Narrative Reverberations

How participation in narrative practices co-create persons and cultures

Peggy J.Miller

Hetdi Fung

Michele Koven

In The Girl with the Brown Crayon: How Children Use Stories to Shape Their Lives , Vivian Gussin Paley (1997) tells the story of a small black girl’s passion for the books of Leo Lionni, a passion that transforms the kindergarten class and Paley’s final year of teaching. The student, Reeny, is hooked first by Frederick, the story of a brown mouse whom she recognizes to be a kindred spirit. The students read and reread each book until they have memorized it. They discuss, ponder, and dramatize the story, and create posters tha happen: Characters from different books turn out to be friends, Frederick shows up in a classmate’s closely guarded fantasy world, previously inhabited entirely by rabbits. The Leo Lionni stories call forth other stories: epics from India, stories from a one-room schoolhouse in Mississippi, Harriet Tubman’s adventures freeing slaves, including Reeny’s great-great-grandmother. Paley notes that stories “proceed as if nothing else is going on”(p.viii). In the process, they bring disparate people, places, and times into their orbit. By the end of the school year Reeny, the natural-born leader, innovator, and practitioner of the introspective life, is ready for first grade. Her teacher, contemplating an uncertain identity outside the classroom, faces many questions and a new beginning, but one in which the story of Renny and Leo Lionni’s stories will play a part.

We begin with this example because it dramatizes especially well how narrative reverberates through the lives of individuals, connecting them to other people, other stories, and other activities, and teaching them who they are or might become. Our goal in this chapter is to explain how narrative practices such as those in Paley’s classroom, are implicated in the co-creation of persons and cultures across the lifespan and across a variety of cultural contexts. Although the co-creation of person and culture is widely recognized to be a fundamental problem in cultural psychology, the mechanisms of this process have remained mysterious. We argue that everyday narrative practices can be fruitfully examined as ony key site for how and where the co-creation of persons and culture is accomplished.

Premises of Practice Approaches to Narrative

The turn toward a practice approach to narrative is part of a larger trend towaed practicecentered conceptions of language in cultural psychology and allied disciplines (e.g., Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Duranti & Goodwin, 1992; Goodnow, Miller, & Kessel, 1995; Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Shweder et al., 2006). These conceptions rest on the premise that to speak is to act-to create, perform, and transform social realities. A number of intellectual currents have fed into such practice-centered views of language including scholarship that addresses the pragmatic features of talk-what people “do” with words(Austin, 1975) and socio-cultural theory, with its focus on semiotically mediated activity(Cole, 1996; Wertsch, 1991). These perspectices converge on a conception of language that privileges the analysis of speech events in context (Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Bauman & Sherzer, 1989; Duranti & Goodwin, 1992; Hanks, 1996; Hymes, 1974; Jakobson, 1960). Hanks (1996) describes speech as “a form of engagement in the world……To speak is to occupy the world, not only to represent it, and this occupancy entails various modes of expression, of which propositional meaning is only one” (p. 236). Terms such as “talk,” “speaking praxis,” “language use,” and “communicative practices” are therefore used to signals a contrast with the narrowly referential conception of languagr that holds sway in most research on human development and cross-cultural psychology. Instead of reducing language to a representational system or repository of knowledge, this approach recognizes the functional inseparability of talk and nonverbal action, and attends to how speech forms implicitly index or point to dimensions of interactional and sociocultural context (Silverstein, 1976/1995).

This approach enriches cultural psychology by expanding the toolbox of analytic techniques that scholrs can use to examine talk as a cultural phenomenon. It allows the the analytic to look at what participants “do” with each other in interaction-how, through talk, they position themselves relative to each other, and to broader sociocultural values and types of people.

Furthermore, because a practice approach assumes that words cannot be sealed off from silence or from gaze, posture, gesture, and other practices of the body, it allows the analyst to treatatalk (including narrative) as multimodal, inviting questions about how silence is patterned, and how verbal and nonverbal systems are choreographed and integrated.

In addition, a practice approach recognizes that speaking is organized beyong the sentence level into dialogues and genres (including a multitude of narrative genres). These largr communicative events and stretches of discourse, while serving as units of analysis, are themselves multiply embedded in larger sociocultural contexts and networks of cultural pratices. In contrast to approaches that take the disembodied word, sentence, or text as the unit of analysis, for it recognizes that cultural principles are expressed not only in the conteny of talk but also in the way that discourse is organized internally and in relation to larger ecents anda sequences of talk.

Creating Persons through Repeated Participation in Narrative

We said earlier that sociocultural theory is one of the intellectual currents contributing to a practice approach to narrative. Scholars working out of this tradition emphasize the routine or recurring nature of cultural practices, including narrative practices, in everyday life(e.g., Miller & Goodnow, 1995; Scribner & Cole, 1981). From this perspective, one way that cultural principles are expressed is in terms of the types of narrative practiced routinely. Several scholars have applied ideas from Vygoyskian theory in an effort to understand the role that narrative plays in childhood socialization (e.g., Fivush, 1993; Nelson, 1989, 1996; Sperry & Sperry, 2000). For example, following Vygotsky’s account of the acquisition of scientific concepys, Miller (1994) proposed a discourse model of socialization in which institutions are organized to bring novices and members together recurrently for particular activities mediated by particular forms of discourse that lead to partivular social and psychological consequences for the participants. As applied to the family, the institution in which early socialization occurs, the model posits that young children are socialized into systems of meaning through recurring interactions with family members that are mediated by narrative and other discursive practices. This approach to socialization has specific implications for empirical work, requiring that researchers identity rhe kinds of narrative practices that young children routinely encounter in their everyday lives and the kinds of partivipant roles that are available to them.

Establishing the recurrent nature of narrative practices is especially important from the standpoint of the co-creation of person and culture. The power that narrative has to create certain kinds of persons rests in part on the frequency with which children participate in narrative. In the next section of this chapter, “Narrative in Early Childhood,” we return to this issue. For now, we underscore two points. First, most research on children’s narratives relies on elicited narratives; thus it cannot address the question of which narratives occur routinely in the child’s life. Although elicited narratives can inform us about many important questions, observational and ethnographic studies are needed to address this question. Second, an important trend in research on the consequences of children’s participation in narrative (and other cultural practices) is toward an expanded view of those consequences. Svholars argue that children not only acquire cognitive skills, such as the ability to tell stories to themselves and to other people, but thay also develop selves and identities, affective stances, forms of moral agency, and ways of being (e.g., Fung, Miller, & Lin, 2004; Goodnow et al., 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1990; Miller, Fung, & Mintz, 1996; Rogoff, 1990; Wenger, 1998).

Creating Persons by Representing and Enacting Selves in Narrative

In addition to sociocultural theory, a variety of other theoretical traditions have treated narrative as a particularly rich type of discursive practice. This work, some of it familiar to cultural psychologists, draws from research on discourse in sociolinguisrics that examines narrative “evaluation” (Labov, 1972; Labov & Waletzky, 1967), linguistic anthropology that examines “voicing” or “footing” (Bakhtin, 1981; Bauman, 1986; Goffman, 1979; M.H. Goodwin, 1990; Hill, 1995; Koven, 2002; Ochs & Capps, 2001) and conversation analysis (M.H.Goodwin, 1990; Jefferson, 1978, 1984; Mandelbaum, 1987, 1989 Sacks, 1974) that addresses the participant frameworks out of which stories emerge and which they transform. (See Koven, 2002, for discussion of these several approaches.) Across these traditions, scholars investigate the “meaning” of stories not for their themes or plot but for the social actions participants accomplish. In such work, with its focus on “meaning” as interactional accomplishment, scholars have sometimes resisted addressing the psychological import of stories, out of a reluctanve to see meaning as situated in and produced by the individual. However, with the stance that psyvhological meaning is deeply intertwined with social activity, such sociocentric accounts area perfectly compatible with current visions of cultural psychology.

More specifically, scholars taking a sociopragmatic approach have investigated how participation in narrative practices can construct participants’ selves or identities (e.g., Bruner, 1990; Hill, 1995; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998; Miller, 1994; Ochs & Capps, 1996; Schiffrin, 1996; Urban, 1989). According to Wortham (2001), for example, narrative construct participants’ identities insofar as narratives allow people simultaneously to enact and represent themselves in particular ways. Wortham argues that most attempts to understand how autobioguaphical narrative construnts and transforms the self are inadequate, because thay analyze narrative only at the representational or content level. In other words, autobiographical narratives function not only to represent the self-protagonist in past events but also to position the narrator in relation to his or her audience in the here-and-now ecent of storytelling. He analyzes one woman’s telling of her life story, showing how her description of herself as a character was mirrored by the srance she took toward her interviewer. While describing herself in the story as repeatedly moving from a passive to an active self over the course of her life, she simultaneously alternated positioning herself first as passive and vunlnerable and then as active and assertive vis-a-vis the interviewer over the course of the interview. Wortham argues that such parallels, or “doubling,” across representational and interactional levels of analysis constitute especially potent moments of self-creation and re-creation. Attention to the content of stories alone would miss how participants’ selves are constructed in and through the storytelling interaction itself.

In keeping with this perspective, in a later section of this chapter, “Narratives in Late Adulthood,” we discuss a Taiwanwsw grand-mother’s narrative of her two marriages, which she had never shared with anyone, including her grown children, These intimate and intensely emotional events were tellable only to the ethnoguapher, precisely because she was an outsider to the family. We argue that the meanings that Mrs. Lin constructed about herself can be most fully apptrciated by taking into account not only her narrative representations of her marriages but also the social circumstances that disallowed the telling of these stories to anyone but herself in the course of her everyday life.

NARRATIVE IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

In the Beginning, Personal Storytelling Abounds

By the time she entered kindergarten, Reeny was a veteran of nattatives settped in oral stories about herself and her family. Surrounded as she was by gifted storysellers, we can surmise that she was exposed to stories from birth. Indeed, it is now well established that children from many cultural backgrounds within and beyond the United States begin to tell stories of personal experience in conversation during the second or third year of life (e.g., see reviews by Miller, Cho, & Bracey, 2005; Ochs & Capps, 2001; Shweder et al., 2006). At this early age, children step into the narrative practices of family and community, thereby laying claim to a vitally important cultural resource (Bruner, 1990). Even linguistically isolated deaf children, whose parents choose not to expose them to a conventional sign system, are able to create gestured narratives (Van Deusen-Phillips, Goldin-Meadow, & Miller, 2001). These stories carry hints of culture-specific meaning, suggesting that conversational narrative is a remarkably robust medium of socialization.

Young children’s stories of personal experience tend to be simple, invoking small departures from the baseline of their ordinary, expectable experience: A child gets a shot; shares, unprompted, with a sibling; goes to a birthday party; helps to cook a meal; writes on the bedroom wall; defends herself against a cousin’s aggression. Small events such as these have emotional or moral significance to the child and her family and are thus “reportable.” Consider the following example, in which the child Amy fell down and hurt herself, an unexpected event with obvious emotional import. This story was intiated bu Amy’s mother: “She pulled a little sneaky the other day, went out the back door and fell down the back stepsand busted her back all up…. Didn’t you? Went out there and fell. Amy nodded her head, then said, “Me big fall down,” lifting up her dress to show the damage. Her mother replied, “You fell down, yeah [smiles]. You hit your back.” Although Amy was only 19 months old, she was able to contribute to this story of her own mishap, echoing her mother’s account, and adding a nonverbal embellishment (Miller &Sperry, 1988). Another child, age 3 years, launched a story about a memorable encounter during a recent family visit to the zoo: “Remember the walrus?... This is what he said ‘[makes spitting noises].’ ” Her mother replied, “Yeah, at the zoo. You went to the zoo. You went to the zoo again.” The child then repeated the walrus’s noise and enacted his surprising antics (Burger & Miller, 1999).

These stories may seem unremarkable, so mundane as to be negligible. From the standpoint of socialization, however, they are anything but negligible. Their power lies partly in their sheer abundance. Ethnographic observations of young children in the contexts of everyday family life show that telling stories of personal experience is a recurring practice in a wide variety of communities. For example, stories involving 21/2-year-olds occurred at average rates of three to four per hour in both middle-class Taiwanese families in Taipei and middle-class European American families in Chicago (Miller, Wiley, Fung, & Liang, 1997). In a follow-up study of the same children at 3, 31/2, and 4 years of age, stories of personal experience continued at similar rates (Chen, Lin, Miller, & Fung, 2005). Narratives accounted for one-fourth of 2-year-old’s naturally occurring talk in working-class African American families in the Black Belt of Alabama (Sperry & Sperry, 1995, 1996). In working-class European American in conarrations at an average rate of six times per hour (Burger & Miller, 1999). These and other studies suggest that the early years of life are a period of intense initiation into narrative. Interaction after interaction, personal storytelling gets woven, densely but almosi invisibly, into the fabric of young children’s social experience. Before long, telling and listening to stories become second nature to them.

Early Storytelling Is Culturally Differentiated

Regardless of where they occur, these small, mundane storie are saturated with value and replete with culturally patterned messages. Personal stories vary within and across cultures along a variety of parameters that encompass how the genre is defined and practiced (Miller et al., 2005; Miller & Moore, 1989; Ochs & Capps, 2001).

For example, in her classic ethnographic study of neighboring, working-class communities in the Piedmont Carolinas, Heath (1983) found that members of Roadville, a European American community, adhered to a criterion of literal truth when narrating their personal experiences, a pattern that also occurred in the working-class communities of South Baltimore and Daley Park (Miller, Hengst, Alexander, & Sperry, 2000). This contrasted with the African American community of Trackton, where a “story” was not a story if it lacked fictional embellishment. Roadville and Trackton also enacted opposing norms toward denigration versus aggrandizement in their portrayals of the self-protagonist. Roadville children’s stories occurred in response to adult invitations and focused oneach child’s own weakness or foolishness. Trackton children created bold, self-expressive, and triumphant self-protagonists, and asserted their right to tell stories by adroitly working their way into multiparty talk, commanding the floor and receiving approbation for their verbal artistry.

In their study of an African American community inrural Alabama, Sperry and Sperry (1995, 1996, 2000) found that 2-year-olds produced more fantasy stories than factual stories of past experience. “Both caregivers and children enjoyed telling stories of escaping from ‘Nicoudini,’ the ‘Boogabear,’ ‘Werewolf,’ or the spectral deer who entered their home one misty evening. Families told such stories easily and frequently, and children gathered around to be thrilled by the imagined terror and to practice creating it themselves” (Sperry & Sperry, 1996, p. 462). Caregivers actively discouraged girl’s fantasy stories but were more accepting of boys’ fantasy stories, a finding that may help to explain how men in this community get to be so good at “tall-bragging.” Hypothetical stories, that is. Storie about what could happen, were a relatively late development.

Another dimension of cultural variability in early storytelling has to do with the didactic use of storie. Several studies show that Chinese parents treat personal storytelling as an explicitly didactic mediun (e.g., Van Deusen Phillips et al., 2001; Q.Wang, 2004;Q.Wang & Leichtman, 2000;Q.Wang, Leichitamn, & Davies, 2000; X.Wang, Bernas, & Eberhard, 2005). For example, Miller, Fung, and their colleagues conducted a series of comparisons of middle-class Taiwanese families in Taipei and middle-class European American families in Chicago, and found that the Taiwanese amilies were much more lilely to tell stories in which they cast the 21/2-year-old child-protagonist as a transgressor (Miller et al., 1996, 1997). In keeping with local beliefs that parents should take every opportunity to correct young children throufh concrete exemplars (Fung, 1999), many of these stories occurred immediately after the child had committed a misdeed in the here and now. In conarrated stories, and in stories told about the child in the child’s presence, families repeatedly invoked moral and social rules, structured their stories so as to establish the child’s misdeed as the point of the story, and concluded their stories with didactic codas.

By contrast, the European American families rarely told stories about young children’s past transgressions. Even in those rare instances when a European American child’s transgression was narratited, a qualitatively different interpretation was constructed, one that downplayed the misdeed or framed it as humorous (Miller et al., 1996). Thus, whereas Taiwanese families were more likely to use personal storytelling as a didactic resource for correcting young children and conveying moral and social standards, European American families were more likely to use personal storytelling as a medium of entertainment and self-affirmation. This contrast was also evident in parents’ beliefs about storytelling (Miller, Sandel, Liang, & Fung, 2001) and in pretend play (Haight, Wang, Fung, Williams, & Mintz, 1999).

Moreover, the contrasting versions of personal storytelling practiced by the European American and Taiwanese families reflect and reinforce larger systems of cultural meaning in each cultural case. The self-favorability bias enacted by the European American families has been linked to discourses that valorize self-esteem (Miller et al., 1997, 2001); the didactic