ABSTRACT
Studying personal experience offers a window into the meaning and importance of identity in individuals' lives. Experience is inherently social and cultural. Furthermore, each recounting of an experience is a political endeavor, as certain of its elements are variously highlighted and others relegated to the shadows. Before it can be political, experience is social, enmeshed in discourse, constrained by the linguistic and cultural parameters by which it can even be discerned as experience. A story is, indeed, a particularized representation of culture, containing elements of both the social and the individual. More than merely sound, narrative methods give authority over knowledge production to the participant more effectively than many traditional methods do, precisely because they rely, in part, on the participant's understanding of culture and reality. Thus story telling is particularly well-suited to the study of culture-in-use as well as identity studies.
