How to Include Material Elements in the Analysis of Life Stories? Applying Actor-Network Theory to the Analysis of Autobiographical Narratives on Alcohol Dependence

Often the aim in the analysis of life stories is to identify cultural meaning structures that tell about the values and norms that regulate people’s life choices and give purpose to their aspirations. Hence, the life stories are often approached, for example, by applying Vladimir Propp’s theory on narrative functions or William Labov’s theory on narrative categories.  

By applying actor-network theory (ANT) to the analysis of autobiographical narratives on alcohol dependence, the paper shows how the methods that focus on the identification of cultural meaning structures have a tendency to detach action described in life stories from its material and bodily mediations and overemphasize the importance of psycho-social and cultural factors in action. In ANT action is understood as an effect of network where both human and material elements can act by a set of links of relations. ANT offers tools to grasp how alcohol dependence, for example, is produced and mediated by a network of material, bodily, psychological, social, conceptual and cultural entities that transforms the action in an unforeseen way.   

The paper uses empirical examples from the life stories on alcohol dependence to discuss how material entities, like physical spaces, material resources and bodily reactions, may trigger a dependency to alcohol, stabilize it, prevent it or abolish it as part of networks that connects human and non-human material elements. It proposes that as we follow the mediations of action and their conglomerations in many surprising sets of agencies, we should focus on situations/events and their concrete processes. That is, cultural meaning structures, like narrative functions or categories should be considered as mediators among other mediators, acting as part of complex actor networks that include also material elements.