Abstract:
This paper examines the impact of adopting a holistic narrative analysis methodology for studying the workings of historical consciousness as they influence individuals’ sense of group identity and agency. In focusing particularly on the unique experiences of English-speaking Quebec, and the educational role plaid by its community leaders for strengthening the linguistic minority’s vitality, the paper looks at a three-pronged application for better grasping how their historical sense making patterns condition the social posture from which they educate group members about civic engagement and community survival. In viewing historical consciousness as both an object of inquiry and theoretical approach, the quest of attaining such a global vision centers on analyzing the content and the form of research participants’ narrative formulations regarding the community’s past and how they are understood and used for mobilizing social action. Of central importance here is the underlying interrelationship of participants’ emerging narrative templates, thought processes, and knowledge of historical content-matter. Within a narrative analysis lens, the analysis of these elements presupposes humans are storytelling animals who construct reality and configure their sense of knowing and acting in time by drawing upon narrative resources from personal cultural toolkits. When faced with ethical, political, or practical dilemmas, individuals consult past ideas, events, and experiences from such repertoires for giving meaning to what once was and for establishing what could have been, should, and shall be. In following this logic, the three analytical methods presented here insert individuals in the historical sense-making process with a view to observing their grasp and enactment of historical reality. In seizing what participants unconsciously know and do, the techniques of ghostwriting and narrative structural analysis help decipher culturally available skeleton plots of generalizable storylines or schematic narrative templates regarding understandings and uses of history. They thus offer knowledge on embodiments of larger cultural modes of historical sense making. In discerning what participants are consciously aware of when giving meaning to the workings of history, a cross-comparison inquiry, relating to conventional open coding strategies, permits capturing the thought processes behind their historical consciousness and how these help negotiate awareness of their public role, posture, and agency. Finally, in going beyond such conscious and unconscious narrative articulations, content analysis permits analyzing the contents of historical narratives of the past to determine the emergent narrative patterns that structure the central historical items and directing ideas that participants value the most and mobilize in the community.