Reflection: Culture, Theory, and Narrative: The Intersection ofMeanings in Practice
Dennis Saleebey
Two essential characteristics of the human condition important for social work practitioners to remember are (l) human beings build
themselves into the world by creating meaning, and (2) culture gives meaning to action by situating underlying states in an interpretive
system. Practice is an intersection where the meanings of the worker (theories), the client (stories and narratives), and culture (myths,
rituals, and themes) meet. Social workers must open themselves up to clients’ constructions of their individual and collective worlds. The
major vehicles for this are stories, narratives, and myths. Acknowledging and helping to refurbish them does not doom social
workers to psychologizing what are, in part, social and political problems. Social workers can assist in the “insurrection” of
subjugated meanings and help get them into the agency, school, hospital, commission, institution, community, and profession through externalization. Such an approach to practice helps clients edge into
the larger and often oppressive world, strengthens the self, and emboldens the folklore of the group.
Key Words: clinical practice; culture; meaning; narrative; theory
Professional social work can be substantially. enriched by incorporating constructivist ap-preciations and perspectives into its theory and practice. To do so may require a shift in our understanding of the nature of reality and our stance toward what is “true.” There are many ways to construe and construct a world of mean- ing, and we will benefit as practitioners if we come to understand more clearly how people and cul- tures create a world of meaning and what implica- tions such meanings have for how we approach our work. Until now, much of the thinking and work of constructivist practitioners has failed to do two things: (1) establish a link between indi- vidual constructions and the larger environment of social institutions and culture and (2) examine
how any theory of practice is also a symbolic con- struction or “story.” This article offers some pre- liminary thoughts on the intersection ofculture, theory, and individual narratives.
Culture and Meaning Bruner (1990), in his usual astute and direct way, draws our attention to two characteristics of the human condition that we sometimes forget. First, human beings can only build themselves into the world by creating meaning, by fashioning out of symbols a sense of what the world is all about, Unlike other species, we cannot rely on biology for instruction. Biology does constrain, but it does not shape who we think we are, what we think we are doing, and where we think we are going.
CCG Code: 0037-8046/94 $3.00 © 1994 National Association of SodaI Workers, Inc.-351
Without some plausible and poignant interpretive devices and images we are lost, swarmed by a rush of stimuli on our nervous systems. Second, we get the raw material for our meanings, however pro- visional, from culture. Culture is nothing if it is not a system where meaning is given to action by “situating its underlying intentional states in [this] interpretive system” (Bruner, 1990, p. 24). Culture insinuates its patterns on us, and they be- come embedded deeply within us.
Culture is the means by which we receive, or- ganize, rationalize, and understand our particular experiences in the world. Central elements of this cultural patterning are story and narrative. That is, we find or impart meaning largely through tell- ing stories and weaving narratives, the plots often laid out by culture. But individuals do not simply and passively receive meaning. There is always, as Rosaldo (1989) noted, an interplay between struc- ture (culture) and agency (selfhood). We may, as individuals and families, alter the plots of story lines and the motives of actors to suit ourselves and to more comfortably situate us in our own world. Much of what culture tells us, the learning of it, occurs early: “Once learned these behavior pat- terns, these habitual responses, these ways of inter- acting gradually sink below the surface of the mind and, like the admiral of a submerged submarine fleet,control from the depths” (Hall, 1981,p. 42). Thus, we frequently mistake what is in fact cultural for something innate and immutable. We only come to realizeour mistake when we become immersed in another culture or when someone or some event callsour meaning into question. Egregiouserrors of interpretation of what others’ behavior means are, according to Hall, attributable to this “hidden” as- pect of culture. To transcend it, we must know that it is there, and then we must summon up the mean- ings and patterns that make it up. Without that exer- cisewe are doomed to misinterpret the lifeworld of people of cultures or subcultures that differ from our own (Hall, 1981).
Another lesson learned from those who have come to understand other systems of meaning besides their own: No culture has a monopoly on truth. Truth may be an irrelevant standard by which to judge a culture or microculture such as a group, family, or gang (Rosaldo, 1989). Truth by one culture’s standards is fantasy or folly by another’s. Even the truths of a particular culture change and shift with the passage of time, the in- termingling with other peoples, and the dyna-
mism of the human-made and natural worlds. Whatever meanings a culture sustains are mostly expressed in two ways: (1) stories, narratives, and myths (individual and collective versions) and (2) nonverbal communication (the expressions of the body in context) (Hall, 1981).
So the truths that practitioners, researchers, and educators traffic in often ultimately turn out to be the implements-discourse styles, language, and tropes-that make up the culture’s stories. This fact, says Bruner (1990), makes folk psychol- ogy and folk science enormously important; un- derstanding a group’s interpretive system is a matter of delicate sensitivities. Because most folk science is “narrative rather than conceptual” (p. 35), we must hear the stories. In a similar vein, anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo (1984) wrote that the self “grows not from ‘inner’ essence rela- tively independent of the social world, but from experiences in a world of meanings, images, and social bonds, in which all people are inevitably involved” (p. 139). These cultural truths and the narrative core of folk psychology are based on “human agents doing things on the basis of their beliefs and desires, striving for goals, meeting ob- stacles they best or which best them, all of this extended over time” (Bruner, 1990, pp. 42-43).
The dream of discovering truth or reality apart from a people’s and a culture’s interpretations may be just that-a dream. But social workers are not doomed to a limp relativism. Rather, we refer to a universal human capacity and interest-mak- ing meaning, telling stories, and institutionalizing myths. Some research suggests that children are disposed to receiveand offer stories from the very earliest months that they can communicate (Miller, 1982).We can examine stories and myths and imag- ine their consequences for individuals and groups in terms of our own interpretive canons, values, and morals. Nevertheless,until we begin to ground our professional understanding and actions in the sto- ries, in the meaning systems of those we help, we will continue to make the same errors that Rosaldo (1989) claimed have been made by objectivist eth- nographers: “In cross-cultural studies, the gaps be- tween the analyst’s narratives and those of the pro- tagonists often rival the clashesof incongruous epistemologies in Javaneseshadow theater” (p. 142).
Narrative and Story Borrowing from others, I have claimed that the interpretive slants taken in cultures often come in
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the form of stories and narratives. Although the differences among narrative, story, and myth are difficult to aptly describe, we may assume that narratives are grounded in the culture, are wide- spread, are more attentive to form and style, and often relate to matters that are prototypical and essential to the culture (Laird, 1989). Stories, al- though they might be derivative of narrative, may be more restrained, more loosely organized, and more idiosyncratic. Myths, on the other hand, are epic and epochal. They contain the big truths about culture, family, and individuals, past and present. They are preserved because they in some way underwrite a considerable fund of meaning, and they provide a rich interpretive lode (Laird, 1989). Therefore, there is a considerable politics of storytelling, narrative construction, and mythmaking: How is it decided which stories are credible and institutionalized? Consider, for ex- ample, groups who are oppressed within a culture. We rarely hear their stories, and they are not al- lowed to tell them except in certain tightly en- closed circles (Laird, 1989; Rosaldo, 1989).
Bruner (1990) pointed out that narratives and stories generally take two forms-the canonical and the exceptional. On the one hand, some nar- ratives celebrate the normative structure of cul- ture; they instruct, chasten, and lend rhetorical weight to norms and conventions. (In this instance the politics of narrative instruction are prominent.) Other narratives, however, have the purpose not of distributing canon, but of accounting for ex- ception, novelty, and anomaly. When we encoun- ter novelty or the bizarre, we do our level best to fit it into a canonical guise. Often we cannot, so we “make up” a new story. But, most important of all, stories and narratives “dabble in the sub- junctive” (Bruner, 1990, p. 53), exploring the ten- sions between the possible and impermissible, ex- horting alternative possibilities,explaining or explaining away fallsfrom grace, and exalting achievement. For example, Alcoholics Anony- mous (AA) has been both praised and damned for being based in the “disease” model, but those who know it well know that disease is merely a meta- phor of mythic proportion and that the method is founded on what drinkers excelat, the telling of sto- ries-endlessly. AA’s method is subjunctive art:
Drinking, all we did was tell stories, if only to ourselves. Drinking, we built ourselves a drunk’s ladder of words, one end propped on the clouds,
the other floating on water. The whole ladder is important if you would understand drunkards, but fluid footing is where you begin to under- stand AA. The fellowship exists to ground the drunk’s ladder on solid earth, on common ground, and whether we extend one end of it back up into the heavens or simply lay it down to bridge the chasms between ourselves and others, it is still made of words. (“Elpenor,” 1986,p. 43)
Interpretation and Reality There is hot debate now in the field of family therapy. The structuralists or constructivists con- ceive of family therapy as correcting a script or helping the family rewrite a better text for their life. It matters not if it is “true,” as long as it is help- ful,plausible, interesting, and positive. Reframing is one species of this therapeutic genus (de Shazer, 1991; Watzlawick, 1978; White & Epston, 1990). But serious criticism has been leveled at this kind of meaning construction, and socialworkers should take it seriously. Minuchin (1991), certainly a partiarch in the field, decries the exclusive con- structivist reliance on stories because they ignore “the social context that may actually dictate the ‘plot’ of [clients’] lives-the institutions and so- cioeconomic conditions that determine what they do and how they live” (p. 49). We must respect the forces of circumstance and context and of politics, social institutions, and economy, but there are other ways to look at this criticism.
Interpretation and story are the essence of cul- ture. They are not trivialities unrelated to circum- stances. Rather, they are serious and essential cre- ations that grow out of the experiences people have in particular environments. Stories may instruct individuals on how to survive or how to accept- even how to overcome-difficult situations. And at the least stories reveal to individuals consider- able information and perspective about the nature of their circumstances. The stories created out of the experience of slaveryin this country were no at- tempt to shut one’s eyesto the horrors and furies of slavery. Although they foretold a time of grace to come, they also directed people to look squarely and bravely at their predicament (Gwaltney, 1980). Consider the opposite: Individuals and cul- tures whose stories have been appropriated/or suppressed forcibly are in dire straits because they cannot reliably and safely construe circumstances to their advantage. People can surmount the most distressing of conditions given the uplift and
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guidance of stories and narratives. When we robbed Native Americans of their stories by pro- pagandizing and punishing their children in schools, we stole from them some of their cultural sinew, their collective memories, their hopes (de Loria, 1969).
Without a story, meaning, conviction, and pos- sibility fail. Only when we endow a circumstance, event, or situation with words and a plot line does it become relevant. Women, as many have writ- ten, have suffered from having many of their ex- periences unstoried and others told merely pri- vately or when made public, belittled. But there is an upsurge in the publicizing of woman’s stories and in feminist mythmaking that is clearly em- powering. Laird (1989) said it well: “As more and more women tell their own stories and as stories are told about women in biography, novel, play, and poem and in music, film, television, and ra- dio, women’s choices for self-construction are enriched and expanded. Women not only begin to connect themselves with other women and to dis- cover new possibilities for their lives, but also have new opportunities to tell the stories of their oppression and of their poverty” (p. 440). The subjugation of other peoples typically begins with two basic violations of human nature: suppression of the body and its passions and degradation or suppression of the native word or story. Peoples becoming free often begin by rediscovering their past and its stories, myths, and rituals and by re- covering their sensuality.
Another thread ties narrative to social context in an important way. People have always been in- spired by visions, images, and symbols held up to their eyes by inspirational leaders, leaders who could weave tales of imminent possibility and tri- umph grounded in the real circumstances of their followers. Tales of the quest for respect, relief, or redemption or the creation and reviving of sym- bols that unite hopes with action have moved people and have encouraged them to alter or defy their circumstances. Thanks to the word, whether spoken by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, Betty Friedan, Alice Walker, Elie Weisel, or Black Elk, people have been empowered and restored. These kinds of stories and visions also may insulate individuals and groups from the op- pressors’ stories about them.
Finally, stories and narratives link people to context and institution. They can provide the building blocks of critique, reaction, and even re-
bellion. In a democracy that professes justice and equality, social resources must be made broadly available to underwrite the blossoming of self, family, group, and culture. But all resources are not external; many are internal to self or group and need to be explored, to become valued, and to be rendered employable. More often than not, such resources are preserved or discovered in an individual’s or group’s narratives, myths, and other songs of the subjunctive.
Stories are not money or housing or food, to be sure. But neither are they idiosyncratic creations not tied to real life. Often they are what binds us to that outer world. Rosaldo (1984) asserted that the self only grows from “experience in a world of meanings, images and social bonds” (p. 139). As Bruner (1990) argued, “Interpretive meanings are metaphoric, allusive, very sensitive to context. . . .They are often the coin of culture” [italics added] (p. 61). So stories and myths and narratives can be the instruments of empowerment-individual and collective.
Social Work Practice: The Intersection of Meanings One version of the helper myth has him armed with theory and technique, heroically maintaining interpersonal distance and dispassionate concern as he blandishes a variety of esoteric techniques and a precious lexicon to bring her out of her mis- ery. In this myth it is usually a him helping a her. To do so successfully he first must figure out what the problem is, and he has theory to help him do just that. Without theory and proven technique, our hero is as impotent as Samson. The education and research enterprise, in this saga, is to provide armament for our helper. Cynicism aside, the in- terpretive slant on this myth is that any theory or any technique is as much a symbolic and linguis- tic construction as the next guy’s story. As Goldstein (1991), with his usual wit, contended, “As it turns out, the apparent ‘facts’ [he refers here to the building blocks of theory for prac- tice-scientifically derived facts] are really human inventions, not scientific discoveries such as a new virus, atomic particle or galaxy. Concepts such as ‘ecosystems’ or ‘codependency’ are authored as arbitrarily, selectively, and rhetorically as are the themes and impressions of an autobiography or novel” (p. 5). What may be happening in the usual helper-client interaction is that the helper, clumsily or deftly, imposes his version of the situation or
Social Work / Volume 39, Number 4 / July 1994-354
recasts the client’s version into professional cant and canonical, not common, sense. That is theory. Clients surrender their own narratives (or sup- press them) and accept the professionals’ theory, thus becoming more receptive to technique and more compliant with regimen. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ofDisorders, Third Edition- Revised (DSM-III-R) can be understood as a text for the translation of an enormous variety ofhu- man predicaments, follies, emotional and cogni- tive states, and social conditions into a standard “accounting” and, eventually, numbers (Cutler, 1991). There is an inherent dualistic tension in the DSM-III-R. On the one hand lies the subjective and narrative presentation of the client, on the other, the “objective” and numerical pronounce- ments of the professional using the diction of DSM-III-R (Cutler, 1991). In this way, however benignly, the client’s story is subjugated, made fugitive (Foucault, 1980; Weick, 1983).
Critique of the value-free version of the work of a discipline or profession is occurring on many fronts. Perhaps one of the more useful in helping us contextualize practice comes from anthropol- ogy. In likening anthropologists to the social crit- ics envisioned by Walzer (1987), Rosaldo (1989) said this: “Rather than work downward from ab- stract principles, social critics work outward from an in-depth knowledge of a specific form oflife. Informed by such conceptions as social justice, human dignity, and equality, they use their moral imagination to move from the world as it actually is to a locally persuasive vision of how it ought to be” (p. 194). There is a heavy load of imperative in that quote for social work. The initiatory act of the helping would seem to be the suspension of canon or theory (not much different, it would seem, than the old saw about “beginning where the client is”). The orientation of the worker clearly has to be informed, insofar as possible, by an appreciation of the context and meaning sys- tem wherein the client dwells. It would seem req- uisite to encourage and give free reign to the client’s hopes, aspirations, possibilities, and im- manent meanings and actions. And certainly we may have to understand and illuminate the client’s storied situation in the gleam not so much of theory, but of our own moral imagination and the values of the profession.
Nevertheless, it is extraordinarily difficult to hear and respect the accounts of clients, particu- larly if they are in a socially subordinate position
(it is possible that the very definition of”client” implies subordination) (Holmes & Saleebey, 1991). The static of our own theories and pre- sumptions, agency canon, and the informal stories about clients and client groups that permeate the atmosphere of many agencies make it difficult to hear with clarity and to manage the suspension of disbelief. Goldstein (1991) quoted Fibush in this regard:
If one truly listens to what a client is saying-not for the purpose of pigeonholing him into a diag- nostic category or pinning a sociological labelon him-one beginsto knowsome of the basicre- curring questionsarisingout of the human di- lemma…. My understanding… comesin the interchangebetween me and the client…. A diagnosis can be as stereotyping as a racistslur and evenmore dangerously prone to becominga self-fulfilling prophecy. (pp. 4-5)
A first-year social work student, with no previ- ous social work experience, begins work with a young man, a heavy drug user in the past, who is ostensibly in the throes of the last stages of ac- quired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). In the hospital, all but isolated if not morally quaran- tined by staff, he is, in effect,a pariah. One doctor, answering the student’s question about involving the family, suggests that people “like this” typi- cally do not have families who care. (This is the doctor’s story, by the way.) Innocent, unnerved, but dedicated, the student does not know what to do-but she does the most human thing; she so- licits and really listens to the young man’s story. He rallies for a few days, days made passable (maybe even possible) by his storytelling. At a point at which death seems near, he says to the student, “I love you.” She, against her learning, replies in kind. Through her encouragement of the story and, thus, the self, she and the young man had trafficked in the possible, acknowledged the past, and laid some ghosts to rest. But for the student, there is a political lesson here. Her client’s story and others like it must get out, and she will assist in that project.
Meaning and Troubles
Practitioners need to know how meaning,’ whether manifested in story, narrative, vision, or language, affects intention and action, feeling and mood, relationships, interactions with the sur- rounding world, well-being, and possibility. They
Saleebey / Culture, Theory, andNarrative: The Intersection of Meanings in Practice-355
also need to know how meaning can get people into trouble, get them stuck, or embroil them in crisis. There are many ways in which meaning is implicated in human dilemmas:
Stories, narratives, and meaning configura- tions sometimes are not one’s own or even those ofone’s culture. Rather, they are com- posed by and imposed from the outside. The individual and the collectivity have no ownership of these meanings. Thus, reso- nance and vitality of action are subverted.
There is an “impoverishment of narrative resources” (Bruner, 1990, p. 96)-that is, the stories that come from lived experience, individual and collective, are few or are not compelling; they lack symbolic power or subjunctive intensity.
The stories that people tell, the construc- tions they devise about their lives, some- times propel them down dead ends or dan- gerous paths. Occasionally such stories assume the status of myth (Laird, 1989). For example, “All the men in this family are hell-raisers. You can’t tame them, you’ve just got to accept what they do or get out.”
The meanings through which people try to construe their situations and their lives do not account for the exceptional, only the expectable. When the ordinary does not pan out and the unique or unbidden occurs, it cannot be made comprehensible or given coherence. As a result, it is ignored, or it causes fear and maybe the paralysis of will or action.
The stories that some people tell have no currency in the larger world of people and events, particularly the stories of individuals from cultures and subcultures outside the dominant institutions. To traverse and traf- fic in the dominant world they have to sur- render to other interpretations of their lives, often adulterated and corrupt (White & Epston,1990).
As an example of narrative adversities, consider a public housing development in a midwestern city. Some residents are clearly discouraged, dispirited, even depressed. Some of the stories they tell about their lives, the meaning they attach to events in some subtle ways, spring from or are at least reinforced from the outside. The world of public housing is seen by outsiders through tales presented in the media and elsewhere that turn
obsessively on drugs, danger, and disorganiza- tion-“even the police are afraid to go there.” We have encouraged social work students placed in the housing development to find and help spread counter stories: tales of survival under difficult conditions; stories about compassion, about “grace under pressure”; tales of accomplishment; and word pictures of people acting effectively with dignity and aplomb. These stories exist, but they tend to be brushed aside or suppressed by the force of “alien” and dominative stories. Both story lines are “true,” and both should inform and di- rect the residents. But the stories of survival and accomplishment need to be restored as well. There is an inevitable connection between what people do and what they think they can do and the interpretive frameworks available to them (Bruner, 1990). So the importance of stories of hope and survival is paramount.
As an example of the divergence between myth and reality, consider the U.S. government’s long- held view of the Soviet Union as the enemy, the “evil empire”; we constructed narratives of mythic proportion that fueled defense policy, depleted social policy, and crafted intelligence and diplo- matic strategies. But in a matter of months, that story was subverted by an exceptional and sudden series of events. Because we still cannot account comfortably for it, we remain suspended some- where between hope and suspicion.
Meaning and Practice
Meaning and interpretations are socially consti- tuted, a product of interaction and exchange. They are also born of the fact that individuals are almost always in some degree of disequilibrium and seek to organize their world in a way that is more predictable, satisfying, resonant, or interest- ing. Cultures may actually survive because they provide schemes for accounting for the novel or for confronting change. But no matter how well cultures do that, individuals are frequently in the position of becoming authors, agents of construc- tion. Sometimes, however, for the reasons out- lined above, the agency of individuals weakens or becomes disreputable, and they need help in deal- ing with crisis and challenge and in refurbishing meaning. Help can come in many guises, only one of which is professional. But when people are in crisis, one of the avenues for change is the “devel- opment, overthrow and redevelopment” of mean- ing (Steenbarger, 1991, p. 291).
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Thus, a social worker can help serve as a cata- lyst in the reconstruction or reconstrual of mean- ing as it affects some part of a client’s world. The idea is not necessarily the restoration of equilib- rium or even the boosting of adaptive capacity, although those might be a result. Helping the resi- dents in the public housing project construct or enliven alternative stories has, among other things, begun, for some, the process of viewing the “housing project” as a “community” or “neighborhood,” where individuals begin to take ownership and transform it, rather than hide be- hind their doors and wait for the police to come or for the Housing Authority to come up with a new security plan. Seeing that other people have different and more positive constructions about the public housing experience is important. One woman, for example, has lived there 35 years and successfully raised eight children. As these stories become available to other people, they allow the formation of some new meaning and the recap- turing of some old meaning about the experience and-this is so important-encourage people to begin to create a vision about what might be and to take some steps to achieve it. Drugs and danger are still there, but they may be confronted differ- ently as people slowly open up the story that this can be a community.
Because meaning making in people’s lives is reciprocal, we usually do it in league with others, and many of our constructions derive from our relationships with others, are about our relation- ships, or affect them (Steenbarger, 1991). So with clients, we act as collaborators, cofacilitators, and codirectors as we work to resurrect, confirm, or disconfirm old meanings; establish
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