This paper analyses biographical narratives as a possibility of getting access on how individuals interpret their life-world, that is, the subjective interpretation in biographies of actors on their social context. Here biography is understood as the description made by the individual himself. It is of processes and experiences that extended through the course of life, that is, written or oral presentation of the history of life. In this sense, biographies and biographical trajectories are not purely individual phenomena, but social ones. (...) The biographical narrative offers important elements for the analysis not only on the narrator´s life, but especially on the connections between the individual and his group or community, considering however that any narrative is an interpretation based on a specific biographical situation. In this sense, the access to the experiences accumulated and consolidated in their biographies permits the analysis of the subjective interpretation of the actors. (shrink)

This paper analyses biographical narratives as a possibility of getting access on how individuals interpret their life-world, that is, the subjective interpretation in biographies of actors on their social context. Here biography is understood as the description made by the individual himself. It is of processes and experiences that extended through the course of life, that is, written or oral presentation of the history of life. In this sense, biographies and biographical trajectories are not purely individual phenomena, but social ones. (...) The biographical narrative offers important elements for the analysis not only on the narrator´s life, but especially on the connections between the individual and his group or community, considering however that any narrative is an interpretation based on a specific biographical situation. In this sense, the access to the experiences accumulated and consolidated in their biographies permits the analysis of the subjective interpretation of the actors. (shrink)

The paper explores biographical experiences for the understanding of social phenomena, both in the writings of Alfred Schutz himself and in sociological empirical approaches based on his work. Schutz handles biography at least in two different ways: as a manner to investigate the “because” motives for one’s action and as a way to exemplify his theoretical considerations. The first step will be to discuss the biographical experience as a key aspect to understand the motivation for action. It will be argued (...) that for Schutz, biography is not exclusively an individual life’s trajectory, but results of both individual and social experiences, synthesized on the individual relevance systems, which are embedded by the relevance systems of the community in which one has been socialized. In the second step the paper verifies how Schutz deals with his own biographical experiences to discuss theoretical and empirical aspects of his sociology. Examples of the first kind of use of biography by Schutz are, for instance, “The Stranger” and “The Homecomer”, which will be considered in this paper. A third step aims to discuss how these writings influenced empirical researches in sociology based on biographical narratives as a way to access empirically the social construction of reality. (shrink)

This paper analyses how the epistemological foundation proposed by Alfred Schutz, especially his notion of system of relevance, can adequately inform interpretive social research that adopts biographical narrative interviews and the method of biographical case reconstruction. We exemplify this adequacy between Schutz’s theory and the interpretive biographical approach by exploring a research project conducted in favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We claim that social research on urban development and social inequalities can greatly benefit from this type of phenomenologically based (...) perspective because it offers a longitudinal and in-depth understanding of individuals’ life courses and experiences in urban everyday life and how they unfold always intertwined with a wide range of different historical and cultural experiences, contexts, and meanings. (shrink)