The Shape of Narrative Identity in Exile

Chapter 2 discusses how the experience of exile comes to shape identity in a way that can be at odds with the collective identity of that person’s exiled group. The author draws on his fieldwork to show instances in the informants’ narratives where their sense of exile did not cohere to other Tibetans’ experiences of exile, resulting in a double alienation. The author also looks to the narratives of the informants to identify a salient type of story they told, one that combines surrender, apartness, and survival. Finally, the author identifies the modes through salient stories that were told and situates these understandings within narrative psychological literature about identity, pointing to both the possibilities and limits of the concept.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the author’s fieldwork and the focus of the book: using narrative approaches to understand and represent exile. The chapter reviews the progress narrative work has made in the discipline of psychology and how it provides a useful approach to the study of exile for reasons that are theoretical, methodological, and rhetorical. The author sketches the history of the Tibetan exile and explains how it provides a useful site to investigate the issues that are at the heart of the book, including the transmission of stories, and traumas, over time. Finally, the author introduces the informants who feature significantly in the book.

Reflections

Chapter 6 reflects on the challenges to theory, method, and rhetoric that occur in the study of exile. The author outlines the ways in which those challenges occur on both scientific and emotional levels in his own fieldwork. He then discusses what these challenges mean for questions of understanding and representation and situates those challenges with within the much-used framework of human rights when discussing exiles. Finally, the author revisits the changes that occurred to psychology as a discipline in the years following World War II. The current historical moment provides some frightening parallels that demand psychology’s engagement. That engagement, the author argues, can be led by narrative work.

The Rhetoric of Narrative Work

Chapter 4 reviews contemporary research on psychological writing in order to sketch the possibilities and limits of such prose, rooted in a style of writing that goes beyond “typical” social scientific conventions. Drawing on the author’s reflections of how he chose to write about the lives of exiled Tibetans, he makes the case that this more narrative style is particularly suited to the experiences of those who have been displaced because it allows for a deeper representation of the efforts to understand the effects of profound violence on another person. The author reviews the challenges that come with this sort of writing as well, including the complexities of reflexivity, the emotional components of fieldwork, and the historical legacy of subaltern studies.

Personal Narratives and the Creation of a Political Voice

Chapter 3 focuses on voice—in particular, how personal narratives become embedded in a political voice for many exiled groups. The author illustrates this tangled relationship in his fieldwork and then elaborates on it through the work of scholars who have written on the Harkis of France and on refugees in South Sudan. What becomes clear in these accounts is that personal narratives of exile provide a challenge to the understanding of what a narrative account means by the degree of a narrator’s investment in audience, testimony, witnessing, and a need to speak with unquestioned authority. The author also considers the narrative form many of these accounts take: hope.

The Narrative Complexity of History

Chapter 1 discusses the importance of using narrative as a way to understand the history of an exiled group, for both that group and outsiders interested in the group’s history. The author draws on psychological analyses of Holocaust narratives to discuss how that atrocity shaped many of the conventions of speaking and writing about life and displacement after violence. This provides a framework for what comes next: a discussion of the history of Tibet since the first mass exodus in 1959, by way of the stories that have been told about death and survival. The emphasis of this discussion is on the way that exiled groups often embody historical tensions, creating narratives that move across several planes at once.

Ethical and Interpretive Stances in Narrative Work

Chapter 5 looks into the ethical responsibilities scholars have toward the exiled lives they study. The author considers existing principles that guide review boards, and thus the practice of psychological research, in order to show the ways in which narrative approaches challenge those principles. Then, he discusses the ways that an ethical stance is embedded in the act of interpretation, and how any interpretation of exile must reckon with proximity to individual and collective death. Finally, the author considers the ethical choices that mark each phase of research in order to show how narrative approaches broaden what can be represented in the field of psychology.