Themes and Narrative Patterns in Conflict-Related Intrafamilial Storytelling in Northern Ireland: An Oral History of the Ceasefire Generation

所有的家庭都是助记型社区，利用自我参照的叙事--家庭故事--来构建集体身份。除了在家庭成员之间建立凝聚力和认同感，这些故事“提供信息和指示；它们提供蓝图和理想；它们发出警告和禁令”(Stone，2017)。当这样的故事不再适合一个家庭的目的时，它们就会被遗忘。在宗派冲突之后，特别是一场跨越几代人的冲突之后，这一进程变得更加复杂和重要；身份问题，特别是宗教、政治或文化方面的问题，具有更加紧迫的意义。该项目将比较北爱尔兰家庭内部讲述的与冲突有关的故事所包含的主题。我将采访来自宗教、政治和社会经济边界的个人，他们都出生在1998年签署耶稣受难日协议后的几年里。我将请参与者再现他们在自己家庭中听到的与冲突有关的故事，并审查他们听到的故事是否包含文化和阶级界限之内和之外的共同主题。关于北爱尔兰家庭内讲故事的研究有限，仅集中在与重大创伤事件有关的故事上。这个项目采用了更全面的方法，利用了更广泛的叙事池，以探索所讲述的故事是否主要与创伤事件有关。这一跨学科口述历史项目力求在与家庭故事有关的现有工作的基础上再接再厉，了解长期的冲突局势如何影响家庭的故事及其时间范围，以及不同文化和阶级划分的家庭如何以相似或不同的方式使用这种叙事的再现。

All families are mnemonic communities that make use of self-referential narratives - family stories - to construct a collective identity. As well as forging cohesion and identification between family members, such stories 'give messages and instructions; they offer blueprints and ideals; they issue warnings and prohibitions' (Stone, 2017). When such stories no longer suit a family's purpose, they are forgotten. In the wake of a sectarian conflict, especially one which has spanned multiple generations, this process is both more complicated and more vital; questions of identity, especially along religious, political, or cultural lines, take on a more urgent significance. This project will compare the themes contained in the conflict-related stories that are told within families in Northern Ireland. I will conduct interviews with individuals from across religious, political, and socioeconomic boundaries, all of whom were born in the years following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. I will ask participants to reproduce the conflict-related stories they have been told within their own families and will examine whether the stories they have been told contain common themes, both within and across cultural and class boundaries. Research into intrafamilial storytelling in Northern Ireland is limited and has exclusively focussed on stories relating to significant traumatic events. This project adopts a more holistic approach, drawing on a wider pool of narratives, to explore whether the stories told are predominantly those related to traumatic events. This interdisciplinary oral history project seeks to build on existing work relating to family stories and understand how a long-running conflict situation impacts on the stories that a family holds and their temporal scope, and how the reproduction of such narratives is used by families across cultural and class divides in similar or dissimilar ways.