“Living a life of your own”; “being your own person”; “marching to the beat of your own drum”; “becoming who you are”; contemporary self-realization discourse is replete with images and expressions that suggest a certain view of the self. Although rarely made explicit, this image of the self can broadly be described as self-reliant, independent, autonomous, atomistic and essentialist. (1) It has already been pointed out that in contrast, the reframed understanding of self-realization that this study aims to develop presupposes the embedding of the self in a social and cultural context. Consequently, our identity is seen as a socio-culturally constituted phenomenon, rather than an essential inner “core self”. Moreover, our lives and selves are perceived as intrinsically interwoven with those of others rather than atomistic and independent. In other words, who we are can only be understood against the background of the social and cultural context of our lives.
(2) In the context of this study, cultural narratives are defined as agglomerates of stories, imaginaries, meanings, representations, archetypes, views and stock images existing in a certain culture about a social group, for instance women, Muslims, gay/lesbian people, or aging individuals. This is a deliberately broad definition which includes, but is not restricted to narratives as traditionally understood stories with a beginning, middle and end. Most importantly, my understanding of cultural narratives presents them as carriers of meaning in the broadest sense. Cultural narratives are disseminated in a given culture through various means, and they pervade our lifeworld in a sometimes conscious, but also often largely unconscious manner. They provide the horizon against which we situate our own life narratives. They supply us with a reservoir of both narrative form and content on which to model our own identities. Other terms that emphasize this function of cultural narratives are “macro narrative environment”, and “ideological setting”.
From early childhood throughout life, we are constantly confronted with explicit and implicit cultural narratives about different aspects of our world. They come to us through fairy tales or comic books, advertisements, newspapers, TV shows, exemplary figures like parents or teachers, works of art and many other media. These cultural narratives give direction to our views and perceptions, inform our choices and judgments, influence which social roles are or are not available to us, and influence how we think and act in certain situations. Cultural narratives are thereby indispensable meaning-generating resources without which we cannot form a viable identity. If a person were to dissociate herself from them completely, she would no longer be able to understand either herself and the people around her or the workings of her society. (3) Despite their indispensable status as identity resources however, cultural narratives may also severely restrict the options that are available to members of a particular social group to form a certain identity. This is the case if they produce and reproduce prejudiced sets of images and expectations that are so pervasive that they are very hard to counter. The expected result is marginalization and oppression. Members of social groups that are thus marginalized in a given culture are unlikely to have the same access to that culture’s dominant ideals of a good life.
Any given culture harbors a diverse array of cultural narratives, but some narratives have a more dominant position than others. Lindemann Nelson describes these as “master narratives”. She defines cultural master narratives as “the stories circulating in our culture that embody socially shared understandings”. The role of cultural (master) narratives is expressed by De Medeiros when she defines them as “the stories (or story fragments) ‘told’ by a culture to communicate the values, expectations and attitudes of that culture”. (4) The quotation marks surrounding the word told in this definition emphasize that cultural narratives are very broadly perceived and do not only include traditional stories put into a coherent lingual form, but can also encompass more diffuse expressions, such as artistic expressions or media representations.