The Narrative Dissipation of Identity: Blurring Categorical Bounds of Selfhood in Christian Testimonial Practice

• In Event: 2251 - Culture and Narrative

Abstract

Sociologists have convincingly shown in recent years that identity – a cohesive sense of collective belonging or individual selfhood – is a narrative phenomenon: narrative provides organizing categories to make coherent the chaos of life experience across space and time. In the case of individual identity, i.e. selfhood, narrative practice carries with it a somewhat paradoxical practical question: how to make the self the simultaneous subject and object of narrative action? That narrating selfhood requires the splitting of self into the simultaneous author and character of the story suggests that narrative has diffusing, as well as cohering, functions in self-making. This article takes up a paradigmatic practice of narrating selfhood, Christian testimonial practice, and shows how the reflexivity of the practice systematically splits the self into the simultaneous subject and object of narrative action at the same time that it also blurs and blends everyday categorical distinctions between self and other, such that the potency of the practice is in part the result of the undoing of “identity” of self.

Author

• Graham Wilson Hill, University of Bern