“Who am I?”- 8
PIN jc19265
especially important for understanding how “personal identity, the answer to the riddle of ‘who’
people are, takes the shape in the stories we tell about ourselves” (Hinchman & Hinchman, 1997,
p. xvii).
In the next section, I introduce Bruner’s (1990) concept of folk psychology to elaborate
on the role of self as storyteller, and I show how conceptualizing narrative as conversational
interaction, social process and discourse contributes to our understanding of self as relational
(Gergen, 1991, 1999). But first, I want to explore why the narrative form has gained popularity
within recent years.
The rise of narrative. As suggested by Hinchman and Hinchman (1997), the rise of
narrative can be explained by frustration and disenchantment with current theoretical and
methodological stances from within a variety of social science disciplines, especially
psychology, that portray self and knowledge as static, behavioristic and objective. In contrast,
narrative emphasizes the activeness, fluidity and the power of stories to create and rewrite
identity (Mancuso & Sarbin, 1986). Also, narrative allows for stories to be “told” from multiple
perspectives, which gives rise to a cacophony of competing voices, all vying for the right to
speak the “truth” (Gergen, 1991). This cacophony questions the positivist claim that there is one
set of indisputable truths which science can measure. The stories that we tell ourselves and
others enable us to organize, understand and give meaning to everyday communicative acts, but
the stories are not static or indisputable. As Bateson (1972) and Geertz (1973) suggest,
traditional methods have been inadequate to deal with the complexity of meaning, human
relationships, randomness and order because they fail to reconstruct the richness of social
phenomena.
Convention