Life-Histories by Crapanzano

The life history is often a memorial to an informant-become-(distant-)friend, a commemoration of a field experience, and an expiation for abstraction and depersonalisation - for ruthless departure. It is seen as "portraying" or "illustrating" culture or some aspect of it. To have value as such it must be truthful and come from a "typical" individual - one, at least, who can be socially located..

The life history is the result of a self-constituting negotiation. It is the product, at least from the subject's point of view, of an arbitrary and peculiar demans from another - the anthropologist. Although, at some level, the anthropologist's demand is always a response to the informant. They are asked to review their life and possibly even expose themselves. They may not understand the anthropologist's demand and may searh for an "equivalent" model in their culture, one that the anthropologist searching for a life story may reject. Foucault (198) says that since the Middle Ages we in the West have become "a singularly confessing society". As members of such, we may demand something very alien to the people we study, and we, despite ourselves, "torture" them to that end.

When we analyse a life story, we are analysing a text, not social reality, and this text is itself the product of a complex collaboration