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This article presents a process-oriented perspective that relates to the broad question of how self-related experience comes to be endowed with meaning. The approach highlights the implications of `living by' particular culturally based understandings in specific contexts and centers on how jointly cultural, social, and cognitive processes offer potentialities for orienting the experiential self without determining self-related experiences. This process-oriented perspective revolves around the interplay between the range of historically contingent cultural resources available for endowing experience with meaning and the socially and structurally grounded processes through which individuals learn about, orient towards and traffic in interpretive plausibilities - a socially situated experientially based process. This perspective is informed by, and provides an entree for exploring, variability within a cultural setting. The narrative accounts examined are from individuals who grew up speaking either Ojibwa or Cree (both Algonkian languages) in First Nations communities in Manitoba, Canada.

▪ Abstract  Across cultures, narrative emerges early in communicative development and is a fundamental means of making sense of experience. Narrative and self are inseparable in that narrative is simultaneously born out of experience and gives shape to experience. Narrative activity provides tellers with an opportunity to impose order on otherwise disconnected events, and to create continuity between past, present, and imagined worlds. Narrative also interfaces self and society, constituting a crucial resource for socializing emotions, attitudes, and identities, developing interpersonal relationships, and constituting membership in a community. Through various genres and modes; through discourse, grammar, lexicon, and prosody; and through the dynamics of collaborative authorship, narratives bring multiple, partial selves to life.

Abstract
In this article, some major results of a longitudinal study on preschool children's narrative development are presented. Narrative development is seen as the acqui-sition of narrative competence, that is, the knowing how narrator activities and listener activities are reciprocally interrelated. Both narrator and listener have to carry out characteristic joint tasks in the phases of narrative units. In the initiation phase, they have to deal with embedding the narrative unit in the ongoing conversation; in the realization phase, they have to create and maintain prerequisites for the listener's understanding, to present and reconstruct the event sequence, to mark and reconstruct the narrator's perspective, and so on; in the closing phase, they have to compare the narrator's and the listener's perspectives on the events presented.

The data base for the study consists of narrative units taken from everyday conversations in one kindergarten group recorded over a 3-year period beginning when the children were 3 and ending when they were 6 years old. The narrative units are analyzed and interpreted in order to find out how the children ap-proached and solved the tasks typical for narrating and listening at the ages of 3, 4½, and 6 years. (Linguistics)

While narrative focuses on particular protagonists and events, narrative also situates tellers and their audiences within a web of historical and cultural expectations, ideologies, and meanings, more broadly. As such, narrative creates shared understandings and community among those participating in narrative activity. Moreover, the narrative process extends beyond the boundaries of the here and now to embrace people and places in a cultural past. This article examines the religious narrative accounts of the apparition of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe told in children's religious education classes called doctrina at a Catholic parish in Los Angeles. The children that attend these classes are of Mexican descent and their lessons are taught in Spanish. The article analyzes the linguistic and interactional means through which narrative renditions of the story of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe construct Mexican identity. The narrative renditions tell the story of the apparition of the Virgin Mary in Tepeyac, near Mexico City, in the year 1531, thirteen years after the fall of the Aztec empire to the Spanish conquest. These diasporic narrative accounts transcend time and space, as they continue to be told by Mexican Catholics at places beyond the geopolitical borders of Mexico. Moreover, these narrative tellings are instrumental for positioning teachers and students in a postcolonial moment that revisits the hierarchies of Mexico's colonial regime vis-à-vis their current experiences as immigrants in Los Angeles.

Examines German debates over how to correctly narrate & preserve Buchenwald in the broader context of collective memory, historical narrative, & national identity. It is argued that Buchenwald not only demonstrates the difficulties of historical preservation, but also is a symbol of current German struggles with memory & national identity. The search for a shared German national narrative during the Wende of 1989/90 is discussed. The difficulties created by the Federal Republic of Germany's "double past," each with a different memory of communism & Nazism, are described. The historical usage of Buchenwald as a concentration camp, Soviet internment camp, & place of East German national mythology is analyzed as an example of these difficulties. Efforts to reconcile these multiple pasts are assessed. It is concluded that the controversy over Buchenwald represents the persistence of Germany's recent past & the political implications of historical narration in its future. T. Arnold

This article reports on variations of the Cinderella fairytale as told by two southern Namibian storytellers, Martha Frederik and Katrina Louw. The analysis concentrates on the self-imagery of these storytellers as reflected in their performances. Although their stories are not overtly political they interpret their social environment, the relationships between men and women and employment interactions. In this sense these narratives communicate deeper dimensions of Namibian colonial relationships. Life in the towns of Aranos and Gochas is uninspiring, since these are small agricultural supply stations, settled in the mostly arid, sparse, semi-desert southern region of Namibia, Hardap. These communities are generally dirt poor, inhabited mainly by the unemployed, children, women and pensioners. The article further explores facets of the Frederik and Louw's re-interpretations of Cinderella. A few salient sections in especially the performance of Frederik are selected to demonstrate how the storytellers reconstruct their experience of life. Both texts are adapted intuitively to the storytellers' social circumstances and lived experience. The article concludes that it is through the exploration of such narrative experiences that the dialogical relationship between the powerful and the powerless can be understood.