VOICED AND UNVOICED

Abstract

David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (eds.), Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Walnut Creek and London: Altamira, 1997, £39.00, paperback £18.95, 432 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-9188-3).

Rosanna Hertz (ed.), Reflexivity and Voice. Thousand Oaks and London: Sage, 1997, £38.00, paperback £17.95, xviii+1318 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-0383-6).

Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (eds.), Memory, Identity, Com-munity: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, $19.95 paperback, xxxii+1393 pp. (ISBN 0-7914-3323-4).

Deborah E. Reed-Danahay (ed.), Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. Oxford: Berg, 1997, £34.99, paperback £14.99, xi+1277 pp. (ISBN 1-85973-970-9).

Kim Marie Vaz (ed.), Oral Narrative Research with Black Women. Thousand Oaks and London: Sage, 1997, £38.00, paperback £17.95, x+1262 pp. (ISBN 0-8039-7428-0).

Whether or not you subscribe to the view that the grand narratives of history,modernity and enlightenment are passé, you cannot fail to notice the proliferation of smaller, local narratives. The literature of the social sciences is increasingly populated by a variety of lives, life-histories, auto/biographies, auto-ethnographies and other narratives. Sociologists, anthropologists and others, in increasing numbers, have been turning their attention to the collection and documentation of ‘lives’, including their own. The biographical has taken on a renewed currency, invested with methodological and ethical significance. There is a polyphony of ‘voices’ clamouring for attention. There is, of course, nothing absolutely novel in this. At one time, life-histories and similar documents of life were celebrated as a prime source of sociological data and insight, articulating the intersection between the personal and the social. The career or the life could thus be seen to capture some of the complex relationships between socialisation and social organisation, between process and social order, or between institutions and the person. Having for some time been eclipsed and all but excluded from the methodological canon, the biographical perspective has enjoyed a significant revival in recent years. There has been an upsurge of empirical, methodological and reflective writing on biographical approaches to social research. They have received fresh legitimation from a variety of contemporary standpoints — feminist, post-structuralist and postcolonialist among them. Indeed, the celebration of multiple ‘voices’ to be found in much of the literature parallels the multiplicity of epistemological ‘positions’ to be found in contemporary social research. The books under review — and many other in the same genre — reflect those different perspectives, illustrating at once the various opportunities and limitations of contemporary work in this area. In their diversity they also display the extent to which various sub-genres develop in mutual isolation, mirroring specific disciplinary, national and empirical preoccupations. Collectively they embody a number of unresolved tensions in the systematic exploration of social actors' lives, voices and identities.