Life Histories with Members of Indigenous Peoples: Methodological Remarks Based on Two Recent Books

Abstract

In this paper we aim to identify some relevant methodological traits of life histories – conceived both as a research framework and as a textual outcome – with members of indigenous peoples. In order to achieve this goal, we discuss the concepts of ‘narrator’ and ‘narrataire’, the researchers’ stance, and the transformative potential of life histories, as well as some ethical and political issues that these processes and textual productions raise. We depart from the elaboration of the life histories of a multilingual teacher from the Peruvian Amazon and of a historical leader of the Asháninka society: a bilingual book in Spanish and Bora, the first language of the teacher (Díaz Peña 2017), and a book in Spanish and Asháninka, the first language of the historical leader (Casanto Shingari 2022). We state that a core methodological feature of working out life histories with indigenous peoples is the need for clearly setting out throughout the process the various asymmetries and differences between the narrator and the narrataires. A remarkable asymmetry in the experiences we assess pertains to the linguistic market (Bourdieu 2008; 2002), and it emerges from the different social values assigned to the various codes downplayed in the process of producing the life histories and in their textual outcome.