Narrative

In the 1930s and 1940s, social scientists abandoned narrative for being an ambiguous, particularistic, idiosyncratic, and imprecise way of representing the world. During the 1980s and 1990s, narrative was resurrected as a means of challenging positivistic, reductionist, logico-deductive modes of knowing, gaining lively support as a form of representation in legal scholarship.

Epistemological arguments claim that narratives have the capacity to reveal truths about the social world, truths that are flattened or silenced by more traditional methods of social science or legal scholarship. According to this view, social identity and social action—indeed, all aspects of the social world—are storied. Consequently, narrative is not just a form imposed on social life; rather, it is constitutive of that which it represents. Scholars argue that to attempt to examine lives, experiences, consciousness, or actions outside the narratives that constitute them is to distort through abstraction and decontextualization, depriving events and persons of meaning. Although some scholars claim that by representing social processes through narratives and storytelling scholars give voice to populations silenced by efforts to discover general, objective truths, narratives have no necessary or inherent political valence.

Although the concept can be confusing because scholars borrowed it from literary studies and it is more often used as a common sense term,narrative took on specific meaning when applied to social scientific studies, including studies of law and legal processes. As Jerome Bruner explained, narratives are not logicoscientific or paradigmatic forms of deductive argument supported by empirical evidence, typical of physical sciences or philosophical argumentation. Instead, narratives offer the truth of lifelikeness or verisimilitude. Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey described narrative as a particular communication that relies on representation and temporal ordering of a selection of past events and characters, presenting these as having a beginning, middle, and end. The events and characters most often relate to one another and to some collating structure through opposition and struggle. The resolution of the struggle and the temporal closure constitutes a form of narrative causality, a statement of how and why certain events occurred as they did.

Scholars adopt narrative as the object of inquiry when they explore how stories develop through social action, mediating relationships and constituting identities. They use narrative as a method of inquiry when scholars collect narratives to illuminate some other aspect of social life, whether that aspect is experience of law, economy, family, aging, or something other. Finally, rather than analyze or use them as data, scholars produce their own narratives when they represent pieces or processes in the social world, functioning themselves as storytellers producing accounts of social life.

As socially produced accounts, narratives perform multiple functions, neither entirely challenging nor [Page 1050]entirely supporting existing social structures and power. Ewick and Silbey claimed that narratives can be hegemonic when they bury the organization of relations that sustain action and meaning with what appear to be individual, unique, discrete personal stories. Because hegemony describes and reproduces commonplace, taken-for-granted understandings that constitute everyday life, narratives can support hegemony by offering what appears to be diverse, polyvocal accounts that nonetheless inoculate and protect from critique a subtextual master narrative. Conversely, narratives can be subversive, producing new, liberatory consciousness when the story exposes and articulates the structure of social relations that is more often unrecognized and most often unspoken.

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