Page 105 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

94 Articulating culture in the media age

that people will more or less self-consciously use the opportunity of the
interview to share these narratives in whole or in part, and that what we
come away with is material that can most helpfully be seen in this way. We
should expect, further, that they will to some extent reflect that late-
modern project of the self, and will be about the struggle to construct such
a self. They will thus carry evidence of the challenges and contradictions to
the self that our interviewees have encountered, and evidence of their
strategies for crafting a coherent sense of self in response. They are also
normative in that they represent the ideals and aspirations of their
speakers, again consistent with Ricoeur’s as well as with Giddens’s ideas.
It is helpful as well to think of these narratives as “plausible.” This is
rooted in the Interactionist idea that these constructions of self involve a
logic that they are fitted to certain contexts and certain “others” for which
and for whom they must “make sense.” It is in this sense that our interpre-
tations of them most reflect constructivist ideas about reflexivity. This
point can be clarified by means of the earlier discussion of “accounts of
media.” To the extent that media resources are brought to bear in narra-
tives of self, they necessarily carry with them a certain set of culturally
determined ideas about the nature and status of those resources. It could
be said that what my friend at the ski area was doing was making an
account of media that she intended to “make sense” – that is, to be “plau-
sible” – to a university professor who studies media. It is likely that she
would have made the same account of television to many other categories
of people as well, given the generalized opprobrium the culture attaches to
television viewing.
The purpose of the interviews is not to “collect” these narratives as
such. The interviews collect discourses, interactions among informants,
and interactions between informants and interviewers. The agenda of the
interview is to talk about media, home, family, religion, spirituality, and
values. What results, as we will see, are in fact elements of the larger, more
comprehensive narratives of self through which these informants make
sense of themselves for themselves and for others.
I want to argue that the notion of the “plausible narrative of the self,”
then, is less evidentiary than it is heuristic. It provides us an opportunity to
understand how all of the elements of life experience are drawn into these
narratives, how they relate, what is struggled over, what is negotiated “in”
and what is negotiated “out.” The point is thus not the narrative itself and
what it results in. The point is what goes into the narrative.
Consistent with the reflexive and postmodern turns in ethnography and
cultural studies, I further want to suggest that we think of these narratives
as a particular kind of work for our informants, and a particular kind of
account for us as observers and interpreters.
For our informants, these narratives are, as I have said, a “representa-
tion,” a description of self and of the lifecourse. They are also a “history”