Contact Organisers

Professor Peter Ackermann
peter.ackermann*rzmail.uni-erlangen.de
(where * is replaced by the @ sign)

Dr. Bruce White
bwhite*oicd.net
(where * is replaced by the @ sign)

The Organisers would like to thank all the participants for making the 1st Annual OICD (Organization for Intra-Cultural Development) Workshop such a success!

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Read the poem Culture is but a Story by Michael Prinzinger

Strategies of Belonging:
The Individual and Collective Construction of Narrative Continuity

University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany
hosted by the Department of Japanese Studies

July 7 to July 9, 2006

REPORT OF THE 1st ANNUAL OICD WORKSHOP

The University of Erlangen, Germany, played host to a stimulating, 1st Annual Workshop of the Organization for Intra-Cultural Development (OICD, July 7-9th, 2006). The workshop theme of Strategies of Belonging: The Individual and Collective Construction of Narrative Continuity seemed particularly well suited to consideration in a town not far from Nuremburg and the former East German border, as well as one rich in local stories of its own and in the midst of celebrating its national membership in the World Cup.

The presentations consisted of a wide range of regional and topical interests. From Japan to Germany to Switzerland to Hollywood, to Canadian First Nations and China, presentations and discussion developed a variety of perspectives related to the central workshop theme of narrative and belonging. These included: personal narratives brought to life by intercultural, intra-national, and intra-community
encounters; collective narratives defined and maintained by the world's media; cultural narratives formed in order to find new forms of representation within (or without) the nation state; and individual narratives conjured up by those in search of continuity in the life course. The methodology related to the applied approaches to understanding, collecting, and organising, the ethnographic data related to the study of narrative were also developed and discussed.

Overall, the participants enjoyed the way in which the various themes of narrative, continuity, and strategies of belonging became central pivots around which the presentations found their own special, organic, relevance. We all thank Peter Ackermann and all his wonderful student helpers and assistants for making this 1st Annual Workshop such a rewarding and enjoyable gathering, as well as the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for funding the workshop and our attendance. We hope that many of the participants will also find their way to the OICD meeting in Kyoto (Doshisha University, 7-8th October 2006), as will others who are interested in the themes who did not make it to Germany.

Introduction—the OICD and the Annual Workshop
The Organization for Intra-Cultural Development is a politically independent, international organization, based in Kyoto, Japan. Its principle aim is to conduct and facilitate research into the mechanisms that support (or destroy) cohesion within cultures (their constituent groups, societies, and nations). This is done with a view to utilizing this research to develop new, as well a variety of existing, real world applications. Through these two complementary activities, the OICD hopes it may directly contribute to other efforts to reduce violent and non-violent ethnic/religious/racial/inter-group conflict, and promote a concept of unity through the acknowledgment, and celebration, of a common shared social diversity.

The OICD’s annual workshop intends to bring together people, ideas and concepts with a view to developing foundational intellectual and methodological approaches to the organization’s research and project agenda. It is an opportunity to define and improve the key approaches the organization takes to understanding the individuals and groups its applications aim to affect. The workshop operates in academic contrast to a subsequent annual meeting later in the year which (in 2006) will officially ratify the organization and its executive committee, and (in 2006 and every year) focus on developing the research into real-world links and applications.

1st Annual Workshop Theme
In beginning to build a real-world-applicable approach to understanding social identity and cohesion, essentialist notions of culture need to be replaced with dynamic ones which focus on how individuals go about constructing and reconstructing cohesion in their day-to-day social and political surroundings as well as in negotiation with their own self-concept. In this, we suggest that the ethnographic approach of anthropology, and theoretical framework of narrative, be employed as core workshop analytical positions/principles.

The focus on narrative demands that we attend to the notion that the stories people tell are always created in a joint process of talking and listening, writing and reading, challenging and being challenged, asking and being asked. The functioning of dialogue, and the manifold set of rules that all dialogue requires, form a central object of anthropological method and enquiry, aiding us in the process of mapping out the interactive nature and construction of social life in particular contexts.

Using these perspectives, the concern of the workshop shall be to investigate how narratives operate in providing form, structure and meaning to our sense of ourselves as individuals and as members of a group (family, community, generation, culture, nation, etc.). Understanding what “Strategies of Belonging” we employ in order to build ourselves into groups and identities, the focus will be to understand how people orientate themselves towards existing or developing "grand theories", or “master narratives”, integrating, or not, individual stories into a overall package of identity (including family, regional, national, group etc. contexts). The workshop is then concerned with understanding the individual’s synchronic and diachronic relationships to social contexts. A variety of possible avenues of enquiry are listed below.

Workshop Enquiries
> Trans-generational narratives – how do they function? How are they changing? To what degree are they made explicit or implicit in social life? Are they fundamentally different across cultures, e.g. Germany and Japan?
> Broken narratives – what happens when a person breaks, or is forced to break, with his or her own past? What happens to the narrative "self" if there are several "selves", before, and after a break?
> How does moving across borders of belonging (migration, learning a foreign language, retiring) "break" or enrich personal narratives?
> How do narratives link past and future? How do they organize activity and decision making processes?
> How do narratives reflect views about "fate" or the supernatural, e.g. by being oriented to notions of obligation ("I must", "I would like to, but must not"), compulsion (e.g. the Western concept of modernity, the idea of bringing the world "forwards") or even phobias (e.g. the terror of losing face, or of being denied the right to be "adult master of oneself")?
> How do narratives reflect history, becoming collective history in the process? Through what processes do they produce history?
> How are people split between different narratives – narratives on an intimate level, on different group levels, regional, national, religious levels, or deeply personal narratives? How do these levels interrelate and become salient in social life?
? How are present, recordable narratives related to older narratives, and how can the links between past and present narratives be put to use to understand situations and help "persons without history", i.e. persons who find themselves outside a narrative because, for instance, they are foreign?
> What causal relationships show up in narratives in a systematic way, and what does this tell us about individual, group, cultural or national "views of the world" and hierarchies of importance?
> How are relationships constructed between uncontestable "facts" (e.g. a murder) and the stories told about facts?
> How do narratives change along with age, i.e. along with the reduction of the possibilities a person sees for changing or developing visions of a personal future?
> What strategies does one develop when personal narratives cannot be understood by others or outsiders?
> What structural, organizational features make up specific narratives, and how can they be analyzed?
> What aesthetic qualities characterize particular narratives, and what do these qualities tell us?
> What are the rules of discourse that mark belonging, and how do particular narratives define such discourse? What happens when such rules are not observed? How do rules and narratives change, and why?
> What frameworks can we offer to facilitate the development of personal and master narratives to act as inclusive, rather than exclusive, stories?
> What frameworks are needed to contain or modify narratives that confront others with themes they do not want to face (e.g. notions that they might be wrong, alternate interpretations that threaten a person's sense of security)?
> How must we listen to narratives? What verbal and non-verbal behaviour signals emotional involvement and investments?
> How does listening to, and telling, stories change "self"? How does "self" change by being subject to questioning, or becoming deeply familiar with another person’s narrative?
> How can the presentation of narratives, and, along with narratives, of ethnographic data relate to the aims of OICD?

Japan and Germany as Areas of Ethnographic Importance
The ties of the OICD to Japan are of special importance. Japan provides strategies of belonging in a modern society that perhaps draw on alternative narrative concepts than those of Western Europe and North-America, for instance. This puts Japan in the position of being able to, with its respective experiences and solutions, contribute enormously to an increasingly plural approach to understanding the universal and particular workings of narrative and how they affect social interaction and individual and group identity.

However, it is not always easy for Japan to make itself understood in the face of the rules structuring discourse and narrative outside its borders. Thus the OICD would like to provide a framework in which its narratives can be focused upon and given the possibility to develop their impact and influence through dialogue. Ethnographic presentations based on fieldwork in Japan are, therefore, particularly welcome. This, however, does not in any way exclude other areas of the world, nor a concern with understanding how narratives can be patched together using clichés and stereotypes which, for instance, emphasize the particularism of particular cultures, or support or threaten the development of nationalisms.

We think that continental Europe, and Germany in particular, is a good place to host a workshop which will hopefully bring together people and ideas that will make up the OICD. On the one hand, continental Europe has important contributions to offer in a variety of languages to the study of narratives. Story telling has not merely been an obvious tradition in innumerable regional variations, but perhaps nowhere else in the world has it been so closely linked to the relationship between individual and nation, a link that is today demanded of populations around the world in spite of the fact that the corresponding ideas are not rooted in, and may not form part of, their own stories.

The organizers were:

Professor Peter Ackermann, Japanese Studies, University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany

Dr. Bruce White, Department of Sociology, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan

The Organisation for Intra-Cultural Development (OICD)