4.2 Research paradigm
4.2.1 Social construction and identity construction
The social constructionist epistemology takes as its starting point the philosophical view that all knowledge, not only that of research participants, is socially constructed (Seale, 2004). In this regard, Terre Blanche and Durrheim (1999:148) assert that “[s]ocial constructionist approaches treat people as though their thoughts, feelings and experiences were the products of systems of meaning that exist at a social rather than an individual level”. Postcolonial theories of blackness (cf. chapter 3) have defined the troubling nature of blackness as a historically grounded view of encounter with racism. From a social constructionist perspective, an identity is a narrative
66 construct that is influenced by the sociocultural context in which people live. This approach focuses on text and narration, stressing the importance of dialogue and multiplicity, and pays attention to process as opposed to objectives, which is known by Hall and Du Gay (1996:2) as a
“theory of discursive practice”. According to this view, Terre Blanche and Durrheim (1999:6) maintain “constructionist research … aims to show how versions of the social world are produced in discourse and to demonstrate how these constructions of reality make certain actions possible and others unthinkable”.
The argument in this study is that a social constructionist approach challenges the notion that knowledge is based on an objective and unbiased observation of the world (Burr, 1995).
Understandings of the world are seen not as universal but as products of culture and history that are dependent upon the social and economic environment prevailing in that culture at that time.
One‟s currently accepted view of the world is, therefore, a result of constant interaction, negotiation and construction between oneself and others. An important claim that guides this in this study is that black identities are socially, culturally and historically constructed. The people‟s understandings of the world are shaped by discourses – taken-for-granted assumptions that inform the cultural stories of how life ought to be (Burr, 1995).
Social constructionists contend that not only is knowledge constructed socially but also that objective knowledge is not possible (e.g. Burr, 1995; Davis & Gergen, 1997; Gavey, 1997;
Gergen, 1994a, 1994b, 1999). According to Shotter (1993a:34), “[w]e can no longer claim to be presenting neutral „pictures‟ of fixed, already existing states of affairs, awaiting our judgment as to their truth or falsity”. There is a denial of representationalist epistemologies that maintain that there can be a clear and direct grasp of the empirical world and that knowledge simply reflects what is out there. At this point it is necessary to distinguish between the assertions that the world is out there and the truth is out there. Common sense would hold that there is a real world out there. The world is, indeed, out there but we have no way of apprehending that world outside language (Edley, 2001a). Knowledge or truth is, therefore, conveyed by linguistic constructions.
Rorty (1989:21) asserts that we must drop the notion that language can represent the world as it is “since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths”. The social
67 constructionist perspective claims that identities harnessed by race and racism are not fixed, nor static, but shifting in a state of flux and socially constituted through language (Ratele & Duncan, 2003). This becomes clear in the following empirical chapters, where respondents draw on historically and politically available discourses to construct black identity.
This study wishes to understand the impact of historical-political, socio-economic change on black identification. Post-apartheid black identity in this study has provided us with a diversity of subject positions, social experiences and cultural identities comprising the category of “black”
(cf. ch 6). Terre Blanche and Durrheim (1999) believe that social constructionist research is appropriate if the researcher believes that reality consists of a fluid and variable set of social constructions. Burr‟s perspective understands identity as discursively constructed and as always socially and historically embedded. Burr (1995:51) states that “identity is constructed out of the discourses culturally available to us, and which we draw upon in our communications with other people”. This means that self and culture are interdependent and selves are nurtured within a culture constructing the concepts they provide. Constructing identity is thus always in process.
As discussed in the previous chapter, Hall (1996:4) focuses on identity as a process of
„becoming‟ and stresses the importance of representation in the construction of identity:
Identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in a process of becoming rather than being: not „who we are‟ or „where we come from‟, so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves. Identities are therefore constructed within, not outside representation.
Shotter (1993b) claims that identity construction takes place within and through dialogue. He believes that by using certain kinds of language, people construct different social relationships, and in so doing they construct a sense of their own identity. This means that one‟s private experience of the world, which is apprehended through the senses, is related to the social sphere.
Given the earlier assertion that social constructionism focuses on relational activities between people, questions are then raised about how this methodology accounts for people‟s inner,
68 subjective lives. To provide an answer to this question, Shotter (1997:11) explains that the inner things are not so much inside us but are to be found in the “momentary relational spaces occurring between ourselves and an other or otherness in our surroundings”. In other words, our sense of self is seen as something we accomplish with social interactions “reconstructed from moment to moment within specific discursive and rhetorical contexts, and distributed across social contexts” (Edley & Wetherell, 1997:205). This has led to a conceptualisation of the self as de-centralised, fluid or multiple, with the person or self changing within the context (Gergen, 1991, 1994b; Hall, 1992).
In a study that is concerned with the tension that exists in the construction of self, it is important to know how the language positions people as they talk about their experiences of being black. I now move to positioning theory in order to understand the storyteller‟s construction of identity in narrative.