Histories of the Self: personal narratives and historical practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-346
Author(s):  
S. Shapland
Keyword(s):  
Personal Narratives ◽  
The Self ◽  
Historical Practice

You Don’t Look Like a Baptist Minister: An Autoethnographic Retrieval of ‘Women’s Experience’ as an Analytic Category for Feminist Theology

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Wigg-Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theology ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
The Self ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
Crisis Of Representation ◽  
Theological Understanding ◽  
Theological Thought

This article constructs and deploys a set of autoethnographic narratives from the author’s experience as a Baptist minister to critically retrieve the category of ‘women’s experience’ for feminist theological construction. Autoethnography, as a response to the crisis of representation in the Humanities, uses personal narratives of the self to reveal, critique and transform wider cultural trends. It therefore provides helpful tools for analysing, critiquing and transforming theological thought and practice. Following the article’s methodological sections, the constructive sections use the crafted autoethnographies to re-frame Rowan Williams’s vision for how church and world co-constitute each other towards God’s just ends. Whereas Williams argues that this co-constitution occurs through processes of interactive transformative judgment, the feminist theological understanding argued for here founds the process instead on interactive, transformative grace.

The Place of Things in Contemporary History

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Cole
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Contemporary Archaeology ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Textual Records ◽  
Historical Practice

This essay examines the variety of ways that historians have engaged with material culture in their work over the last few decades. Although textual records from the archive remain privileged sources, the diversity of historiographical approach has led to a range of historiographical practices including a material turn. Two major approaches to objects have dominated. Dubbed ‘object driven’ and ‘object centred’, these variously use objects as evidence for a very wide range of research questions, and focus on past material cultures respectively. Focusing on a case study of Holocaust historiography, the essay identifies the challenges for contemporary archaeology generated by these two historiographical traditions, as well as by the self-reflectivity over narrating material pasts/past materialities that characterizes historical practice.

scholarly journals Life/History: Personal Narratives of Development Amongst NGO Workers and Activists in Ghana

Africa ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Yarrow
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
The Self ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Relative Neglect ◽  
Development Workers ◽  
Personal Ethics

Widespread assumptions about the extractive and self-serving nature of African elites have resulted in the relative neglect of questions concerning their personal ethics and morality. Using life-history interviews undertaken with a range of Ghanaian development workers, this article explores some of the different personal aspirations, ideologies and beliefs that such narratives express. The self-identification of many of those interviewed as ‘activists’ is examined in terms of the related concepts of ‘ideology’, ‘commitment’ and ‘sacrifice’. Much recent work within history and anthropology uses the ‘life-history’ as a way of introducing ‘agency’ that is purported to be missing in accounts focusing on larger social abstractions. Yet it is the very opposition between abstractions such as ‘history’ and ‘society’ and their own more ‘personal’ lives that such narratives themselves enact. The article thus interrogates the various ways in which development workers variously imagine their lives in relation to broader social and historical processes.

Argumentation by Self-Model: Missing Methods and Opportunities in the Personal Narratives of Popular Health Coaches

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria E Gigante
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Medicine ◽  
Evidence Based Medicine ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Holistic Health ◽  
The Self ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Health Movement ◽  
Health Coaches ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Based Medicine

This essay expands Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of argumentation by model to bring more attention to the persuasive effects of using the self as a model. To illuminate this technique, I analyze the personal narratives of popular health coaches, who are championing a holistic health movement toward what I refer to as “do-it-yourself healthcare.” This case involves arguments regarding the efficacy of methods in evidence-based medicine and “alternative” or holistic health, as popular health coaches predicate their ability to heal themselves and others on abandoning traditional medicine. In brief, the purpose of this article is twofold: first, to characterize the rhetoric of the movement toward alternative or holistic health, and, second, to extend Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of argumentation by model and address the implications of this expansion.

scholarly journals Fashioning the Self in Transcultural Settings

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Research Group ◽  
International Workshop ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
The Self ◽  
Current Volume ◽  
German Research ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Late Ottoman

The current volume developed out of an international workshop of the German Research Foundation's Research Group 530 on "self-narratives in a transcultural perspective" [DFG-Forschergruppe 530 "Selbstzeugnisse in transkultureller Per-spektive"] that was held at the Orient-Institut Istanbul from September 29 until October 2, 2009. The workshop formed part of a long-standing cooperation with the Orient-Institut Istanbul, where research on transcultural self-narratives con-tinues beyond the term of the research group, with the project "Istanbul Memo-ries. Personal narratives of the late Ottoman period" (www.istanbulmemories.org). The stimulating discussions at the Orient-Institut Istanbul centered around the multifaceted interplay between dress and person/personhood in written self-narratives or ego documents. By focusing on "Fashioning the Self in Transcul-tural Settings: The Uses and Significance of Dress in Self-Narratives," we hoped to supplement the existing research on self-narratives with the dimension of ma-terial culture. In the workshop light was shed on the potential of dress to shape identities, to express forms of affiliation or foreignness, as well as on vestimen-tary practices. Were clothes simply purchased to be worn, to possess, and to give away as a gift or in barter trade? During the presentations and discussions it be-came clear that new insights might be gleaned if one widens the focus in self-narratives, beyond material culture to include the consideration of other sources such as trousseau inventories or account books.

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