RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
2.9 Auto/biography and Issues of Positionality
2.8.3 Secondary Sources: Literature Review
(see Chapter One)The secondary literature helps to provide information on violence in general, even from other parts of the country with similar experiences to the Natal Midlands. This is important for the purposes of comparison and cross-pollination of ideas on the subject. In addition, secondary sources may provide other researchers’ perspectives, for example, on how muthi was employed against opponents during violence in other parts of the country and the continent.
For some time, history has been searching for lost voices – those of workers, the peasants, the children, and most recently the subaltern. But there is another voice which historians have been less anxious to access – that of the writer him- or herself.48
Arguments concerning self-study (autobiography) and ‘insider-outsider’ research have been addressed in several studies and disciplines in the social sciences and humanities faculties, particularly in disciplines like literature (in which field autobiographies are generally considered) and anthropology (insider-outsider research). History tends to undervalue autobiographies, because of their subjective nature, though not biographies, which are considered to be in the area of historical study. Here I concur with Robert Morrell’s assertion that “even an apparently objective document bears the distinctive and unique mark of its author and his or her past, predilections and disposition.”49
The subject matter of this thesis is my personal odyssey: how I experienced the traumatic events of 1987-96, from the age of approximately eight, up until my early teens. This period of uncertainty and violence marked my life and affected my identity. Thus my thesis cannot be written without frequent reference to my historically-constructed self; the study is shaped by my own history and past experience. I feel that only when I have completed the study will I be able to grasp the nature of memory and its relationship to the violence-induced trauma that characterised the civil war that marred my childhood. Mine was a childhood that, in its interactions between parents, children and siblings, was echoed in many other families in KwaShange. Since I have the opportunity provided by the writing of a doctoral thesis, I shall use it to work towards understanding some of the effects of war on family-dynamics. That is why I shall, in this thesis, permit my own voice to be heard. My aim in the study, with its strongly autobiographical elements, will be to produce findings that will add an authentic dimension to existing knowledge of the experiences of violence in the Midlands. At the same time I hope that my work will help to justify the methodological use of self in research.
The use of autobiographies as research–related documents started in the 1980s, when approaches to history and autobiography became more complex. Historians began to relate
48Robert Morrell, From Boys to Gentlemen: settler masculinity in colonial Natal, 1880-1920 (Pretoria: Unisa, 2001), preface, x.
49 Robert Morrell, From Boys to Gentlemen: settler masculinity in colonial Natal, 1880-1920 (Pretoria: Unisa, 2001), preface, x.
more personally to events that they had previously analysed from a critical distance.50 Jeremy Popkin explores this development, analysing the correlation between autobiography and history, using historians’ autobiographical accounts as sources for historical understanding.51 He defines the links between history and autobiography as a way of reconstructing the past, approaching life-writing texts as a source for the knowledge of the historians’ experiences and professional positions.52 Juame Aurell elaborates:
Autobiographical texts can also be used as a reference for comprehending the way historians construct our access to the knowledge of the past: the historical texts. In this way, we increase our understanding not only of history, but importantly, of the writingof history. Indeed, the practical and methodological links between history and autobiography are important: they share structural formulations that invite us to read them in conjunction, and decipher possible ways their enactments of events might be similar.53
Aurell considers autobiographical texts as historiographical sources which comprehend personal lives and also, significantly, assume the obligation to discern the motives and processes that govern texts which are claimed to be purely historical. He reasons that a critical approach to life-writing enables the reader to examine to what extent the scholarly production of histories, as opposed to autobiographies, by historians, has been conditioned by personal experience. He writes:
Historical texts have been influenced by both the general historical context and the personal story of the historian who wrote them – family background, childhood and
50Jaume Aurell, “Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Reading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel”, Biography, 29: 3 (Summer, 2006), 1.
51Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), quoted in Jaume Aurell, “Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Reading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel”, Biography, 29: 3 (Summer, 2006), 1.
52 Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), quoted in Jaume Aurell, “Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Reading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel”, Biography, 29: 3 (Summer, 2006), 1.
53 Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), quoted in Jaume Aurell, “Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Reading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel”, Biography, 29: 3 (Summer, 2006), 1.
adolescent experiences, intellectual information, and commitments to ideology or political movement.54
Jaume Aurell attributes constructive criticism of historians’ academic autobiographies to Pierre Nora’s Essais d égo histoire, published in 1987. Aurell writes that Nora’s introduction of the documents challenges the principle that made historians “keep themselves out of the way of their work, disguise their personality behind their knowledge, barricade themselves behind their notes, flee from themselves into another epoch, express themselves only through others.”55 The effect of this was to create a new trend in historians’ autobiographical writing.
Certainly there had been autobiographies written by historians, but their autobiographical texts were judged separately from overtly historical works, in which the author-historian laid claim to objectivity and distance.56
Aurell feels that this epistemological context helps us understand the increasing number of historian-autobiographers who are more and more comfortable in assuming the role of authors of their own stories. Consequently, consciousness of the historian’s function as
‘narrator’, rather than merely ‘recorder’, has grown significantly, heightening the analogies between historical and literary texts. Thus we find in historians’ autobiographies not only testimonies of their lives, but also data that explain their historical projects. For this reason, historians’ autobiographies must be examined to reveal information, not only about the context in which the historical texts are articulated, but also about how the writers’
ideological and intellectual convictions may have conditioned the methodological and epistemological nature of their texts.57A problem that may occur when reading autobiographies as historiographical sources lies in historians’ reluctance to reveal details of the course of their projects, a hesitation that reflects their preoccupation with rigour and objectivity.58
54Jaume Aurell, “Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Reading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel”, Biography, 29: 3 (Summer, 2006), 1-2.
55 Pierre Nora’s Essais d égo histoire quoted in Jaume Aurell, “Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Reading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel”, Biography, 29: 3 (Summer, 2006).
56 Jaume Aurell, “Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Reading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel”, Biography, 29: 3 (Summer, 2006).
57Jaume Aurell, “Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Reading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel”, Biography, 29:3 (Summer, 2006), 3.
58Jaume Aurell, “Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Reading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel”, Biography, 29: 3 (Summer, 2006), 4.
In telling the story of my childhood and that of my mother in KwaShange, and linking our experience to historical accounts of violence, I move necessarily across a spectrum that extends from academic autobiography to records of oral history. Though autobiographies which deal with important historical events may appear to be better historiographical sources than more purely personal life-writing projects, I reason that details of historians’ lives, isolated or disconnected from their academic careers, also provide valuable information for the creation of historical writings. My own study of political violence in KwaShange is clearly conditioned by my personal experience of that violence, as I myself recognise, years later, that my identity was similarly conditioned.
Historians’ autobiographical writing furnishes information on their historical texts to different degrees. Clearly, these are autobiographies which deal with important historical events. Many such autobiographies are relatively recent and are reflections of the evolution of the social sciences during the second half of the twentieth century.59 Jaume Aurell states:
During that period, the academic world increased its visibility and influence in Western culture; academics began to be public people, whose opinions on issues and activities beyond the classroom began to matter. One of the effects of this greater visibility is the reinforcement of the connections between academics’ personal and professional identities that validate the publication of an autobiography.60
Like any other research methods, autobiographical writing has its defects, as literary scholars have emphasised. Michael Sprinker, in “The Writings of Nietzsche, the Precursor of Freud”, elucidates:
If autobiography can be described as the self’s inquiry into its own history – the self- conscious questioning of the subject by itself – then Nietzsche offers the most fearful warning for any autobiographical text: The danger of the direct questioning of the subject about the subject and of all self-reflection of the spirit lies in this, that it could be useful and important for one’s activity to interpret oneself falsely.61
59Jaume Aurell, “Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Reading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel”, Biography, 29:3 (Summer, 2006), 4.
60Jaume Aurell, “Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Reading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel”, Biography, 29:3 (Summer, 2006), 4.
61Michael Sprinker, The Writings of Nietzsche, the Precursor of Freud, (1980), 334.
Sprinker further reveals that crucial Freudian ideas (particularly concerning repression) are related to Nietzsche’s fundamental insight. Drawing also on Vico and Kierkegaard, Sprinker associates autobiography with reflection and subjectivity and, in the case of Freud, with the silence surrounding repression.62 Following Mandel, we might indeed suspect the repressive nature of autobiographical silence, where “[the] ego has attempted to manipulate and distort, to prevent disclosure.”63
“In qualitative research the role of the researcher as the primary data collection instrument necessitates the identification of personal values, assumptions and biases at the outset of the study.”64 “To be reflexive is to insist that researchers systematically and rigorously reveal their methodology and themselves as the instrument of data generation.”65 My perceptions of how this violence is remembered have been shaped by my personal experiences. Therefore my experiences and my personal ideology will shape my interpretation of this study.
However, I believe that being away from KwaShange for more than 10 years, and being a trained historian, have given me a better knowledge of the subject being researched, the sensitivities involved and the ability to explore the topic objectively. The fact that my research was conducted amongst people with whom I share the language, and who come from the same region and have the same cultural identity, needs to be taken into consideration.
“A person studying their own culture can be likened to a fish trying to describe the water.”66 I grew up in the same setting, in the rural area in which my study has taken place; because of this I felt connected to my informants, mainly because of our shared knowledge of the violence I am writing about, language and cultural identity, as we are all Zulu. I spent my formative years with all my informants in the community that was ravaged by the civil wars.
62Michael Sprinker, The Writings of Nietzsche, the Precursor of Freud, (1980), 338.
63Siegfried Mandel, Nietzsche and the Jews (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998).
64John W. Cresswell, Research Design: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (USA: SAGE Publications, 1994), 163.
65Jay Ruby, “Exposing Yourself: Reflexibility, Anthropology and Film”, in Kinesis Reports, 3:1 (1980), 153.
66Peter Just and John Monaghan, Social and Cultural Anthropology: Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 30.