Poor people - Poor life stories? (Ordinary and extraordinary in life-history narratives)

This paper presents a methodological discussion of the quality of the life through narratives collected in the project "Social History of Poverty in S lovakia" from the Winter of 1995-96, The stories were narrated by family me mbers of the economically and socially marginalised families. This discussi on tries to trace the roots of broken hopes that accompany the research obj ective; that is, to use life histories as an access to the dialectics of so cial opportunities and life strategies of the families under study. First, the discussion aims at the problem of narrative 'thinness' that is, on the absence of thick descriptions of ordinary activities in the collected narra tives. Then it focuses on narrative constructions of the categories of "ord inary" and "extraordinary", as well as their use in self-description (or id entity construction) of the narrators, Special attention has been given to the collective representations used in this process. The author discusses t he hypothesis that the collected life-history narratives can bee seen as a performance aimed at "proving" one's inclusion into social majority and to distance oneself (and one's family) from the "deviant" label.