Exploring Cross-cultural boundaries

In this chapter I will discuss my own experience of conducting narrative research in a range of different cultural contexts. I wish to argue that cross-cultural narrative research is predicated upon narrative imagination (Brockmeier 2005); put simply, if we wish to access the frameworks of meaning for others, we must be willing and able to imagine a world other than the one we know. I will argue that narrative imagination, which Donoghue describes as “the seeing of difference” (cited in Brockmeier 2005), lies at the heart of cross-cultural research. The argument that I will make here is not new; indeed, Marcus Aurelius, in the second century AD, claimed that “to become world citizens we must cultivate in ourselves a capacity for sympathetic imagination” (cited in Nussbaum 1997: 85). In this chapter, I will explore what comprises that imagination, and through a discussion of some of my own research, will discuss what happens when our imaginations fail us, as inevitably they do from time to time.