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Voices of Experience: Talk, Identity and Membership in Reminiscence Groups

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2008

Kevin Buchanan  and
David Middleton
Kevin Buchanan
Affiliation:
Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, Nene College, Northampton, NN2 7AL.
David Middleton
Affiliation:
Department of Human Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU.
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Abstract

This paper presents a discourse analysis of talk in reminiscence groups. Two main issues are addressed. First, we examine how speakers' identities are accomplished through the way they position themselves in social relationships and social practices of ‘remembered pasts’. Particular analytical attention is given to how people claim entitlements to the significance and consequences of their lived experience. Second, issues of membership are examined through the way people index their engagement in the narrative environment accomplished in reminiscence group talk. Finally, we are concerned with how these narratives contribute to a ‘reconstitution’ of understandings in common about cultural and moral orders of remembered pasts and the historical era in which the reported events, experiences and practices took place. Our analysis aims to demonstrate how reminiscence work affords a context for ‘re-membering’ where older people on their own behalf can work entitlements to voice the consequences of their experiences of life.

Keywords

Discourse analysis of reminiscence talksituated identities and membershipsre-memberingcultural and moral orders of remembered pastsvoicing experience as social action.
Type
Research Article
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , December 1995 , pp. 457 - 491
Copyright
Copyright Cambridge University Press 1995

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