Interpretive Biography

The interpretive biographical method involves the studied use and collection of personal life documents, stories, accounts, and narratives that describe turning-point moments in individuals' lives (see Denzin, 1989, Chap. 2). The subject matter of the biographical method is the life experiences of a person. When written in the first person, it is called an autobiography, life story, or life history. When written by another person, observing the life in question, it is called a biography.

The following assumptions and arguments structure the use of the biographical method. Lives are only known through their representations, which include performances such as stories, personal narratives, or participation in ritual acts. LIVED EXPERIENCE and its representations are the proper subject matter of sociology. Sociologists must learn how to connect and join biographically meaningful experiences to society-at-hand, and to the larger culture- and meaning-making institutions of the past postmodern period. The meanings of these experiences are given in the performances of the people who experience them. A preoccupation with method, with the VALIDITY, RELIABILITY, GENERALIZABILITY, and theoretical relevance of the biographical method, must be set aside in favor of a concern for meaning, performance, and interpretation. Students of the biographical method must learn how to use the strategies and techniques of performance theory, literary interpretation, and criticism. They must bring their use of the method in line with recent STRUCTURALIST and POSTSTRUCTURALIST developments in critical theory concerning the reading and writing of social texts. This will involve a concern with HERMENEUTICS, SEMIOTICS, CRITICAL RACE, FEMINIST, and postcolonial theory, as well as pedagogical cultural studies.

Lives and the biographical methods that construct them are literary productions. Lives are arbitrary constructions, constrained by the cultural writing practices of the time. These cultural practices lead to the inventions and influences of gendered, knowing others who can locate subject swithin familied social spaces, where lives have beginnings, turning points, and clearly defined endings. Such texts create “real” people about whom truthful statements are presumably made. In fact, these texts are narrative fictions, cut from the same kinds of cloth as the lives they tell about. When a writer writes a biography, he or she writes himself or herself into the life of the subject written about. When the reader reads a biographical text, that text is read through the life of the reader. Hence, writers and readers conspire to create the lives they write and read about. Along the way, the produced text is cluttered by [Page 508]the traces of the life of the “real” person being written about.

These assumptions, or positions, turn on, and are structured by, the problem of how to locate and interpret the subject in biographical materials. All biographical studies presume a life that has been lived, or a life that can be studied, constructed, reconstructed, and written about. In the present context, a life refers to two phenomena: lived experiences, or conscious existence, and person. A person is a self-conscious being, as well as a named, cultural object or cultural creation. The consciousness of the person is simultaneously directed to an inner world of thought and experience and to an outer world of events and experience. These two worlds, the inner and the outer, are opposite sides of the same process, for there can be no firm dividing line between inner and outer experience. The biographical method recognizes this fact about human existence, for its hallmark is the joining and recording of these two structures of experience in a personal document, a performative text.

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