Personal Narratives as Interactive Texts: Collecting and Interpreting Migrant Life-Histories∗

Abstract

Life-history or personal narrative techniques have considerable potential as a way of recovering hidden histories, contesting academic androcentrism, and reinstating the marginalized and dispossessed as makers of their own past. Drawing on a large methodological literature on life-history collection, and applications of these techniques in Africa, we argue that geographers might explore these methodologies as a means of recovering lost geographies and venting alternative voices in academic texts. Drawing on our own project on Swazi migrant women, we suggest that life-histories cannot, however, be seen purely as vehicles for the delivery of uncontaminated fact about the past. Rather personal narratives should be viewed and interpreted as interactive texts. This leads us to a consideration of a number of methodological and interpretive issues surrounding life-history collection: the positional advantages of insider status, the “terrible assymetries” of the interview process, and the power (and pitfalls) of narrative forms of representation.