"Att skriva livet är en annan historia"
att förstå och hantera inkonsekvens, diskrepans och levande metaforer i en levnadsteckning
Philosophical anthropologyAnthropologyHistoriographyEthnographyBiographyLife historyIdentityPaul RicoeurRepresentationLiving metaphorInconsistencySocial sciencesSamhällsvetenskaperCultural anthropologyEthnologyKulturantropologiEtnologiSocial Sciences
In the pilot study for a biography, some of the methodological and/or theoretical problems facing the anthropologist and biographer are discussed.The empirical section is based on a number of interviews I made with my grandmother over the period 1995-2001. I have come across inconsistencies in the material when rendering a historical event. Furthermore, the material makes me reflect on how the biographer or anthropologist is able to handle or interpret that she and the subject/informant has a different attitude to metaphors and how the metaphors can change over time, space and interpretation.The essay begins with a summary review of some of the central social and behavioural scientific theories that can be related to the individual and the biography.There then follows an in-depth discussion based on Paul Ricoeur's philosophy that says that your identity is created in relation to how you look at your history and future at the present time. Identities are created in an interaction between the field we are currently in, the cultural capital that includes gestures, mannerisms, symbols, our language and the area of interpretation the field allows in the culture. Consequently, the biography is also a representation that is created in time and space and between the subject and the person rendering the subject.The biography or ethnography is transient and is of necessity a historiography.Ricoeur talks about the living metaphor. A metaphor created in each moment. Basic values are often rendered metaphorically. When someone talks about and refers to a metaphor whose interpretation has changed over time, the interpretation is influenced partly by how the subject understands the metaphor both today and historically. But it is also influenced by how the subject or the informant thinks that the biographer perceives the metaphor.The historiography or biography will therefore express something about the person and the context that it is written in, but as long as the biographer or ethnographer is clear about this, it should not represent any problem.Inconsistencies and living metaphors are a reality wherever there is human life.