Life (Hi)story writing: The relationship between talk and text

Abstract

Abstract This paper is based on my experience of life (hi)story work with Aboriginal women. It will focus mainly on the development of a collaborative methodology between Patsy Cohen and myself and the process of creating the text Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs 1. Life (hi)story writing lies uneasily on the boundary between biography and autobiography and as such challenges many of our assumptions about telling and writing a life. It has traditionally been regarded as ‘an extensive record of a life told to and recorded by another who then edits and writes the life as though it were autobiography‘2. More recently feminist researchers have redefined this process to emphasise its collaborative nature ‘in life history, two stories together produce one. A speaker and a listener ask, respond, present and edit a life‘3. Such a definition focuses our attention on the relationship, the inevitable power relations involved in the processes of the production of knowledge, the interface between talk and text an...