Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements

1. Narrative and Social Movements The Power of Stories

ONE Narrative and Social Movements The Power of Stories JOSEPH E. DAVIS The past two decades have witnessed a great flowering in writing about narrative and the effort by a wide variety of scholars to incorporate it into their disciplines. The study of narrative in fiction has, of course, long been central to literary theory. More recently, however, narrative study has moved out of English Departments to take on new prominence in psychology , philosophy, semiotics, folklore studies, anthropology, political science, sociology, history, and legal studies. The “narrative turn” (Mitchell 1981) in so many fields of human inquiry, has, no doubt, many and complex causes. This development, however, is clearly part of a renewed emphasis in these fields on human agency and its efficacy, on context and the embeddedness of human experience, and on the centrality of language to the negotiation of meaning and the construction of identity in everyday life (see Hinchman and Hinchman 1997). In specific areas of inquiry, however, both within and across these disciplines, a concern with narrative has often been slow to develop, and research on social movements is paradigmatic. Within sociology, for instance, there has been a resurgence of interest in narrative as a social act and form of explanation, on storytelling as a social process, on life histories and “accounts” as social objects for investigation, and on the narrative constitution of identity (see, for example, Davis 2000a; Griffin 1993; Maines 1993; Richardson 1990; Somers 1994). Yet, with respect to social movements, little of this interest in narrative can be found. As Gary Alan 3 Fine has observed, narrative “has barely been explored by social movement researchers” (1995: 133). For some, a neglect of narrative stems from the continued sway of theoretical orientations that emphasize structural and interest-oriented explanations, to the near exclusion of ideational factors. A certain resistance might also be explained by the antipositivist and postmodern stance of some sociologists who promote a focus on narrative. With a few notable exceptions (e.g., Benford 1993b; Fine 1995; Hunt and Benford 1994; Polletta 1998a), even scholars who have sought to reinvigorate movement research with increased sensitivity to issues of agency, context, and language have tended not to directly engage the concept of narrative. Neglect from this quarter is especially surprising because social movements are dominated by stories and storytelling , and narrative goes to the heart of the very cultural and ideational processes these scholars have been addressing, including frames, rhetoric, interpretation, public discourse, movement culture, and collective identity. The investigation of narrative in social movements is both warranted and overdue. Combining theoretical analysis with empirical studies of narrative in specific movements, this volume argues that narrative is both a vital form of movement discourse and a crucial analytical concept. It demonstrates that studying narratives, their functions, and the conditions under which they are created and performed adds to the growing “cultural turn” in the study of social movements by offering analytical insights and understandings that extend contributions in the recent constructionist and new social movement scholarship. The analysis of narrative, as the contributors show, overcomes key limitations in the framing perspective and illuminates core features of identity-building and meaning-making in social activism. It also sheds new light on movement emergence, internal dynamics , and public persuasion, and addresses cultural aspects of activism that get short shrift in movement research. Moreover, this book’s empirical cases include movements that are prominent on the American landscape and that have high rates of participation , but that typically have been regarded by social movement scholars as too apolitical or individualistic to be considered social movements, and therefore ignored. Unlike movements with an explicit focus on the state, self-help and New Age movements, like many other “culturalist” new social movements, have looser, more fluid structures and direct activism toward far more diffuse and decentralized forms of social power. These forms of collective action represent challenges to power relations that are 4 DAVIS inscribed in social institutions and cultural practices, including aspects of everyday life. They engage what Anthony Giddens calls “life politics,” a politics that concerns “issues which flow from processes of self-actualization in post-traditional contexts” (1991: 214). Studying movement narratives , as the case studies show, provides analytical purchase on unifying and oppositional elements not only in state-targeted movements but in these less overtly political movements as well.1 Stories of Change was conceived for all those interested in movements and...