Stories Have Histories: Reflections on the Personal in Personal Storytelling

Abstract

In this paper I reflect on the personal in personal storytelling, drawing upon Bakhtin and allied theoretical perspectives in anthropology and cultural psychology. These perspectives converge on the idea that stories are not only forms of representation but also sociocultural practices. Stories do more than evoke events in temporal sequence: they have histories in people’s lives. I explore this idea via examples of three oral narrative genres collected as part of ethnographic work in several culturally and ethnically diverse sites. ＂Stories of personal experience＂ and ＂life stories＂ are explicitly ＂personal＂ in that the narrator casts the story in the first-person, but ＂stories of vicarious experience＂ invoke (in the third-person) a story about someone else’s experience. Yet vicarious tellings are also personal in that they reflect and create bonds between teller and listener. Building on this point, I argue that any story-a written story, a news story, a story from television-can be personalized via contact with stories of personal experience. Such personalized re-workings of narratives occur across the life course and across cultural groups. This process of personalization via personal storytelling helps illuminate a key problem in psychological anthropology and cultural psychology, namely, the co-creation of person and culture.