Qualitative Analysis in the Making

Daniella Kuzmanovic, Andreas Bandak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780367600112
• eBook ISBN: 9781135042448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

How do scholars transform qualitative data into analysis? What does making analysis imply? What happens in the space in-between data and finalized analysis is notoriously difficult to talk about. In other parts of the research process, scholars and students are aided by method books that describe the technicalities of generating, processing and sorting through data, handbooks that teach academic writing, and scholarly works that offer meta-level, theoretical perspectives. Yet the path from qualitative data to analysis remains 'a black box.' Qualitative Analysis in the Making ventures into this black box. The volume provides a means of speaking about how analyses emerge in the Humanities. Contributors from disciplines such as anthropology, history, and sociology of religion all employ an analytical double take. They revisit one of their analyses, analyzing how this particular analysis came into being. Such analyses of an analysis are neither confessions nor step-by-step recounts of what happened. Rather, the volume argues that speaking of the space in-between requires analytical displacement, and the employment of fresh analytical takes. This approach contributes to demystifying the path from qualitative data to finalized analysis. It invites novel epistemological reflections among scholars, and assists students in improving their analytical skills.

Section 1

Configurations

1

Telling Lives

In Search of the Keys to a Biographical Analysis

Birgitte Possing

DOI: 10.4324/9780203379776-3

In 1992 I published a biography of the eminent Danish pioneering educationalist Natalie Zahle (1827–1913). Doing so, I kick-started a process of what I have termed rehumanizing historiography. My book, titled Viljens Styrke. Natalie Zahle—en biografiom køn, dannelse og magtfuldkommenhed [Natalie Zahle—The Strength of Will. A Biography of Natalie Zahle] (Possing 1992a), questioned a structuralist historiography. This challenge sparked off a discussion among historians about the biography as a scholarly genre. In Scandinavian academia, the death knell had long-since tolled for the historical biography, given that structuralism and Marxism had deemed the individual character irrelevant as historical protagonist. To my surprise, the debate spread like wildfire through the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish specialist community in the early 1990s, and my biography of Natalie Zahle became highly popular with the well-read part of the general public. To my pleasure as a writer, the book, which was a published version of my doctoral dissertation, was read as both literature and scholarship. This great interest in the biography caused the chair of the adjudication panel, Danish professor of history Niels Thomsen, who had initially endorsed the work as doctoral dissertation, publicly to challenge its relevance to scholarship (!). Grand emotions were triggered, and the general public as well as the specialist academic public goggled at the professor’s inconsistent comments (Possing 1992b: 2, 1997a: 2, 1999: 2; Ambjörnsson et al. 1997). The reaction gave me the impetus to reflect further on the methodology of the classic life-and-times biography, this being the genre my biography of Natalie Zahle had introduced to a Danish readership. The purpose of professor Thomsen’s criticism had not been to pave the way for further insight into biographical methodologies, types, and tools and thus aid other ventures into this genre. However, following his crusade against the relevance of the historical biography to history as a discipline, research-based historical biographies flowed off the presses in Denmark and the other Nordic countries.¹ I went on to write a number of biographies—long, short, and ultra-short²—and also tried my hand with more methodological considerations of the analytic methods and typologies the biographical genre has presented in the past, has on its current agenda, and might offer in the future.³

In the following I shall reflect on the analytic keys that had to be found in order to open the door to a completely different type of biography titled Uden OmsvØb. Et Portræt af Bodil Koch [To the Point. An Incisive Portrait of Bodil Koch] (Possing 2007b), which I published fifteen years after my biography of Natalie Zahle had whipped up the historians’ dispute. Bodil Koch (1903–1972) was an extremely high-profile and popular Danish politician. In her capacity as provocative polemicist, intellectual, feminist, and humanist, she had been marginalized in the national historical discussion and virtually written out of Danish history, even though she had kept her job as a government minister for an uninterrupted period of fifteen years and her impact on the domestic and international politics of her day had been immense. I wanted to write her back into history. The question was how to do it? My underlying principle was the same that had applied to the biography of Natalie Zahle. I wanted to understand and explain Bodil Koch, her life’s work, endeavors, and impact, in interaction with the wider historical context of which she was part. Also this time my intention was to tell other stories than the purely biographical, to explore the environment into which she was born and brought up, the settings that influenced her, and the boundaries she breached. Contextualization of the protagonist was and remained a theoretical must for me. By contextualization I mean grasping the way in which geographical, social, cultural, religious, political, and familial habitat and conditions affect the individual’s life, identity, selfimage, status, vision, and work, and how the individual’s endeavors in turn influence and change this habitat. Or, in other words, how a character can be, at one and the same time, a bearer of culture and a breacher of culture, and how the individual is fathomed in dynamic and dialectical interaction with social structures.

Despite the requisite contextualization, the challenges of the analytic processes underlying the Zahle and the Koch biography were worlds apart: Viljens Styrke on Zahle had been written as a classic life-and-times biography, whereas Uden OmsvØb was to be structured as a polyphonic portrait. This much I knew. But how to go about it? In this chapter I shall identify the analytic keys applied to data regarding Bodil Koch and reflect on the differences between this portrait and the classic life-and-times biography. The chapter will focus on what a biographical analysis can do, expose its complexity, and make a case for the historical biography as being far more than the straightforward story of a life. This recognition that the linear life story is a construction in need of epistemological analysis was clearly demonstrated by Pierre Bourdieu in his 1986 landmark article L’Illusion biographique.⁴ Bourdieu maintained that the biographical construction of separate events in a chronological sequence bears an inescapable similarity to the ‘bildungsroman’ of the literary agenda, in which the lived life is rendered on a model of linear, subjectivized, and objectivized coherence. Bourdieu rightly disputed that this construction might well be worthy of preservation in terms of aesthetics, but that it is not worthy in terms of the relation between reality and the representation of reality. This change in scholarship and theory on biography has been further developed by several scholars.⁵ The reader is hereby invited into the biographical workshop, where I will explore a range of interrelated issues pertaining to the making of my analysis. One such issue is how the task I had set out to do evolved during the making of the Bodil Koch portrait, and the reasons for such shifting notions. This implies reflecting upon the implications of dealing with differing publics and different readerships, as well as upon the nature of the source material and the uses of interdisciplinary methodologies in opening up these sources. Another issue is how the biographic, but non-chronological composition in a polyphonic portrait interplays with the relationship between biographer and protagonist as well as with ethical implications of the methodological decision-making during the de- and reconstruction of the portrait.

CHALLENGES THAT CHANGED EN ROUTE

I wanted to depict Bodil Koch’s national and international impact in her lifetime and to reflect her significance for posterity. As it turned out, it was the chance encounter with a paradox that determined how I should cut the cloth, formulate the issue, and constitute the scope in which analysis and narrative can materialize. This paradox leapt out at me from a painting in a museum. I simply happened to come across the second of Kirsten Kjær’s two portraits of Bodil Koch both painted in the same year. Here she was, an explosive rendition of a woman on guard, a woman poised to jump, an ardent gaze, intense well-defined eyebrows. I was looking at a sitter rendered as a medley of sparkling red, yellow, blue, and green. A woman with a purpose, slender, head tilted, radiating an appealing volition. The portrait, unlike the other painting of Koch by the same painter in which Koch was painted with her eyes shut, showed me a woman in motion, a pro-active woman who would surely get things rolling. Yet it was a disjointed mosaic, full of holes. The painting exuded a double-edged and enigmatic aura of focus and diffusion, of radiance and razor-sharp spotlights. In some mysterious way all that had found its way into the ambiguous narrative of the national— and international—discourse. Conventional historiography regarding Bodil Koch had been split along two lines. One held Bodil Koch, the world’s first female Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, Denmark’s third female government minister, the academic, the devout Protestant and mother of five children, to have been an impulsive, female ‘court jester’ (as she ironically referred to herself) who was not a proper politician. The other pointed to her as one of the twentieth century’s foremost political talents, advocate of modernity and humanism, critic of Cold War mentality, and the feminist who cut the mustard as a purposeful man. How come she had left us with this enigmatic and contradictory reputation, where the one interpretation actually precluded the other? I wanted to find an answer by re-painting her portrait in words. I wanted to analyze her afresh in relation to the challenges of her day. That was the task I set myself, the key or keys I had to find.

READERSHIPS AND ANALYSIS

Compared with my analytical work on the similarly contextualized biography of Natalie Zahle, which had paved the way for my career as academic biographer, the analysis underlying the portrait of Koch was of a quite different nature. While my biography of Zahle was an apprenticeship piece, designed to show expertise in the craft and originality in research, as demanded of a classic doctoral dissertation, my biography of Koch was the work of a mature academic willing to experiment with the genre. This reflects how making analysis also involves reflections upon where a scholar is in her academic career trajectory. The Zahle biography was a research project that had to cover the concept and evolution of academic and cultural education across a whole century in order to reflect the magnitude of the central individual’s pioneering endeavors for the democratization of access to knowledge. The Koch biography was a project designed to inform and discuss, to carve out four thematic sections in the protagonist’s work with a view to firstly tracing her influence on Danish and international politics, and secondly finding out why she had been controversial and intellectually provocative while also being democratically accountable and a national decision-maker. The Zahle biography was directed at finding the complex woman behind the myth and telling the story of her life via her work. The Koch biography listened to a woman with several voices speaking in diverse directions and created a polyphony of visions, thought patterns, and actions that did not necessarily add up to a unified whole. Where the Zahle biography was intended to reconstruct the general public’s image of a national icon, the Koch biography was intended to challenge and deconstruct this same general public’s view of a controversial, but valued and much-loved politician. The Zahle biography was going to re-humanize historiography and restore the biography as a worthy, analytical genre in the world of scholarship, whereas the Koch biography was going to reinstate its leading lady in the national discourse and render her visible in a broad, political, and intellectual public arena. While the Zahle biography was told as a classic life-and-times biography familiar from the Anglo-Saxon research tradition, which was thus introduced in a Danish academic forum, the Koch biography was meant to provoke, criticize, and re-develop the narrative conventions of this tradition. These differences would, of course, have consequences for the analytic method underlying the biography of Bodil Koch. In the following, I shall venture further into the biographical workshop and reflect on this process from the perspective of its contrast to my experience with analysis from the classic life-and-times biography in the portrait of Natalie Zahle.

There was another difference between the methodology of the two biographies, this being their relationship with and to the different types of ‘publics’. In some respects, neither the academic nor the general public had any bearing whatsoever on how the two biographical analyses took shape. They were developed in my own analytical workshop, without any dialogue with a target readership. Nonetheless, a number of ‘publics’ had a decisive bearing on the structure of the two analyses and why they took such different approaches to the task of constructing a life. Not least the ethical responsibility of the biographical pen in its investigation of the subject of the biography was a significant issue that I grappled with and that had bearings upon my analysis. I shall return to this aspect after looking at the challenges faced in terms of data and theory when making an analysis of Bodil Koch and her political life’s work.

SOURCES AND THE NATURE OF THEIR CHALLENGES

In his book about the Danish government cabinets from 1953 to 1972, historian Tage Kaarsted characterizes Bodil Koch as the ‘only real man’ in her governments and, in addition, deems her as one of the most important figures in twentieth-century Danish domestic and foreign affairs (Kaarsted 1992). He documented her status as the Social Democratic party’s biggest vote-catcher, her enormous and rarely matched impact on political life, and how her contemporary political colleagues across party lines had acknowledged her significance, irritated or jubilant according to where they stood on the political spectrum. Other historians have nonetheless overlooked her or characterized her as awkward and inept—indeed, the ‘court jester’ of Danish and international politics (Kaarsted 1991; Nissen 1991). How could public perception of her be so conflicting? The term ‘real man’ signals purposefulness, firmness, and courage, whereas the term ‘court jester’ signals absurdity, amusement, and impulsiveness. On the face of it incompatible characteristics that were so inconsistent they could hardly be used to refer to the same person? Or had Bodil Koch herself signaled an ambiguous nature that substantiated the contradictory reputation? If so, was this in itself a reason to give her such a transient position in historiography as has been the case? Or, on the contrary, was there reason to recollect a politician that had in my v...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Analytical Displacement and the Project of the Humanities
• Section 1 Configurations
• Section 2 Juxtapositions
• Section 3 Senses
• Afterword: Reflections on Making Analysis
• Contributors
• Index