Roots Or Routes

Rudolf Egger

Roots or Routes

Biographical research and its impact on the democratization processes and the transformation of post war societies

Introduction

This project is an attempt to connect the approaches in biographical research with the processes of social transformation in Kosova. It tries to bring theoretical issues and approaches from oral and life history work into adult education research and practice.

The first goal is to establish a Life Course Archive in Kosova. Students of different faculties will do recordings of life-stories in different levels of the Kosovarian society. These interviews will secondly be transcribed and collected. In arrangement with the local partners at the university and at KODI (Kosovar Research and Documentation Institute) some of the interviews will be translated into English to use them as learning materials for the processes of interpretation with different groups. In these interpretation groups (with Kosovarian students and others from all over Europe) we try to (re-)construct the experiences and meanings of social changes from the perspective of life course, which can help to understand the individual possibilities in creating one's life in new social structures. The main points in these work are:

• How could Kosova people manage the many risky status-passages in their lives after the war?
• What kinds of transformation processes take place and what processes of memory and forgetting are necessary to manage these changes?
• What happens in theses processes of „life-trajectories in social space" ?

The archived data material is at the moment used by students to learn the principles of qualitative research methods. It can also be served as a "pathfinder," or as a "store of ideas" in preparation for newly-planned investigations. The analysis of data which has already been collected may be carried out in the form of historical and culturally-related comparative studies. This archive should finally be a resource base for humanitarian and research projects to analyze the conditions and possibilities of social change. In reconstructing the dominant patterns in (auto-)biographical narratives we can see the different historical periods and different stages of societal development. In that sense, biographical research has a huge impact on the democratization process and the transformation of this post war society.

To understand the problems and the background of these ethnicity it is crucial to know something about this country. With the declarations of independence of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991 the breakdown of Yugoslavia began, 1993-1994 there was a war between Croatia and Muslims, 1998 the battles in Kososva started. After the air raids of NATO in 1999 Milosevic resigned in 2000 and since that year UN troops secure the peace in the country, which is still a part of Yugoslavia. Kosova is under United Nations and NATO administration since 1999. The political status is still unclear and the economic situation is very bad. In recent days the European Union has sent clear signals that it is willing to grant eventual membership to western Balkan countries provided they comply with EU standards of democracy and human rights.

In all my activities in this country it is the goal to find out something about the many small daily steps which must be done, to create a kind of “normality” after the terrible massacres of an ethnical-territorially defined nationalism in former Yugoslavia. These steps can be very well reconstructed by narrations, by life stories, because personal experiences are naturally linked with social orders. Each individual story is connected with further stories, in which the collective history will be negotiated and reflected. The view on the biographical narration opens the possibility to analyze the concreteness of the “individual case” in the complexity of collective history. Life stories contain thereby a kind of a transition character, that’s why they can be used for the reconstruction of periods of political transformation. For example: In the individual story we can find very clear the national or mythological character of the Albanian people in Kosova. The collected narrations can also be read as narrative lines in relation to the (re-)interpretation of the past, in which lived life is fixed into history in the so-called collective memory in Kosova.

The Archive

Approximately 80 interview texts (all in Albanian, 34 in English) have been made anonymous, documented and deposited into a digital archive.

Due to the sensitive nature of qualitative data, we prepared a detailed concept of anonymity and data protection (see Witzel 2004). The strategies of anonymization are based on the rule, that person-related details like names, addresses or places are erased when the interviews are transcribed in order to prevent the re-identification of the interviewee concerned. But there is still a big problem. Special analyses of interviews are hardly possible without an awareness of biographical details, and as a rule it is necessary to know the whole context since the structure of the narration forms a basic requirement for text interpretation. There remains the question of clarifying under which conditions qualitative data can be given to other researchers or interested persons for the purpose of their specific use. The following points should be agreed upon in a written contract (Witzel 2004):

• data may only be used for learning, research and humanitarian purposes
• data must not be passed on to a third party and must be stored in such a way that a third party cannot gain access,
• data must remain anonymous,
• person-related details may not be quoted or published, and
• notification of the end of the research project must be given and the data which has been made available must be erased.

The archive must check the process of making data anonymous by the researchers, but regrettably, we cannot formulate any general solutions for making qualitative data anonymous because such data is extremely heterogeneous in terms of the themes and areas of life already mentioned. The other question is, under which conditions qualitative data can be given to other researchers for the purpose of secondary and re-analysis. The use of archived data for (re-)analysis and secondary analysis has many methodological and methodic advantages which have partially been put forward in connection with the tradition of quantitative methods (see Thompson 2000).

Stories and structures

Oral history projects want to look to recover the voices from below, the stories of individuals and communities whose lives have been hidden from history. Beyond these democratic aspirations and methods and the criticisms by traditional documentary historians is always a crucial methodological question, why individuals compose their memories in particular ways, and how the processes of remembering could be a key to understand the ways in which certain individual and collective versions of the past are active in the present. There is strong multivalence of individual memory and the plurality of versions of the past provided by different speakers (as well as different documentary sources). But the ‘distortions’ of memory could be a resource as much as a problem.

In recent years oral historians have become more interested in exploring the relationships between memory and subjectivity, and between collective memory and the processes of remembering. We are now more self-conscious about the distinctive character of oral testimony, and assert the theoretical and methodological values of the qualitative approach in oral history research.

Biographical self-reflections are attempts to find and make up stories, in which one can rediscover oneself and with which one can live. Creating an acceptable autobiography is part of the continuously ongoing process of identity building throughout life and up to death. This happens both in everyday life and in the process of learning and acting. Dealing with the subject’s world means in a constructivist view, that people are narrative constructors of their world. This focus does – firstly – not include that the ‘real world’ has no influence on this constructions, and, it does – secondly – not mean that our constructions have no impact on the ‘real world’. ‘Stories’ and ‘structures’ are dialectically inter-twinned and the way they need each other makes the world changing.

There is indeed a great deal to suggest that we spend a considerable part of our everydays existence within the horizon of ‘stories’. Stories constitute the unity of our individuality, but they are also intersubjective in character. Stories create the social contexts without which we could not live. Even historical description is essentially narrative because it conceives of historical events as elements within chains of events, in a quite unpretentious sense as ‘stories’. The future exists only within the horizon of expectations. To that extent, every successful historian is a ‘narrator’ – even if (s)he prefers (as a follower of the ‘école d‘annales’) to deal with structural historical issues. The everyday narrator is also a ‘historian’. Even his/her ‘story’ is part of that universalist narrative that sets modernity apart from everything that went before. The everyday narrator, precisely in his function as a narrator, is a bearer of ‘structures’, because the narrative networks him with the social and historical lifeworld in which he takes part. Narrators need a kind of “lay concept” of the world in the sense of the everyday world or lifeworld, i.e. they cannot make use of narrative forms of description without referring at least intuitively to collectively available knowledge. ‘Stories and structures’ cannot be separated from each other (see Alheit/Dausien 2000, Egger 1995). Narrations are much more than mere subjective reconstructions of the ‘real world’. Methodologically spoken, they are the king’s way to understand reality, because the disposition to tell a story (or to interpret history) is always the perspective of the actor.

There is no other way to describe history, and particularly life history, apart from the form of a narrative. Paul Ricoeur has powerfully argued this in his books Time and Narrative (1984). However, this does, of course, not mean that the narrative is identical with real actions, events and things having ‘happened’ in the past. It says, there is a characteristic relationship, a structural similarity between things happening in the ‘real world’ and those that are told in a story. Even more complicated: the told story itself is, as you might say, a ‘physical’ part of the real world and has a certain impact on it. So again, and a bit more dialectical: As ‘history’ is not understandable save in the form of a narrative, the narration as such ‘makes’ history. This relation will be clear and more concrete in the presentation of the findings of our project on biographies. Narrations are used in that context in much more than mere subjective reconstructions of the ‘real world’.

In the work with the interpretation groups it becomes transparent that the frame of reference which a narrative reconstruction of social reality represents, does not just imply a 'system of rules', but a biographical action perspective. Any remembering of an experience or event that must necessarily precede the narrative situation opens up not only a narrower or wider horizon, but also refers back to changes in the narrator’s self. An event worth to be remembered is obviously one that has left traces; it has marked the narrator and left behind an ’impression’, altering the structure of his experience to a greater or lesser degree. “Any impromptu narration of one’s own experience is also a new remembering of this more or less unnoticeable process of change” (Schütze 1984, p. 82). This statement is of definite theoretical significance, because that each has to ratify this narrative plan in his narration. How these consequences unfold as a 'cognitive frame of reference' for narration in impromptu autobiographical narrative has been described detailed by Fritz Schütze. Schütze (1984) points out the ’cognitive figures of impromptu autobiographic narrative’, with which he associated the following four phenomena: "Personifications of biography and events, in addition to the social relations existing or changing between them; chaining of event and experience; situations, life milieus, and social worlds as the conditional and orientational framework for social processes; and the total design of the life history." (1984, p. 81)

Having said this, the narrator also needs, according to Schütze (1984, pp. 88ff), to select specific 'linkage forms' that condense to procedures (ibid., p. 88) - in addition to the presentation of himself and other important actors in her/his biography. Schütze considers four 'experiential attitudes' towards life history processes to be of particular theoretical relevance; these can be characterized as "systematic elementary aggregate conditions of the linkage of events in experience" (ibid., p. 93):

(1) Biographical action schemes,

(2) institutional patterns for life course procedure,

(3) life 'trajectories' and

(4) transformation processes (Schütze 1984, p. 92).

The collection of memories

To the conditions of human life belongs the organization of the past, the linkage of our being in the context of a history. We (re-)arrange ourselves, our experiences, within an “inner value map” which is in motion. This procedure of the development of values knowledge (Urteilsvermögen) can also be called education. Hans Joas describes the emergence of the values in his book “The Genesis of Values” (2001) thereby convincingly, how our value system doesn’t arise from rational-argumentative justifications, but from experiences, in which we were forced to leave normal conditions behind us and in those in which subjective experiences appear evidently as the good.

My remarks want to clarify how such self education potentials can be productive in the handling of crisis-experiences in the sense of biographical-orientated concepts. Even in educational contexts such learning processes are crucial (i. e. in the relation to the history of mentalities, to collective experiences or to culture). We have to deal with the different meanings of history, of life-stories (individually and collectively) because the “collection of memories”, of events, doesn’t produce meaning in itself. The “red line” of a story can be build by different “stones” of (what we call) memory. The space, in which memory can filled up with meaning is a highly stressed area, in which meaning is produced by different “voices” of culture, mythology or race and gender. These processes of “negotiation” are linked biographical educational processes in their historical, cultural and social contexts. In the reconstruction of these we can also find out, how our roots fix the possibilities of our for routes into the future and also into the past. It is tremendous in the situation of Kosova, how these processes are underlined by the so-called collective memory in this country. Even all the historical suffering of this “fate community”, which is still alive in this country, produces extremely long memory cycles. The degradations and also the requirements from periods of long term repressions, make this memory-work so painful for everybody. In our work with the students we try to widen the interpretation-possibilities of the past in a methodological-ruled way. We work on different levels, e.g. in the concrete life story of a biography-holder, but we are also focused on the story of the Albanian people and the forms of their traditional memories. Our leading questions (among other things) are: How do the processes of the reference to the past reach into the production of the present? Which forms of memory produces which kind of present and future?

Narration was thereby never only used as reproduction of the past but also as production of new plots, new areas of historical experience and the horizons of expectation. In the concrete work with the interviews (and in many discussions in and outside of the university) we always came to the same question, how to cope with history and how to create and develop new possibilities and resources to handle the past. For almost every Kosovarian (students or interviewee) the same demands were important. They declare:

1. We want that the hidden truth of our suffering comes to the daylight. We want that everybody sees, what has been done to the Albanian people in Kosova for decades.
2. We want that there is a form of justice, which punishes the aggressors or at least gives them their responsibility for the done. We want an apology.
3. We finally want to have the right to live in a free country.

Many other points could be stated here, but these are the basic demands. In all the phases of our work we noticed again and again, how strong memory is linked to the structures of guilt and racism, of smashed and destroyed goals, which appear in no archives. And behind the collective and the individual suffering there lay obviously the economic tragedy which comes out of the inequality for many decades.

The empirical work

The following considerations are also linked to the possibilities of biographical learning in a project at a university. It concerns not only individual learning of isolated individuals, but also learning as transformation of experiences, knowledge and action structures in the life-course and in the context of the life-world. I call these therefore biographical learning in the sense of a phenomenological learning term. 25 students participated in the starting course at the university of Pristina (participants from in- and outside of Kosova; NL, USA, BUL, SLO, SLK, A, MOL). The main work was to learn the methodology of qualitative empirical social research (the technique of the narrative interview) and to establish several interpretation groups for the structural analysis of life stories.