The biographic word in social science: Between the Bildungsroman and collective action

Abstract

The diversity of uses of the "biographic methods" in the social studies suggest, within each study, particular ways of thinking along the language and the subjectivity. In this context and establishing a distance with the questions attached strictly to the value of knowledge, the proposal is to present and analyze some of its assumptions. In particular, the hermeneutical ones, which refer to a story of making a biography of the experience and to models of understanding of the word biographical; and the epistemological reasons, related with the dialogue scene of the investigation and the constructive character of the knowledge. For this we'll address a sociological text in which the stories of life are the main material for an "ethnography of memories". Vidas beligerantes [Auyero, 2004] presents a cross between the biography and the theory of collective action from which you can infer the conditions of the scientific interview mode, also the epistemic decisions taken over the polemic side of the selve-representation of the identity. This aspects which could be described in an hermeneutic of co-investigation, also point the limitations of a narrative configuration of the experience and its theological moral