Across cultures, narrative emerges early in communicative development and is a fundamental means of making sense of experience. Narrative and self are inseparable in that narrative is simultaneously born out of experience and gives shape to experience. Narrative activity provides tellers with an opportunity to impose order on otherwise disconnected events, and to create continuity between past, present, and imagined worlds. Narrative also interfaces self and society, constituting a crucial resource for socializing emotions, attitudes, and identities, developing interpersonal relationships, and constituting membership in a community. Through various genres and modes; through discourse, grammar, lexicon, and prosody; and through the dynamics of collaborative authorship, narratives bring multiple, partial selves to life.
NARRATIVE HORIZONSNarrative is a fundamental genre in that it is universal and emerges early in the communicative development of children (4,19,152,157,164,182,209). This review focuses on narratives of personal experience, defined here as verbalized, visualized, and/or embodied framings of a sequence of actual or possible life events.Personal narratives comprise a range of genres from story (60, 135, 147, 175, 177, 207) to novel (11, 38, 39, 132, 188), diaries (239) and letters (21) to memoirs (100), gossip (20,28, 101,160) to legal testimony (10, 165), boast (207) to eulogy (29, 30), troubles talk (119) to medical history (49), joke (191) to satire (132, 183), bird song (65, 202) to opera (40), etching to palimpsest (150), and mime (5, 233) to dance (93,205). Counter to a prevalent ideology of disembodied objectivity (98), even scientific narratives can be personal in tone. Scientists, for example, routinely construct oral narratives of procedures Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1996.25:19-43. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by New Mexico State University (NMSU) on 09/17/13. For personal use only.
