> "Any narrative is shaped by the benefits of hindsight, but it also captures
> the unfolding of events in time. It is informed by a sense of the whole,
> by an understanding, achieved in retrospect, of the larger social and
> historical contexts in which people acted, when they themselves necessarily
> lacked this awareness. But at the same time it can reconstruct the
> unfolding, the twists and turns of events, the surprises and
> disappointments, that agents experienced. This juxtaposition of the
> limited viewpoint of the agent and the larger forces that cannot be seen
> clearly at the time is the power of narrative, and it is precisely this
> two-sided approach-partial understanding of agent; larger social/historical
> system-that a critical socio-cultural analysis of human development seeks."
Why do you choose to present the juxtaposition as two-fold by combining
the social/historical and then collapsing it into socio-cultural? I have
been noticing that this is a relatively common approach but don't yet
understand what is behind the decision to do so.
> As I write this story I make endless decisions about what to higlight and
> what to background, and I've come to see this *as* analysis, of a kind that
> doesn't reduce the complexity of events to theoretical abstraction. And
> I'd like the people I worked with to read what I've written and say, 'yes,
> that's right, and we now understand a little better what we were trying to
> do, what went wrong, and what we can do next.' A narrative (I hope) can
> do this in the way that a quantitative analysis, for example, can't.
But what happens when the people you've worked with say, "where the hell
did you get _that_ from? you've got it all wrong. . . ." For me, this is
where much of the interesting stuff takes place.
Lenora de la Luna