Narrating and naming positive agents: Storytelling by Philadelphia postwar political elite

Abstract

This paper connects research in social psychology, psycholinguistics, and discourse analysis to develop two hypotheses about character description. Interviews conducted in the late 1970s with political elites of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA confirm predictions. Speakers describe co-group members as praiseworthy agents disproportionately, in comparison to out-group members, and refer to co-group members with individually specific language disproportionately. Extrapolating from research of similar practices in other contexts, the author explains why these two patterns may be important to identity formation. Images of positive agents are central to collective identity, so repeated stories portraying group members as such would reinforce those identities. Social psychological research suggests that specific, individual naming draws attention away from group identity; explicit group naming does the opposite. The use of individually specific names, rather than group names, may therefore mask the symbolic power created by the stories’ repeated descriptions of co-group members as positive agents. The language practice is both ubiquitous and opaque; it is common, and its power emerges from the aggregation of very short utterances. The combined practices of “narrating and naming” may exemplify the kind of misrecognition imagined by Pierre Bourdieu and Passeron (1990 [1977]). Together, these practices can reproduce or challenge social inequalities without being acknowledged for doing so.