Documents of Life

Documents of life are all those documents in which people reveal their social and personal characteristics in ways that are accessible for research. The documents could include diaries; letters; photographs; life stories; inscriptions on tombstones; furnishings; videos; and, these days, personal Web sites. In an early description of the method, humanistic anthropologist Robert Redfield described them as “personal documents,” seeing them as one in which the human and personal characteristics of somebody who is, in some sense, the author of the document find expression, so that through its means the reader of the document comes to know the author and his or her views of events with which the document is concerned (Redfield, in Gottschalk, Kluckhohn, & Angell, 1945, p. vii). They are not the second-order constructs of reality made by social scientists, but first-order accounts that attempt to enter the subjective world of informants, taking them seriously on their own terms.