The Narrated Self: Life Stories in Process

• DOI: 10.1525/eth.1993.21.4.02a00010
• Publication Date: 2004-11-23T16:34:14Z
• Authors: JAMES L. PEACOCK; DOROTHY C. HOLLAND
• Keywords: Chapel; Special collections

Since Paul Radin's pioneering work early in this century, life histories have become standbys in American ethnography. Ethnographers collect them, Crashing Thunder (Radin 1983) and other informant biographies are classics in the discipline, and students are still exhorted to collect life histories as part of fieldwork. Yet, despite their great promise, life-history studies have been of controversial value from the start. Boas, Radin's teacher, distrusted life history as a research technique because he felt informants were wont to lie and to exaggerate and researchers could scarcely help but bias the informant's story (Fogelson 1979). Radin meanwhile saw a strength not revealed by Boas's scientific perspective. For him, history and culture were grounded in the lives of specific individuals. Life histories revealed history and culture as lived (Diamond 1981). Today, decades later, life-history studies are still subject to perspectives as wildly different as those of Boas and Radin. They encompass a confusing welter of different approaches and, even worse, are poorly integrated with the larger endeavor of sociocultural and psychocultural description, analysis, and theory. The objective of this article is to both catalogue the variety of approaches and to place them in an encompassing framework. We