Foreword: In the following paper I analyze specific components of the Storycorps project. Storycorps is an oral history project sponsored by and broadcast on National Public Radio, NPR. While the project is not specific to families, a large portion of the interviews surround issues pertaining to kinship. To learn more about the project, visit this link.
Moments of constructed family norms in Storycorps interviews: Introduction
In the article titled “Is there a family? New Anthropological views” the authors, Jane Collier, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako ask readers to reexamine the constructs of family life that are possibly hindering their family relationships. They call for an understanding of family “not as a concrete institution designed to fulfill universal human needs, but as an ideological construct associated with the modern state.”[1] This paper will analysis Storycorps, an oral history project which records interviews between two people for broadcast on public radio, and how it relates to social constructs of families and the agency of individuals in American society. I will focus specifically on those moments in the interviews when the constructs of family, what the participants think a “normal” family should be like, emerge from the conversations. How does the participant’s perception of the Storycorp project accompanied by the highly facilitated interview process foster these expectations? These moments in this specific ethnographic project reveal bigger systemic norms pervasive in American culture at large.
