Religious Identities and Religious Institutions 213
IDENTITY AS A NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION
What is already implied in these discussions of action and agency is the way in which
“narrative” may prove a helpful metaphor for understanding the nature of identities.
Studies of identity have long taken conversation and language as key sites for analysis.
Indeed, the ability to use a group’s language is basic to what we mean by membership
and identity. To participate in the “discourse” of the group is to enter the social world
that the group has constructed (Brown 1993). Our understanding of ourselves, includ-
ing our incorporation of categories that keep us in dominated positions, is worked out
in communication and language. As George Herbert Mead (1934) suggested, identity
construction can be viewed in terms of the words we use – words that categorize, words
that imply relationships (and often the unequal power inherent in them).
It is, however, critical to move past the words themselves. What narrative analysis
offers us is attention to therelationshipsandactionsthat give words their meaning. If
we are to understand the nature of identity in a complex world that involves multiple
solidarities that both constrain and are continually reconstructed, we need a dynamic
mode of analysis that moves beyond categorizing words and analyzing syntax. “(A)ll
of us come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing) by being
located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in social narratives...,” claims
Margaret Somers (1994: 606). Narrative, she goes on, renders an event understandable
by connecting it to a set of relationships and practices – historically and spatially,
particular people doing socially patterned things.
Narrative takes an event and makes it part of a plot, that is, an action-account.
The event cannot do this for itself, but must be “emplotted” by the actors who must
evaluate the various possible scenarios available to them.^11 The events that become
part of a narrative are selected from all that we know of the world. They are placed
in a temporal order that implies causation and provides closure. And they are placed
in a structure of relationships. As Ewick and Silbey (1995) point out, the process of
emplotment is an inherently moral exercise, giving meaning at the same time that it
creates explanation and order. This process of emplotment need rarely be conscious;
internalized narratives guide most action through habit. Nor are narratives grand stories
that explain the world. They need only be unspoken accounts that take an event and
give it meaning by making it part of an implied episode or chapter, accounts that
identify the characters in the event as part of a larger cast and that situate the event in
a meaningful setting.
Among the narratives at play in identity construction are, according to Somers
(1994), four types. What she calls “ontological narratives” are the socially constructed
stories that are carried by the individual actor as a way of orienting and emplotting the
actor’s own life. This is her way of reinstating some notion of “core” or “coherence”
in the face of arguments about the self as vagabond. To avoid the presumptions of im-
mutability contained in the notion of an “ontological” self, however, I would prefer to
capture this idea as “autobiographical narratives,” instead. Choices about how to act
(^11) Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) notion of agency is very compatible with a narrative analysis.
Every action, they claim, contains, in addition to the “iterative” (past patterns), an imagined
future, and an improvised present; and creative selection is involved in all three dimensions.
The “imaginative element” in agency is the human ability to generate future trajectories of
action (plots), to imagine what may happen as a result of my action.