not be regarded as a methodological fault but rather as capturing an important aspect of narrative

construction and interpersonal communication in general. Riessman

summarizes it succinctly: ‘stories are social artefacts, telling us as much about society and culture as they do about a person or a group…a story [is]

coproduced in a complex choreography – in spaces between teller and

listener, speaker and setting, text and reader and history and culture’ (2008, p. 105).