Creation of meaning

A focus on meaning-giving constructions has become well established in contemporary anthropology and oral history. In his programmatic text on what oral history is, Portelli suggests the following:

What is really important is that memory is not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings. […] The specific utility of oral sources […] lies […] in the very changes wrought by memory. These changes reveal the narrators’ effort to make sense of the past and to give a form to their lives.” (Portelli 1998, 69)

Fischer (2014), in attempting to formulate an anthropological theory of wellbeing, contributes the insight that making sense of one’s actions is crucial for realising the wish of living a good life: “Living up to the expectations of particular values is in many ways the stock and trade of human existence; and it is this forward-looking, aspirational quality that gives meaning to much of what we do” (Fischer 2014, 6). It is in the quest for meaning where looks into the past and looks into the future meet.

Phenomenology stands at the root of the modern way in which history and anthropology study meaning. One of its core thoughts is that the ways in which we see, conceptualise and understand elements of our lifeworld define what meaning we attribute to our experiences of the past. This makes the phenomenological perspective so important for the interpretation of oral history testimonies. Husserl commented on the fact that both the past and the future are graspable for every human only from the point of view of the present. In the following, he asserts that the present defines how we make sense of the past and of our projections of the future:

Our focus on the world of perception (and it is no accident that we begin here) gives us, as far as the world is concerned, only the temporal mode of the present; this mode

itself points to its horizons, the temporal modes of past and future. Recollection, above all, exercises the intentional function of forming the meaning of the past. (Husserl 1970 [1936], 168, my emphasis)

Here Husserl points at one of the tenets of oral history long before oral history as a discipline was established. When analysing our data, we need to start from the present in which we meet our interlocutor, and not from the past we are told about by him or her. Qualitative research, and most palpably interviewing, “operates in a complex historical field that cross-cuts multiple moments, all of which operate in the present” (Denzin 2009, 216). By exploring the lifeworld of the person in the here and now we can understand how and why people make sense of the past in certain ways, and only by taking this into account can we reconstruct past lifeworlds as well. The present lifeworld, which is temporarily shared between my interlocutor and me, is the ground for intersubjectively shared patterns of meaning. The meaning of actions of the past is created in an individual’s present reflection on this past. In other words, this meaning varies depending on the circumstances of this present reflection. Schütz gives a good definition of meaning in the same vein:

Meaning is not a quality inherent in certain experiences emerging within a stream of consciousness but the result of an interpretation of a past experience looked at from the present Now with the reflective attitude. As long as I live in my acts, directed towards the objects of these acts, the acts do not have any meaning. They become meaningful if I grasp them as well-circumscribed experiences of the past and, therefore, in retrospection.

Only experiences which can be recollected beyond their actuality and which can be questioned about their constitution are, therefore, subjectively meaningful. (Schutz 1970, 1:210)

The interest in meaning-giving constructions is an originally phenomenological way of doing inquiry. It is phenomenology’s assumption that all action, including the creation of meaning (beliefs, motivations, representations, and theorising), is grounded in the present lifeworld. In the case of oral history and anthropological fieldwork, this means that not only the narration by the interviewee but also its interpretation by the researcher are constructions of meaning. Indeed, as Haumann notes, “In the process of critical and interpretive understanding of meaning [...] the historian creates new meaning and co-creates the reality” (Haumann 2006, 51).

There is, however, another assumption that needs clarification: in the lifeworld of everyday life, as well as in scholarly literature, the creation of meaning is most often implicitly understood as the making of positive meaning. This assumption is not often explicitly addressed in social sciences. The lifeworld-oriented historian Heiko Haumann puts the emphasis on meaning as follows: “Recollection shapes the self-conception of people and governs action. It substantially contributes to the praxis of

actors and bestows meaning upon it […], whereby ‘meaning’ becomes nothing less than an existential question” (Haumann 2006, 44). It is implied that this existential quest for meaning is a quest for positive meaning. This reasoning points in the right direction but needs further clarification: it is an existential question because positive meaning is defined and required socially. The quest for positive meaning does not emanate from an isolated ego. As Davies and Harré (1990, 46, 59) state, “an individual emerges through the processes of social interaction”, and “we do struggle with the diversity of experience to produce a story of ourselves which is unitary and consistent. If we don’t, others demand of us that we do.” This is a reference to the common, unspoken intersubjective expectations within the lifeworld. Individuals tend to position themselves with reference to what they feel the current expectations are. This is of course not a law, but a tendency. Digressions tend to be seen by others as digressions from ‘normality’, which means that they leave the realm of the unspoken and will prompt attempts to explicate. The meaning that individuals are to associate with their actions is in most cases expected to be positive, and individuals usually take those expectations implicitly into account. When such expectations are not met, this may lead to a disruption of smooth coexistence, as exemplified in Article 3 in the account of contradicting depictions of the boarding school past by two different teachers and a former pupil.

According to Bourdieu (1987, 297), ‘life-history’ is one of those common-sense notions “which has been smuggled into the learned universe”. It presupposes that life is “a history”, “a path”, “a road”, “a track”, “a progression”, “a trajectory”, something consisting of a beginning, various stages and an ending. Bourdieu’s criticism is justified in relation to uncritical biographies depicting lives as consistent trajectories (the usual suspects being expressions like “from his earliest days…”). It is indeed tempting for both sides, biographer and biographee, to follow this order and thus obtain a fascinating story, and it requires a conscious effort from the scholar not to succumb to this temptation. However, what is common, shared sense is also likely to be “smuggled” into the oral narrative by the interviewee. It is the implicit and presumed common sense, the social frame that defines and requires an implicit meaning in past actions. What this meaning is “is defined through cultural values and a sense of purpose based on what matters most in life”, as Fischer (2014, 7) suggests in relation to pursuit of “the good life”. As biographical researchers, we need not blindly perpetuate the implicit common sense, but we need to recognise that certain constraints on creating meaning do exist. In sum, a well-constructed history, story or series of episodes giving the protagonist’s action positive meaning means constancy to oneself, a predictable, stable identity and, ultimately, “normality” (Bourdieu 1987, 299). In social interaction these are more often than not desirable qualities. What is regarded as positive is defined and implied not by the narrating ego alone, but in the wider society as well as in the immediate conversational situation. Positive meaning – as relative as it may

be – is both a social requirement, as stressed by Bourdieu, and a crucial element for personal wellbeing, as emphasised by Fischer.

Reflecting on his own life, Ingold came to a conclusion similar to Bourdieu’s about the non-linearity of life:

My own work, over the last quarter of a century, has been driven by an ambition to reverse this emphasis: to replace the end-directed or teleonomic conception of the life-process with a recognition of life’s capacity continually to overtake the destinations that are thrown up in its course. It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad of things that form, persist and break up in its currents. Life, in short, is a movement of opening, not of closure. As such, it should lie at the very heart of anthropological concern. (Ingold 2011, 3–4)

Phenomenologically inspired oral history research can directly embrace Bourdieu’s and Ingold’s thoughts on the zig-zag of life. Being aware of the teleonomic burden of biography by de-constructing and re-constructing this burden is a form of healthy phenomenological reduction. We stop seeing life as one line but rather see it at every stage and every moment as a point of departure for a potential myriad of different lines.