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Articulating culture in the media age 91

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oriented, and the other more oriented to culture and identity. In the latter
category, there is a further difference between those studies that conceive
of narratives as evidence of deeper dispositions and meanings “beyond” 21
and those that, in a more postmodern turn, conceive of narratives as social
and cultural constructions that reveal important things about the nature of
22
meaning and identity. There is also an emerging tradition of “autoethno-
graphy” within cultural studies, where researchers interrogate their own
biographies as a way of understanding culture. 23
It may be obvious that the way I intend to use the term narrative in the
context of our inquiries here is consistent with thinking of them as
constructions. At the same time, though, the point is not to use the narra-
tives as data in an exploration of identity as a fixed psycho-social
category, but as constructions drawing on the resources of the culture.
Rather than thinking of “life narratives” in the way that a psychological
or therapeutic intervention might, I want to think of these self-descriptions
more as identity statements within which we can read the contributions of
various elements, from life history to the symbolic resources of media
culture to the way our interviewees think about and describe their own
experiences and actions. While this is not necessarily the totality of what
some psychologists might think of as “identity,” these are “identity state-
ments” that are central to the way people negotiate and construct
meanings.

Identity and narrative
This approach bears much in common with Paul Ricoeur’s ideas about
narrative and identity. Ricoeur argued that mediation is essential to
personal identity, that our self-understandings necessarily are mediated by
symbols, signs, language, texts, and the whole range of cultural-symbolic
resources we encounter. 24 This would suggest an integration of cultural
resources into identity at a very basic and profound level, and therefore
that media commodities that are the primary focus of our project here can
be expected to be among them.
Ricoeur’s ideas are even more relevant to our inquiries in what he has to
say about the narrative basis of identity. Personal identity, he argued, is a
narrative identity. By that he meant to say that identity is neither static nor
discontinuous with our ongoing experience of life, culture, and history.
Narratives strive for coherence, drawing together sometimes contradictory
elements into a coherent trajectory through time. They unite experiential
elements that are “contingencies,” meaning that they do not necessarily
work in a determined, coherent form, but must be brought into coherence
through the narrative. They also unite disparate elements such as people,
experiences, symbols, events, weaving them into a form that makes them
seem necessary or rational. 25