Real life stories to celebrate or to study humans

In Chapter 7, we turn to real biographies of famous figures, trying to identify which aspects of their lives are highlighted and which are left out, depending on the period in which the events occurred. The aspects on which ancient biographers focused were clearly very different from those recorded today. Another crucial issue is the veracity of the facts gathered. Ancient biographies were often written long after the person’s death, when the memory of that life had faded considerably and was influenced by external events. For biographies written during a person’s lifetime, the biographer’s interests are more important to keep in mind than those of the subject. These interests intermingle with the story told, turning the account into a view reflected by a distorted mirror. In the case of autobiography, we must pay critical attention to the aspects most frequently emphasized by the writer. The more recent interest in the life stories of more ordinary people should also be examined. The biography by Thomas and Znanieki (1919) of Polish peasants who migrated to the United States offers a perfect example, followed by many other similar studies. At the same time as the “comprehensive” approach, another more “explanatory” approach to life stories emerged with the recourse to population sciences. We extensively describe the evolution of the paradigms adopted by these sciences and the relevance of the “explanatory” approach, which we compare with the “comprehensive” approach. We then discuss the methods used by the social sciences to analyze the outline of a human life recorded in one or more interviews and depending on whether the survey is retrospective or prospective. While the approaches to event histories may differ substantially from one science to another, the basic material is the same: the collection, in an interview, of a very small portion of the life of one or more persons. We describe these different methods in detail, including the statistical tools used for the analysis and the scientific foundations of the methods.