Stories, Background Knowledge and Themes: Problems in the Analysis of Life History Narrative Author(s): Michael Agar Source:

American Ethnologist, Vol. 7, No. 2 (May, 1980), pp. 223-239 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/643589 . Accessed: 10/06/2011 11:14
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stories, and themes: backgroundknowledge problemsin the analysis of life historynarrative

MICHAEL AGAR-University of Houston

There are many tensions between "ethnography" and "theory," as these terms are generally used in the social sciences. Ethnography is committed to an understanding of a given instance of the human experience-the environment that surrounds it, the history that precedes it, the intent of the persons who create it, and the pattern that gives it form. Theory, on the other hand, embeds concepts in a network of propositions, touching the human experience at selected points via implicational threads. Not that there have not been attempts to reduce the tension by bringing ethnography and theory into more intimate contact. Kay (1966), for example, characterizes ethnography as a process that presupposes a theory of culture, usually unarticulated by the ethnographer. Goodenough (1970) suggests a focus on the issue of description and comparison with the experiences of other groups. Glaser and Strauss (1967) write of "grounded theory," with theoretical concepts and propositions emerging from and changing with ethnographic work. Harre and Secord (1972) offer their "ethnogenic approach," with theory articulating the implicit structure in a slice of naturally situated life. This article represents an exercise within this same tradition. The occasion for the exercise is my attempt to work with an elaborate life history. The details will be presented shortly; for now, note that a life history is an elaborate, connected piece of talk presented in a social situation consisting of an informant and an ethnographer. As such, its analysis can profitably draw from a variety of theoretical traditions that deal with this type of data. The problem is that the number of such traditions is formidable. To give only a partial list, they range from concerns with pragmatics, through interests in story structure and the computer simulation of natural language, to treatments of natural conversation in sociolinguistics and ethnomethodology, discourse analysis in linguistics, and studies of conceptual

Life history data as discourse are examined, and recent perspectives from psychology, linguistics and anthropology are applied to the narrative. Each perspective illuminates some portion of the text, including its overall structure, the background knowledge necessary to understand it, and the narratorwho produced it. Attention to complex ethnographic data promises to facilitate the integration of theory. [cognitive anthropology, discourse, life history, methodology, urban America]

Association Copyright? 1980 by the AmericanAnthropological 0094-04961801020223-17$2.20/1

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structure in cognitive anthropology. Among other things, this list leaves out fields such as semiotics, literary criticism, and work in content analysis from anthropology and psychiatry. The problem increases when it is noted that any two traditions relevant to the task almost always partially overlap while remaining partially distinct. It's the worst sort of quagmire. Yet some sort of effort at untangling is essential; for although each of the traditions say something about the life history interview, none of them says enough. For an ethnographer, understanding the interview means understanding all of it-the situation that produced it, the person who gave it, and the shared and idiosyncratic knowledge which constitutes the unseen context needed to interpret it. To use a mathematical metaphor, the strategy for tension reduction attempted here will be similar to a qualitative Fourier analysis. As I understand it, Fourier analysis takes as its problem a complicated, irregular-appearing wave pattern, and then shows how the complex observed wave can be understood as the simultaneous occurrence of several regular wave patterns. What I would like to do here is draw from some theoretical traditions in the analysis of talk, showing how each contributes to the understanding of a complex life history. This will be an exploration in the integration of different theoretical concerns by careful attention to the richness of a person's account of human life in natural context.

the life history

Cultural anthropologists have long attended to the life history interview as an important type of ethnographic data. Life histories, the assumption goes, are a focal point for the individual perception of and response to broader cultural patterns. There are discussions of the life history method in anthropology (Langness 1965; Mandelbaum 1973), but there is little in the way of explicit approaches to the analysis of life history materials. As often happens with complex ethnographic data, the conflict between the systematic analysis of a manageable amount of data, and the broad statements of integrated pattern that are the goal, raises a frustrating barrier to methodological development. Before we begin dealing with such problems, some background on the particular life history discussed here is necessary. Most of my own ethnographic research has been done with urban heroin addicts in both institutional and community settings. When I took a research job in New York City in 1973, I began developing a project to study the history of the New YorkCity narcotics scene through the eyes of its protagonists-the addicts. I asked people I knew who were familiar with the streets to put me in touch with any older addicts who might be willing to be interviewed. A short time later, I was told that an older addict named Jack would be willing to meet with me. jack (a pseudonym) was about 60 years old, a patient in a methadone program on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He shared an apartment in Brooklyn, to maintain his distance from the street action in the neighborhoods he used to frequent. One evening, I went with our mutual acquaintance to Jack's apartment, explained my interests in interviewing him, and set up an appointment. As I began asking questions about the history of the street scene, I learned what a unique individual Jack is. He had been an addict since his midteens in Chicago and moved to New York in the 1930s. He was the street contact of the literary scene that centered around Columbia University in the 1940s and published some of his own stories and poems over the years. He has been through most of the drug epochs in the country's history, from preWorld War II heroin, through drugstore narcotics during the wartime heroin shortage, to the resurgence of heroin use after the War. More recently, he participated in the Haight-

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Ashbury and East Village scenes in the 1960s, the Lower East Side scene as it centered on "speed," and the early 1970s shift to the street use of methadone in New York. Jack, in short, is a junkie tribal elder who has run a range of social scenes from downand-out Times Square hustling to being an invited guest at a college poetry reading. After a couple of interviews, I decided to work exclusively with him and do an intensive life history. We met off and on over an eighteen-month period, completing about forty hours of taped interviews. We met in a variety of settings; interviews were always done in an office or an apartment, but we also met in coffee shops or bars, sometimes in areas that Jack had talked about in previous interviews. Jack is an articulate storyteller with an eye for detail. As a result, the transcribed interviews, after a simple editing job, make fascinating reading. There is a variety of information available in the transcripts. Different drug subcultures wax and wane as external events modify the chemical ecology of the streets. Patterns appear in Jack's personal responses to situations. We see his views on the variety of "types" that populate the street world. A skeptic might argue that the touch of an analyst's hand would only obscure Jack's story, and the skeptic might be right. Perhaps, by some intuitive evaluative function, maximum understanding of Jack and the various drug scenes occurs with the material in its natural narrative form. Yet, there are some troubling questions that should bother any reader. How much a part of the story is Jack, or is he just the current vessel of a predetermined script? What did he choose to tell (assuming he had a choice), and what did he leave out? Of those things he told, what was emphasized? How much of the story involves Jack the individual, and how much involves Jack the role-playing member of junkie subculture? When is Jack in a junkie role, and when is he in some other role-street person, Chicago adolescent, or AngloAmerican? Questions like these are important for an understanding of Jack's life history. They will not be answered in this brief article, but at least we can explore some of them. To do so, though, we must play the analysis game and break the narrative into pieces. The skeptic's question, reserved for the conclusion, is whether the analysis provides a deeper understanding when we go back to the original story. There are other questions to worry about as well-questions that will not be treated here. For example, some readers of the life history might wonder about the relationship between Jack's account of events and their actual occurrence. To some extent, this is an inappropriate question, since it is Jack's perception of things that is of interest. However, because of Jack's friendship with other writers, there are some published accounts that talk of him in scattered short stories, novels, and literary histories. I also did a short paper (Agar 1978) checking his account of the World War II heroin shortage with the New York Times articles from that period. In both the published stories and my own study, Jack does quite well. At any rate, the questions introduced in the beginning of this section offer problems enough for now. Before groping for answers, we need a section of the story to focus on. For this article, I am going to take the first segment of one of our interviews. I select it because it is one of several where the story flowed with minimal interference from me. The first few interviews are jerky, since neither Jack nor I were sure whether we were doing an ethnohistory of chemical use in New York, his life story, or something else. Then, of course, in the first few interviews we were strangers, and there was some awkwardness associated with that. But by the time the interview used here took place, we were comfortable with each other. Notice that already the relationship between Jack and myself is an unseen factor behind the life history; there will be more on that shortly. The story used here centers on a person-called "Johnny"-who taught Jack burglary.

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The interview begins with a clear boundary for the narrative to come. After our usual preliminaries, I turned on the tape and it began like this: j: So where do you want to start? M: Well, I'll tell you, I was working on the transcripts, and you said in there, "remind me to tell you that, some other time, about the guy who taught me burglary." J: 0 yes, that's... M: Is that, you said that was really an interesting story and that I should remind you to tell it some time. J: All right, you want to learn how I became a burglar. M: Sure. The transcribed details are given to qualify the analysis; other sections of the life history were not always so crisp and easy to start. It is clear from the short introduction that, with very little work, Jack is oriented to the story he will tell. It is an episode organized in his memory. As a parenthetical note, the ease with which he keys into the story is interesting in light of discussions in psychology of "episodic" and "semantic" memory. As a cautionary note, though, one needs eventually to ask two further questions. First, does the analysis work with all the episodes contained in Jack's life history? And second, how does the analysis pertain to those parts of the life history that are not episodically organized? The actual data used in this paper cover the transcript from the end of the introductory material just quoted up to the point where the relationship with "Johnny" is established. Johnny is Jack's teacher, and the story of how Jack became a burglar is the story of their relationship. The story, in other words, is a "person-centered" episode that begins and ends with the relationship with that person. Not all the episodes in Jack's life history are personcentered, so we have another caution in generalizing the results of this analysis. For now, I would like to focus only on this initial section. The several pages of actual transcript are appended to this article. It might be appropriate to read them now to get a sense of the material. Then, after the analysis, it could be read again to see if it makes a difference and, if it does, whether the difference is an enhancement or hindrance to understanding. In the body of the article, items will be abstracted and cited as appropriate. To briefly summarize, Jack begins the story by setting the time, with some difficulty, and then describing the cold winter in New York. He goes on to characterize his poverty and poor physical condition. He explains why some important social others from the recent past are now isolated from him, and consequently unavailable as sources of help. Jack then describes how hanging out in a railway station was one way to stay warm cheaply. On one occasion, someone going into the bathroom leaves his luggage with Jack, and Jack steals it. He takes a few things from the bags and goes to a cafeteria where he knows he can find a "fence." The "fence" is discussing a purchase with two overly loud youngsters. Jack joins the table and eventually scolds everyone for being so obvious during an illegal transaction in a public place. He sells the items he stole for a few dollars, and leaves for a movie theater where he can rest and get warm. One of the youngsters, whose name is Johnny, comes into the movie theater later and sits with him. This summarizes the data used in the article. Johnny goes on to form a partnership with Jack and teaches him burglary. The narrative describes their exploits, which end some time later with their arrest. While the narrative makes fascinating reading, the emphasis here (as noted earlier) is only on the introductory portion.

the well-formed story

Now we can discuss the first general perspective on the analysis of the life history. A

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perspective is an organization of concepts representing a guide for the analysis of different empirical instances. To borrow a term from psychology, we will explore the development of schemata (Taylor and Crocker in press) for the analysis of a life history. The first type of schema discussed in this section focuses on the way the life history per se is organized. We deal here with the life history as a linguistic entity independent of the context in which it was obtained. There are a variety of potential contributors to schema development that might be dealt with in some detail. Halliday and Hasan (1976), for example, describe the many devices in English used to provide cohesion in a narrative. Grimes (1975) and Sacks and Schegloff (see Coulthard 1977) examine sequences of talk in terms of the organizational function they serve in the overall verbal event. Shared by such orientations is a primary concern with the structure of discourse, ranging from the most minute phonological detail to the sequencing of substantial stretches of talk. The concern, in other words, is first and foremost with a schema for the product. Any of the above orientations, as well as others not cited here, might be applied to Jack's life history. To take a concrete example, though, a tradition has recently emerged in psychology dealing with story structure (Rumelhart 1975; Thorndyke 1977; Mandler and Johnson 1977). The work shows that stories have a structure that transcends the level of the individual sentence, that speakers have intuitions about how well formed a story is, and that departure from story structure decreases performance in experimental tasks such as comprehension and recall. The structural description assigned to a given story suggests the form of a story summary-that is, it suggests which parts are central as opposed to those parts that are detailed elaborations of a central theme. Story structures are modeled on phrase structure rules, as introduced in transformational generative grammar in linguistics. A phrase structure rule expands a symbol into a string of symbols. Following this approach, Rumelhart offers a series of rewrite rules that begin with an expansion of "story" into "setting and episode." "Episode" is expanded into "event and reaction," and so on into the more detailed formal categories that identify the optional and obligatory structural features of a story. There are disagreements on how the rule system should look. Further,the work done so far deals with simple stories, with their form clearly established through either the control of the psychologist or the weight of tradition. Elicited stories embedded in the life history interviews are more spontaneous and more complicated. Nonetheless, they are stories; in fact, "story" was the term I used to refer to the episode cited earlier in the introductory exchange, between Jack and myself. One useful exercise, then, would be to take the work in story structure and apply it to Jack's narration of how he became a burglar. On a quick reading of the entire story, it looks like the current rewrite rule systems are not rich enough to handle the narrative, although they do capture the general outline. The introductory section of Jack's narrative does fit the story grammars, though, since-whatever their differences-they all separate out "setting" at the highest level of the structural description. In Rumelhart's (1975) grammar, for example, the first rewrite rule is: Rule 1: Story -Setting + Episode

He defines setting as "a statement of the time and place of a story as well as an introduction to its main characters" (Rumelhart 1975:213). He goes on to note that a setting is usually a "series of stative propositions," leading him to the next rewrite rule: Rule 2: Setting - (State)*

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(The "*" simply means that there can be any number of stative propositions.) Things get a little confusing when he notes that, "under certain conditions," the setting can be eliminated if characters in the story are introduced in the body of the story. That sounds like a disguised, unformalized transformational rule. In Jack's story, the section used here is only that part that a story grammar would structurally describe as "setting." The boundary between "setting" and "episode" is ambiguous, though (see rule 1). Jack begins with time/place material, just as the well-formed story should. Then, to introduce the main character who taught Jack burglary, several stories are embedded in the setting description to account for his entry into Jack's life. To stay with Rumelhart's work, it is not clear whether we should treat the stories that set up Jack and Johnny's meeting as embedded events within the episode, or as embedded stories to account for a state in the setting. Intuitively, the embedded stories (stealing the kid's suitcase, selling the stolen goods, and meeting Johnny in the movie theater) might best be treated as three stories, linked causally, to show the process through which a certain state resulted (Johnny and Jack met), since that state is a necessary part of the setting description. This interpretation could, in principle, be included in Rumelhart's rules, with the appropriate changes. However, the point here is not to modify story grammar in light of Jack's story, although that would be an interesting exercise as well. The point is that the notion of "well-formed story" is as relevant to Jack as it is to the psychologists who are examining stories in their simpler forms. To the extent that this is true, the analysis of Jack's story has nothing to do with Jack or the subcultures he represents. The story is organized in a manner over which Jack has no control. The structure, then, becomes a guide to the analyst, who is subject to the same structural constraints. Jack can depart from story structure, but only-according to experimental data-at the risk of reducing comprehension and recall for the listener. The attempt to articulate this implicit, perhaps universal, structure is an important one for students of life history. If you are a student of the gasoline engine, and you begin to study it by slicing it into four equal parts, you've just added to your confusion. But if you start out with the knowledge that every gasoline engine must have an ignition system, a fuel system, and so on, you've added to the chances of success as you try to make sense out of the machine confronting you. Life histories are not engines, but there may be "natural" ways of slicing them up for analysis. According to story grammar, the slice I made to extract a part of Jack's story for this paper was just such a natural cut.

the interpretation of talk

In some of my earlier work (Agar 1973), I tried to study formally some of the "background knowledge" used by members of a group to interpret situated conversation. Background knowledge was primarily characterized in terms of "events," and talk was related to the event which it was realizing, or to events that were anticipated, or to undesirable events that social actors were trying to prevent. The focus here shifts from a schema for the product to a schema for an outsider's interpretation of the product. There is less attention toward the details of talk, and more on the analyst's task of constructing a framework so that an outsider can understand it as would another member of the subculture. The orientation becomes less linguistic and more generally ethnographic. The guiding assumption is that the reader has the necessary intuitive schema to properly grasp the life history structure, but lacks the necessary schema to properly understand the discourse as a whole. An example of recent work that contributes to the development of such contextual

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schemata is Labov and Fanshel (1977), who analyze segments of a psychiatric interview, and the role expectations that they reflect, by "expanding" them to include the underlying propositions that make them sensible. Another example is Schank and Abelson (1977), who deal with talk by showing how it is part of routinized patterns of behavior called "scripts," or more improvised patterns called "plans." Scripts and plans, in turn, are linked together as realizations of "goals," which in turn derive from "themes." Their work in artificial intelligence is designed to provide a model so fundamental that even a computer might understand the stories fed into it. Again, the point is not to test the details of those proposed orientations, but rather to show their relevance to the analysis of the life history material. My first problem in dealing with Jack's story is that I know too much. Some time ago, Moerman (1969) talked about the ethnographer's dilemma. As an ethnographer studies a new culture, several things happen. First, he unconsciously begins to make the same background assumptions that group members do. Second, group members assume he now knows what they know, so they stop making things explicit. The informants become less informative, and the ethnographer becomes less analytic. At the time of the interview segment discussed in this paper, I had known Jack for about one year. A good bit of knowledge had been accumulated to aid in interpreting what we said to each other. To further complicate things, I had been working with heroin addicts since 1968, and Jack knew about that as well. Sometimes he would tell his story assuming that I had the appropriate background knowledge of a street junkie; sometimes he wouldn't. As ethnographer, I became part informant. Added to this is the pragmatic problem of time. I am not interested, as are Schank and Abelson, in providing an analysis so basic that a computer can be programmed to understand Jack's story. For ethnographic purposes, I am willing to assume some abilities on the part of the reader. And unlike Labov and Fanshel, I am not analyzing an interview in which I had no role. If I were, then when I had done sufficient work for my understanding, I might assume that another outsider with a similar background could also understand it. But I do not have that informal yardstick to tell me when I have done enough, because I am not an outsider to the material. I know I do not need to give the reader as much background knowledge as I would have to give a computer, but I suspect the reader needs something beyond just what is contained in the pages of transcript. Jack often explicitly provides the relevant background knowledge in the text. For example, in the narrative, Jack describes a variety of places in detail that might strike an outsider as an unusual collection. Why, a "straight" (non-junkie) person might wonder, would someone know so much about subway tunnels, train stations, all-night cafeterias, and cheap movie theaters? A "straight" framework for a train station might involve commuting to the suburbs; for a movie theater, entertainment; for a cafeteria, a coffee break to get out of the office for a half-hour. It seems to me that Jack gives you the background-he's alone, without money, and it's a cold winter. All the places he mentions are warm and require little or no money in order to stay in them. From a down-and-out junkie's point of view, they represent a functionally equivalent set with an important survival value. Or is that background knowledge obvious to me because I knew the explanation before it was given? Take another example. Later in the story, Jack gets upset in the cafeteria because the two youngsters talk loudly to the "fence" about the stolen goods they have to sell. Why, an outsider might wonder, don't you have to talk up the goods to get the best price? And what's wrong with a little bragging over work well done? Again, it seems to me that Jack explains the background adequately when he quotes himself in the story. When you're talking about illegal behavior, in possession of the evidence, and in a public setting where there

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could be an undercover cop or an informer, it's better to "be cool." But isn't that background knowledge adequately given in the transcript? Perhaps, since Jack is a good storyteller, and since he is used to telling stories to nonjunkies, he might be particularly adept at filling in background knowledge at just those points where he knows that "straight" people will need it. Jack, in other words, has informally made his own study of the necessary schemata to interpret his stories. When talking to a "straight" person, he automatically includes in the story his analysis of what the listener needs to know to understand it. Perhaps this is one of the qualities of a good informant. On the other hand, surely there are some areas where Jack needs the ethnographer's help to render his story understandable. There are specific references to people and places that Jack knows I am aware of because of previous interviews. Partly, he mentions them to orient me as to how the story fits in with other stories he has told me. He refers to people and places that he knows I know about, eventually placing the story as beginning after "the summer and the fall that I had spent in Texas." Jack did not have to elaborate because of the assumed knowledge of his audience; if he were telling the story to you, he would place it differently. The reader needs my help as analyst, but hardly in an interesting way. There are other areas, though, where "expansion," to use Labov and Fanshel's term, might be necessary-again, depending on who the reader is. For example: ". .. and I'd get as far as the Penn Station and I'd sit there for a couple of hours until, you know, I began to get uncomfortable, and I didn't want to be stopped by the law. .. ." To make sense of that, a reader must know that there are laws against vagrancy and loitering, and that if Jack stays too long in one public place he might draw the attention of police who can arrest him or otherwise force him to leave. Or, consider this example: ". . . and while I was sittingthere a young cat came up to me and he had his duffel bag and a suitcase, and he said, 'Look',he said, 'I'vegot to makethe john.Willyou keep youreye on my stuff for me?"Well, therewere two blackfellows sittingdown at the end of the line watchingthis procedure, you know,and I for a few minutesI thought,'Well,fuck it, you know, I'mgonna,the guy trustsme. What'sthe use of tryingto beat him?'" The unknowing "cat" who left his bags has produced a canonical street situation-separate a person from some property long enough to disappear with it; in other words, "beat" or "burn" him. When the "cat" left Jack alone with his duffel bag and suitcase, anyone who knows street rules knows that it is now automatic that Jack will take off with them. Jack then makes a statement about himself by saying that he wasn't going to beat the "cat" (although he later notes that the "black fellows" forced him to by saying they wanted part of the action). By "straight" rules, it would be unusual for Jack to take off with the luggage; with street rules forming the backdrop, it would be unusual for him not to do so. One more example: "Now, sitting with him were two young kids, they couldn't have been a day over 19 if they were that old, probably 17, 18. Bright-eyed kids, obviously not New Yorkers, and they were talking at the top of their voices." To make sense out of this, a reader must know something about "New Yorkers." On the other hand, one might figure out-especially with the help of the missing prosodic features-that "obviously not New Yorkers" correlates with the description of the youngsters as "bright-eyed" and "talking at the top of their voices." Again, the problem is who the analysis is for. A street person? An American anthropologist? A Mexican economist? How much information does one need to understand the text? And what constitutes an adequate understanding in the first place? If an adequate

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understanding could be evidenced by an ability to comprehend and paraphrase, then probably a simple schema would provide an audience of American professionals with an understanding of Jack's narrative. To remind you, this is partly because Jack is an experienced storyteller, and an experienced interpreter of street life to "straight" people. For an ethnographer, then, the analytic work in contextual schema construction is partly a function of two relationships-that between the ethnographer and the informant, and that between the ethnographer and the audience of his analysis. The less the informant assumes the ethnographer knows, the more he will make explicit in the story; the more experience the informant has in talking with people like the ethnographer, the better he will know what needs to be made explicit. If the informant has been explicit in the appropriate way, given the background of the ethnographer, then the more the ethnographer's intended audience is similar to the ethnographer, the less analysis the ethnographer must supply to make the text understandable. It is just such a concern with the intersubjective breaches between ethnographer, informant and audience that helps explain the recent interest in hermeneutics in anthropology (see Tyler 1979; Rabinow and Sullivan 1979). For ethnographic purposes, then, an analysis of life histories in terms of a contextual schema is always going to be necessary, although the amount of work that needs to be done will vary. Some expansions-like the case of Jack "beating" the guy for his luggage-will reveal the sort of information about "culture" and Jack's relationship to it that is of interest to an ethnographer. But, even in this short fragment of text, an initial reading suggests that there is more about Jack and his culture than that.

themal analysis
Researchers, such as those discussed in the preceding section, argue that one of the problems with previous analyses is that people stayed too close to the actual text as a sequence of utterances. Perhaps the critics did not go as far as they might have; although they allow for the description of background knowledge, they still take as the central problem the explanation of intersentential relationships. To paraphrase Labov and Fanshel (1977), the problem is to explain why one sentence follows another-what is it that connects the two, making them part of some larger structure rather than two unrelated occurrences of language. Explaining the connection means finding a context that includes the two sentences, and hence the notions of expansions, scripts, and so on. Although this task is one of the things an ethnographer should be able to do, there are other, more general statements that he might want to make as well. The orientation offered in this section arises from a premise of work in cognitive anthropology-one attempts to use language as a means to the understanding of an informant's cognition. In contrast to the first approach, the emphasis shifts away from the structure of the discourse per se. In contrast to the second, the emphasis is not as much on an explanation of the discourse to an outsider as it is on using the discourse to make inferences about the mind of the individual narrator. The problem is that in cognitive anthropology inferences have usually been made from relatively small chunks of language-usually "lexemes"-to specific domains in cognition. How does one make inferences from language chunks such as discourse, and what is the appropriate schema to which inferences should be made? In a recent pilot study in Houston (Agar 1979), I have been trying to develop method and theory for the analysis of "themes" in personal narrative. To date, the method has consisted of an informal content analysis, where statements with a related focus are abstracted from the text and examined for pattern. The foci used to abstract statements have been the fundamental categories of human

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experience so often discussed in a variety of the social sciences and humanities. Typical categories include areas such as space, time, social others (both individual and institutional), and religion. To exemplify a themal approach, I return to the narrative being analyzed here. Let's examine a theme to see what comes out of Jack's introduction to the story of how he became a burglar. If we begin with an interest in a "time" theme, for instance, the first step would be to go through the pages of text and abstract all those statements that focus on time. There are obvious methodological problems involved in this process. Some have been treated elsewhere (Agar in press). At any rate, the statements I lifted out are displayed in Table 1. Now, inspect the statements for an underlying pattern. Again, there is a methodological problem, since a first analysis of patterning in Jack's statements will partly depend on what my own time themes are. I bring to analysis the field within which similarities and differences will be assessed. Within that field, what is striking to me is the lack of exact measurement of time. Where specific measuring phrases do appear, they are used in an idiomatic sense to characterize an inexactly specified amount-"a few minutes," "for hours," and so on. The calendar and the clock do not have the sacred value to Jack that they have for me. To what extent are we dealing with Jack, and to what extent are we dealing with a member of the junkie subculture? In general, junkies do not worry as much about clocks and Table 1. Selected time referencesfrom the introduction Jack'sstory. to Page number *236 *236 236 *236 236 C237 *237 237 237 237 C237 237 238 238 238 238 238 239 C239 239 239 Time reference I wish I could remember years. I can't. dates just don't mean anythingto me. occasionally sacking up with somebody. towardthe middleof the winter. tied up for several days. they did open up at 8 o'clock in the morning. this followed the winter,or the summerand the fall, that I had spent in Texas. I would see her occasionally. a couple of hoursin the GrandCentral. I'd sit there for a couple of hours. one Sundaymorningabout oh five o'clock. for a few minutes I thought. and time was passing. it was too early in the morning. strictlya hangoutafter certain hoursfor hustlers. you could sit for hours. that morningI was really desperate. it's only going to be a matterof time. I spend 75 percentof my time. It was just about time for the shows to open. about halfwaythroughthe movie.

* Statementsare partof awkward attemptsby Jackto preciselyplace events in time. The awkwardness is itself evidence for the natureof the time theme as discussed in the paper. C Statementsare counterexamples the time theme. Thefirstcounterexample be explainedas to can a fact about movie houses. The second is treated in the text. The thirdis a subjectiveproportion expressedas a percentage,and is not discussed here. Note: Statementswere intuitivelyextracted,a procedurefraughtwith problems.Forexample,Jack often says "at that time,"meaning"then,"so these werenot used. At any rate,the analysisis adequate for illustrativepurposes,and the readercan check the originaltext for disagreements.In addition,B. Schiefflin read the transcriptand suggestedthat not only were some time referencesmissed by my own intuitiverules,but also that a varietyof otherdata was available in areassuch as verbtense and aspect. Clearly,the analysis is incompleteat this point.

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calendars as "straight" people do, so it would appear that the theme is not idiosyncratic. In fact, a frequent source of conflict between junkies and "straight" institutional representatives-be they cops, clinicians, or social scientists-lies in the area of time. But did Jack learn this theme as a consequence of becoming a junkie, or is it just that all people who function in the streets learn that the streets do not run according to a rigid schedule? As another possible complication, there are "urgent times" in junkie life, like the time when one is sick and waiting for a dealer to show up. If another area of the life history were being presented, perhaps Jack would talk in more precise ways about the passing of time. Or perhaps the theme is not restricted to junkies or the streets at all. In my own experience, I have more than once heard the following expressions used by the appropriate group members-"CPT" (Colored Peoples' Time), "Hawaiian Time," "Indian Time," and "Hippie Time." All of these were used by group members to indicate that they were not following the precisely measured schedule of the politically dominant subculture. In short, Jack's time theme looks like something that we might want to call a more general "junkie" theme, but it is not clear whether: (1) Jack learned the theme as a consequence of becoming a junkie; (2) Jack developed the theme independently as a response to the street environment; or (3) Jack has the usual, or "unmarked," time theme for humans that appears unusual only to a social scientist with the "marked" concerns of precise time measurement. The first case would be culture as knowledge; the second, culture as adaptation; and the third, culture with a capital "C." This classic question of the relation between the individual and culture will not be resolved here. However, it does suggest that developing a schema for the informant requires further untangling, since there may be a "cultural" schema representing conventional information, as well as an "idiosyncratic" schema representing the results of the informant's unique personal history. Nevertheless, there is an interesting relationship between the themal analysis and the product and contextual schemata considered earlier. Note the counterexample to the time theme listed in Table1, where Jack says, "One Sunday What is Jack doing with such a specific time morning about, oh, five o'clock...." reference? Perhaps it is simply an exception to the rule. Or perhaps, at an out-of-awareness level, it is a rhetorical device Jack used to mark something. The reference occurs after Jack has filled us in on the time of the story, sketched the physical setting of the subway tunnels and train stations, described the weather, and told us why he was broke and on his own. After the specific time reference, Jack begins narrating the sequence of events that leads him to his first meeting with Johnny. Perhaps people violate themal expectations as a rhetorical device, a way to call the listener's or reader's attention to something. In this example, it appears likely that the counterexample is used to mark a change in story structure. Jack is moving from some background description to a story embedded within the setting section, a story which will eventually introduce the principal character. Once Johnny is brought into the picture, the story of how Jack becomes a burglar can begin. In the perspective discussed earlier, story grammar would assign the utterance to a terminal node in the tree structure that described Jack's story. Those concerned with explaining how the utterance is connected to preceding and following utterances would no doubt note the summary nature of the preceding sentence ("So this was the general kind of a life I was living at the time"), the time and place specifications of the utterance in question, and then decide that a new script was beginning. Those analyses are important, but they miss the way that Jack gets all that structural work done. In this particular example, understanding how Jack does that work presupposes that we understand Jack, and that means we understand those recurrent themes that appear across his account of the dif-

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ferent situations in which he finds himself. This interlocking of the different schemata is a topic that is taken up in the next section.

conclusion
To review what has been done, three different perspectives on discourse have been applied to a life history interview. The first emphasized a schema for the product, with a concern for the organization of the text as a disembodied entity. The second perspective stressed the hermeneutic problem, the interpretation of the material both for the ethnographer and for the intended audience of the analysis. The third approach emphasized a schema for the informant, using the material to make inferences about the narrator as a person who brings a resource of knowledge to the life history interview. Although my separation of approaches to discourse is an arbitrary one, the three different schemata do, I think, help sort through the literature and clarify the different questions that a life history analyst might ask. Other schemata might be developed. One missing schema is that of the ethnographer, the person who brings to the interview a variety of personal and professional agenda. Another missing schema is that of the interaction of ethnographer and informant. This schema, oddly enough, is one that some of the discourse literature would immediately suggest. Much work in discourse takes as its data social interaction, the performing of ordinary events by members of some group. My concern, in contrast, is with an out-of-context interview, an event constructed by the ethnographer to talk about ordinary events. With my biases as a cognitive anthropologist, I am most interested in the use of such materials to understand something about the schema for the person. Hence, my emphasis on the product schema as a guide to making analytic cuts, and my use of the context and informant schemata to learn something about the organization of knowledge of the person and, hopefully, the group he represents. Those who study situated discourse would properly criticize such work by asking how such results relate to the ordinary social world through which the informant moves. I don't have a great deal of that kind of data. On the other hand, in the study of situated discourse appeal is often made to the establishment of a universe of shared meanings as signalled by subtle linguistic and nonverbal cues. Yet often the organization of these "shared meanings" is neglected. It is just this type of organization that I am primarily after. At any rate, the three schemata treated in this article-product, context, and informant-at least begin to clarify the problem of analyzing life history materials and, perhaps, informal ethnographic interviews in general. At the same time, this separation of questions for analytic convenience eventually led, at least partly, to their reintegration. The counterexample to Jack's time theme played a role in the organization of the text, which in turn added to the ethnographer's ability to interpret. This sort of process was the point of the Fourier analysis metaphor used in the introduction. Complex forms are approached recognizing the simultaneous relevance of several different kinds of explanatory schemata. The form is untangled to facilitate analysis, and then retangled to learn what has been gained in understanding the original complex form. An ethnographer's first love has always been the complexity of uncontrolled, naturalistic data. Yet, in his attempts to deal with it, an ethnographer usually follows the erratic lines of the complicated wave. His only other strategy, following the traditional approach, is to isolate key segments of behavior, defined as significant by some theoretical tradition, abstract them from the waves, and deal with them in isolation. The Fourier analysis notion is used here as a sensitizing concept, directing our attention

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to a possibility somewhere in between these two alternatives. Perhaps, a good paraphrase of the general strategy is: theoretical integration through the untangling of complex, naturally occurring behavior. In this paper, the sample of behavior was the life history, a type of data that has often been used by ethnographers. By attending to three different approaches, the complex narrative was partially untangled into parts related to the structure of the data-the relation between the data, the narrator, and the audience-and the structure of the narrator's mind. The job is only partly done, but then the metaphor is an open one, allowing for the introduction of new theory to untangle further pieces. The task here has been limited, since it only deals with a few pages in a life history that runs to several hundred. And a number of problems have been inadequately treated. For example, the relation between the individual and culture has been discussed, but not treated in any systematic way. But, hopefully, this brief exercise has suggested ways to add to an outsider's understanding of Jack's story beyond that which can be obtained in a reading of the raw material. It's now time to reread the appended transcript and decide whether or not a case has been made.

note
Acknowledgments. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the International Congress of

and EthnologicalSciences, New Delhi, December,1978. Supportfrom NIDAgrant Anthropological

#1K02 DA00055-01 is gratefully acknowledged. The author is currently a Research Associate at the Language Behavior Research Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley.

references cited
Agar,Michael

1973 Ripping and Running: A Formal Ethnography of Urban Heroin Addicts. New York: Academic Press. 1978 When the Junk Disappeared: Historical Account of a Heroin Shortage. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 10:225-261. 1979 Themes Revisited: Some Problems in Cognitive Anthropology. Discourse Processes 2:11-31. in press Getting Better Quality Stuff: Some Lessons from Drug Ethnology. Urban Life. Coulthard, Malcolm 1977 An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Longman. Glaser, Barney, and Anselm Strauss 1967 The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago: Aldine. Goodenough, Ward 1970 Description and Comparison in Cultural Anthropology. Chicago: Aldine. Grimes, Joseph 1975 The Thread of Discourse. The Hague: Mouton. Halliday, M. A. K., and R. Hasan 1976 Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Harre, R., and P. S. Secord 1972 The Explanation of Social Behavior. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kay, Paul

1965 The Life History in Anthropological Science. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Mandelbaum, David 1973 The Study of Life History. Current Anthropology 14:177-196. Mandler, J. M., and N. S. Johnson 1977 Remembrance of Things Parsed: Story Structure and Recall. Cognitive Psychology 9:111-151.

and 1966 Ethnography Theoryof Culture.BucknellReview14:106-113. Labov,William,and David Fanshel New York: Academic Press. as 1977 TherapeuticDiscourse:Psychotherapy Conversation. Langness,L. L.

Moerman,Michael

1969 A Little Bit of Knowledge. In Cognitive Anthropology. Stephen Tyler, ed. pp. 449-469. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

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Rabinow, Paul, and William M. Sullivan 1979 Interpretive Social Science: A Reader. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rumelhart, David E. 1975 Notes on a Schema for Stories. In Representation and Understanding. Daniel G. Bobrow and Allan Collins, eds. pp. 211-236. New York: Academic Press. Schank, Roger, and Robert Abelson 1977 Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Taylor, Shelley E., and Jennifer Crocker in press Schematic Bases of Social Information Processing. In The Ontario Symposium on Personality and Social Psychology. E. T. Higgins, P. Hermann, and M. D. Zanna, eds. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Thorndyke, P. W. 1977 Cognitive Structures in Comprehension and Memory of Narrative Discourse. Cognitive Psychology 9:77-110. Tyler, Stephen 1979 The Said and the Unsaid. New York: Academic Press.

Submitted 2 February 1979 Received by current editor 15 April 1979 Revised version received 11 October 1979 Accepted 30 October 1979 Final revisions received 3 December 1979

appendix:transcriptionof Jack's setting description (parentheticalexpressions are interviewer comments)

All right, well you want to learn how I became a burglar, (sure) all right, let me see, I wish I could remember years, I can't, dates just don't mean anything to me, but this would be back, hold on a minute now, it would be back in the 1940s, and it would be around, it would be after, it would be around about 1946 roughly, (uh huh) I may be off a year, it may have been 1947, but I'm gonna play it safe and say it was the winter of 1946, which was one hell of a winter, (uh huh) and things had not gone well for me at all, I was really out on the street with no place to live, just scuffling from one spot to another, occasionally sacking up with somebody at night and considering myself lucky, at the same time oddly enough there were several people that I did know that were pretty well situated, except that they were living in single rooms and there wasn't room for me, and then also even at that time I had a false sense of pride, there were some people I just couldn't beg from, I could borrow, or I could steal, but I just couldn't beg, you know, (uh huh) and finally toward the middle of the winter, now this would be probably after Christmas, about the middle of January of 1947, an incredible snowstorm hit the city where traffic was literally tied up for several days, the snow just piled up, (huh) cars were stalled, traffic couldn't move, and the wind howled around the buildings, and people were just scurrying from doorway to doorway to get out of the cold, and I had really reached the place of where the only thing I could think of was dying, I just wanted to get it over with and get away from the whole thing, I couldn't see any kind of a future for myself, I was run down physically, I probably didn't weigh 100 pounds soaking wet, (Jesus) I had no clothes at all to speak of, I had bummed a coat from somebody, before I go any further, I'm trying to think of whether I had met Williams prior to this or not, but it seems to me that I didn't know Williams at the time, Williams came later, although I had met Williams before, I just, I don't know what happened, but I wasn't seeing any of those people, I was, oh I was out of touch with them for some reason, now

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just what it was I don't recall, but anyway, as I say I was alone, regardless of who I knew and who I didn't know, and who I had met and who I hadn't met, I, there was just people I didn't see at that time, and I was literally living on 42nd Street, sitting up in all-night cafeterias, falling asleep at tables and trying to stay out of the cold, at that time they had movies that were open almost all night long, I think they were closed, some of them, maybe some of them were open all night long, I can't recall, but they did open up at 8 o'clock in the morning, so what I would try to do is scuffle up a little change and, you know, get into a movie, and I, as I think of it I did know, I did know Berg, but Berg was going through changes too, and he was living with his brother down, not exactly in the Chelsea district, but just off the Chelsea district, they didn't have much, they had one little room, in fact this was, I'm way off on time, this followed the winter, or the summer and the fall that I had spent in Texas (oh) that's how it was, when I came back Bill and Joan moved out to Far Rockaway, they weren't seeing me at all, Joan was sort of annoyed with me, and didn't want my presence on the scene, and Berg had moved in with his brother in this funny little room down just off the Chelsea district, and I was making it the best way I could, this was the result of some bad deals with our pot that we brought back, it seems that I was responsible for not being able to unload it as, you know, as financially, what do I want to say, you know, beneficially as (they wanted) they wanted and they were, they were just sort of fed up with me, and there was a girl, Vicky Rogers, that, who's, who turned out to be Priscilla Rogers from the Rogers family in Grosse Pointe, Detroit, (huh) or Michigan, but at that time she was a chick, a very interesting girl that I'll go into detail about some time, but at any rate, she, I would see her occasionally, but she was a pretty cold-blooded proposition, and unless somebody could, or unless the person could really show whereby they were, you know, making something and worth her trouble she just didn't want to be bothered with them, and of course that was my situation at the time, so I had sort of been deserted by everybody, and I was making the streets, I used to, if you shoot down underneath the subway at 41st and 6th Avenue there's an underpassage that will take you all the way down to Pennsylvania Station, you can walk through the Pennsylvania Station and hit the 8th Avenue, (uh huh) and this was not costing you a penny, and you know, you can walk up a short distance on 8th Avenue up to about oh maybe 36th Street, and that's the end of the line, and then you have to go up on the street, well my route was usually a couple of hours in the Grand Central, then I'd put my coat around me and try to hustle over to 41st and shoot down there, and it was warm, you know, and I'd, I'd make it down there, and I'd get as far as the Pennsylvania Station, and I'd sit there for a couple of hours until, you know, I began to get uncomfortable, and I didn't want to be stopped by the law, sometimes I'd dig up a dime, and I did a lot of writing at that time incidentally sitting in ten-cent toilets, I used to just, (huh) I had notebooks, and I'd drop a dime in the toilet, and nobody would bother me, and I could just sit there, sometimes I'd go on the nod, but everything I was getting of course in the way of money that I could possibly spare was going to junk, you know, I was, everybody that I'd run into that was apt to help me, the first thing they'd say is are you still using junk, and of course I'd have to say yes, and they didn't want anything to do with me, so this was the general kind of a life I was living at the time, and one Sunday morning about oh five o'clock I sat down in the Grand, no not in the Grand Central, in the Pennsylvania Station, and while I was sitting there a young cat came up to me and he had his duffel bag and a suitcase, and he said, look, he said, man, he said, I've got to make the john, will you keep your eye on my stuff for me, well there were two black fellows sitting down at the end of the line watching this procedure, you know, and I, for a few minutes I thought well fuck it, i, you know, I'm gonna, the guy trusts me, what's the use of trying to beat him, but one of the black guys came over and said, hey man, why don't you dig in and see what's there, man, man, you know, maybe we can split it, and I said we're not going to split it at all, it's

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mine, and I picked up the suitcase, threw the duffel bag over my back and I split, and left a very irritated guy there, I'll catch you motherfucker, he said, and I said, well maybe you will and maybe you won't, and I'm hightailing it as fast as I can, now there's a passage that goes under Gimbels all the way over to 6th Avenue, that's the way we used to come, we used to come down to 6th Avenue, and then under Gimbels there's a, there's a passageway that leads down right underneath the, what was the hotel, it's the Pennsylvania Hilton now, I guess it used to be the old Pennsylvania Hotel, I guess, that's what they called it, I think, maybe it had another name, at any rate it's a, it's a Hilton hotel now, anyway I got over there and I stepped into a doorway, there was nothing there, just the guy's personal things, and I began to feel worse all the time, but he had a really fine pair of gloves, and along with the gloves he had a cheap camera, I don't know, it was a, a, Brownie I think, and one or two other little objects that didn't amount to doodly-doo, but you know I dropped them in my pocket, I tied the duffel bag up and the suitcase, and I left it there, and time was passing. I said well, maybe I can bum enough to get a cup of coffee and get into a movie, because I was exhausted, and I mean exhausted, my junk was running out, but it was too early in the morning to do anything about that, and there wasn't anything in the suitcase or the duffel bag that was going to help me, so I split up the street, now remember, snow and ice, I split up the street, and at that time there used to be a Chase's cafeteria, I don't know what it's called now, but you know where the Selwin theater is on 42nd Street, you know where Grants is (yeah) you've heard of Grants, (oh yeah) well just about three doors down from Grants, Chase's cafeteria, it was open all night long, and strictly a hangout after certain hours for hustlers, (uh huh) across the street midway down the block was Bickfords, I guess it's even still there, maybe it isn't, I don't know, but anyway there was a Bickfords, that was another hangout, then on, going back to the other side of the street, down, you know where there, there's an arcade, a flea circus, an arcade, well that used to be a bus station at one time, and you could go through there all the way to 41st Street, (um-hm) and there were pinball games and all sorts of you know instruments, and of course a lot of hustlers hung out in there too, right next door to it was a Horn and Hardharts, and of course you could go in there, for a nickel cup of coffee you could sit for hours, well I went to Horn and Hardharts that morning, and I hadn't been sitting there very long when a really strange guy that used to make the scene down there, a, a, a monster if there ever was one, he was a big bullnecked, round-faced, pig-eyed (laughter) you know creature that ran to blubber and, you know, who was always making little nasty dirty remarks, he was really a, an, an obnoxious person in every sense of the word, he was always talking about trying to fuck little girls and things like that, you know, he really was a, he was a character in every sense of the word, but he was a fence, actually I think he, his real profession was tugboating, I think he had a tugboat someplace, I learned later that he used to take chicks down to the tugboat and fuck 'em, but I, how true that was I don't know, but that, that's the story I got later, but anyway he was a, he was a fence, so if anybody had a watch or anything that was at all valuable, and even if it wasn't too valuable, you'd never get what the object was worth, but he would give you a little money, and that morning I was really desperate, now sitting with him were two young kids, they couldn't have been a day over 19 if they were that old, probably 17, 18, bright-eyed kids, obviously not New Yorkers,and they were talking at the top of their voices, why man, I, you know, blah blah blah, I got this guy before he knew what had happened, and man I had his watch, and man did you see the roll his, of bills he had, and one guy is flashing a diamond ring out from underneath the table, he's flashing it up above the table, meanwhile Frenchy's called me to come over and sit at the table with him, so you know, I looked at these two kids and I, I sat down at the table and I was just in no mood to listen to a lot of bullshit so I turned to the kids, I said, hey look you guys, why don't you just soft pedal it, I said I don't know what your story is and I care less, but you're making a

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general display of yourself, this place is loaded with rats, it's only going to be a matter of time until a cop comes in here and busts the whole table, I told Frenchy, I said Frenchy, what the fuck is the matter with you, you know, I says, why don't you tell these dudes to shut up, but Jack, they've got blah blah blah, you know, and I want to get this stuff, I said well look, I said you guys may not care if you go to jail, but I do, I said I spend 75 percent of my time trying to stay out of jail, and I don't want anybody to come up here and bother us, meanwhile I flashed the, the gloves and I don't know, I, I wish I could remember what, I guess it was a cheap watch, and I said Frenchy, I said, give me anything at all, give me enough to get to the movies and get out Qf the scene, well I can't give you very much, they're not worth anything, and he tried the gloves on, the gloves fit him, alright, he said, I'll give you a couple of dollars for the works, I said ok, just give it to me and let me get out of here, so I took the two dollars, and I didn't even say goodbye to these guys, and I split, it was just about time for the shows to open, I walked down, do you know where the Bryant theater is by any chance, it's between 7th Avenue and 6th Avenue on the downtown side of the street, (right) at one time they used to show movies there, now I guess they don't do anything but show girly shows and stuff like that, or these porno things, so I, I could remember, I don't remember the title of the picture, but June Lockhart was in it, and I don't like June Lockhart (laughter) and never did, but I didn't care, all I wanted to do was to get in out of the cold and sit someplace where it was warm, so I got in there, I sat down, and about halfway through the movie I began to get uncomfortable for some reason or another and I got the feeling that somebody was looking at me, and I began to turn around, look around, and sure enough one of these kids was sitting in the row in front of me about four seats down, and he turned around and he said sss, like this, he gave me a high sign, you know, he waved his hand, kind of grinned, can I come over, sit next to you, I said sure man, c'mon, you know, so he came on over.

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