Възможността за наративна социология
The Possibility of Narrative Sociology

Summary/Abstract: Narrative sociology focuses on subalterns, insists on plurality, power and meaning relationships, daily practices. We propose the account, short stories, new forms of expression against “disciplinary decadence” and philological quarrels, in order to find new answers to political and social issues. We propose that sociology adresses its own research subjects, aknowledges their production and act so the investigated recognize themselves in and through these narratives. Instead of scientism, the criterion should be the restitution of social life, not erasing meaning's breakdown, losses of memory, effects of cultural oppression. It is like reviving the controversy between “explaining and understanding”. To clear it, it is said, one only need show that it is the same thing. But where do you begin? Explaining implies you have already understood. Understanding that there is nothing left to explain? Concretely, the choices made by the sociologist are included in its writing. Whom is he speaking to? Of whom, of what does he allow itself? In order to distinguish herself from litterature, to look like science, the narrative of society has rejected sensitivity, uninitiated forms of intersubjective understanding and, eventually, common culture. Going back to narratives, descriptions, would be unuseful or even damaging if it consisted in giving way to romantism. The paper offers pieces of narratives and of the hermeneutics that allows to locate them in the scientific mosaic Howard Becker wished to see.

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