Abstract
Starting from the premise that experience is narratively constituted and actions are oriented through the self as the protagonist in an evolving story, narrative criminology investigates how narratives motivate and sustain offending. Reviewing narrative criminological research, this article contends that narrative criminology tends towards a problematic dualism of structure and agency, locating agency in individual narrative creativity and constraint in structure and/or culture. This article argues for a different conceptualisation of narrative as embodied, learned and generative, drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Social action, which here includes storytelling, is structured via the habitus, which generates but does not determine social action. This theorisation understands structures and representations as existing in duality, according a more powerful role to storytelling. The article concludes by discussion of the implications of such a shift for narrative interventions towards offending.
Highlights
My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge
This article argues for a sociological turn in narrative analysis, sensitised to questions of inequality, power and social structure, drawing on Bourdieu’s social theory and in particular his notion of habitus
This article proposes that the habitus includes the inculcation of narrative dispositions, formats and discourses pertaining to fields, generating action through narrative identity, habitual narratives and evaluations
Summary
My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. Whereas neutralisations are highly strategic the narrative habitus conveys the way that narratives are natural and logical; the sense that the story could never have been otherwise. These characteristics of a narrative, its enduring nature, its connection to a life lived in a particular time and place, can be summed up in the notion of the narrative habitus. Narrative criminology can engage with the ‘real’ world whilst maintaining its distinct focus on subjectivity and narrative, but doing so entails bridges troublesome dualisms: the ‘real world’ and subjective experiences; speaking and doing; material and symbolic; social structure and individual agency. Narrative criminology emerges at a key moment, drawing from post-structural scholarship on discourse but with much to add to contemporary, critical criminology oriented towards harm (Presser 2013) and the resurgence of realist/ultra-realist criminology (Matthews 2014; Hall and Winlow 2015)
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