An autoethnography of lifestories recorded on the community radio on the island of Barra

Abstract

In agreeing with Geertz’s claim that culture is experiential (1973), I aim to present an interpretation of a lived experience. It is an autoethnographic reflection of my experience as a volunteer radio host for the community radio station on the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. At the heart of my argument is spoken language and its meaning. From a selection of themes of transcribed lifestory interviews, I aim to show that culture, diachronically shaped in the island’s collective historical experience of its past relationship to the sea, transforms itself through language to create a coherency of our present living experience. Indeed, my argument is that the collective conceptualisation of community and tradition, and the more individualised concept of identity, as conduits of culture, are constructed through contextually significant linear and non-linear narrative language, which is the result of temporal, ever-changing phenomenological processes. This synchronic interpretation, based on a snapshot of a collective public space, uses a critical discourse analysis of the island’s oral history to demonstrate how lifestory narratives reflect and refract coherency of a historical specific time. In such slightly skewed reflections, the locality finds itself. But in its refracted form, it moves beyond the parochial into territory where themes uncover age gender differences. The differentiation of meaning produces a coherency that is echoed in feminist discourse. Looking through the theoretical lenses of anthropological and sociological perspectives, I argue that in the construction of lifestory narratives, the power relationships of a wider capitalist society are embedded, and, as such, reflect our lived experience, which gives meaning to what we understand as culture.