narrative introduction

Experience, Memory and Narrative:
A Biographical Analysis of Ethnic Identity

MICROCON Research Working Paper 29
Teodora Karamelska and Christian Geiselmann
June 2010

Correct citation: Karamelska, T. and Geiselmann, C., 2010. Experience, Memory and
Narrative: A Biographical Analysis of Ethnic Identity MICROCON Research
Working Paper 29, Brighton: MICROCON
First published in 2010
© Teodora Karamelska and Christian Geiselmann 2010
ISBN 978 1 85864 940 4

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MICROCON: A Micro Level Analysis of Violent Conflict, Institute of Development
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Experience, Memory and Narrative:
A Biographical Analysis of Ethnic Identity
Teodora Karamelska1 and Christian Geiselmann2

MICROCON Research Working Paper 29
June 2010

Abstract: In the first part of this paper, we will introduce the theoretical framework for analyzing autobiographical narratives as it has been developed by the German sociologists Fritz Schütze and Gabriele Rosenthal3, and later has been adapted by
Koleva, Popova and others.4 In the second part we will use this methodology to analyze empirical data that have been collected as part of our MICROCON study on ethnic identity and the risk of inter-ethnic conflict in Bulgaria. We focus on the question of how people belonging to the group of “ethnic Turks” in Bulgaria define their ethnicity, between the competing contexts of the past (in the form of their experience) and the present (in the form of what they remember and how they reactualize it in their biographical narratives). The paper is based on the analysis of two
(out of a sample of 120) narrative autobiographic interviews.

1

Research Associate, Department of Sociology of Religions and Everyday Life, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences; Assistant Professor in Theory of Religion, Department for History and

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