>As for recommendations,you might check out a>book by Renato Rosaldo,
Culture and >Truth: A Remaking of Social Analysis, where he explicitly
talks about the role >of narrative in social scientific research (which I'm
assuming is the overall >"genre" you would place yours in).
Rosaldo makes the point that narrative structures are not universal--and
that Western narratives are Aristotean in terms of time and space being
linear. One point is that the participant observer (cultural analyst)
should attend to the participants narrative structure--he uses the concepts
of tempo and improvisation--and he illustrate with an example of Ilongot and
Balinese narratives being distorted by Aristotelean time/space structures.
>Martin (and others of us), the choice of narrative modalities vis-a-vis
>other types of modalities is not simply an instrumental one.
Absolutely. As Geertz says in Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive
Theory of Culture": cultural life is semiotic, that is s a web of
signification that humans have spun and that "the analysis of it [culture]
is not an experimental science in search of law but an itnerpretive one in
search of meaning." (p. 5).
It seems to me that one's research mode is like Geertz's turtle--that is it
stands on the turtle of one's assumptions about reality.
Scott Oates
3700 LNCO
University Writing Program
University of Utah 84112
801-581-7090