Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 34, Issue 1, pp. 20–37, ISSN 0195-6086, electronic ISSN 1533-8665. © 2011 by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for per- mission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/si.2011.34.1.20. Negotiating Personal Experience over the Lifetime: Narrative Elasticity as an Analytic Tool Oriana Bernasconi Universidad Alberto Hurtado Sociology and neighboring disciplines have produced different analytic tools to examine the dialogical relationship between individuals and soci- ety (“narrative work,” “identity work,” “moral career,” “moral breakdown”). However, the question of how individuals negotiate the interpretation of personal experience over their lifetimes in a changing cultural context re- mains unexplored. This article introduces narrative elasticity as a feature of narrative work and as a time-sensitive analytic tool for conducting in- quiries into processes of temporal retraction and expansion of what sto- rytellers conceive as the normal order of significance. The application of this tool to the analysis of mature and elderly Chileans’ life stories shows how cultural change occurs at the individual level, considers factors that motivate and inhibit processes of reinterpretation of personal experience, and identifies different levels at which it operates. Keywords: life stories, narrative work, social change, self, morality, tem- porality Although since its inception sociology has addressed the relationship between social arrangements and the type of self that inhabits them (Rose 1989:xvii), scholarship on selfhood has developed randomly, remains scattered among different schools, and holds only a minor place in this tradition of thought. At least two factors explain this phenomenon. First, sociology often has failed to put the individual subject at the center of analytic work, giving preeminence to collective agents (community, class, or religion) and conceptualizing the person either as a motivational source or as an effect of social processes. In both positions, the individual is considered a given category rather than a problematic, historically contingent, assemblage worthy of analysis on its own (Calhoun 1991). Second, sociological thought has emphasized the theorization of social order, memory, and reproduction, at the expense of the conceptualization of social change and creativity (Touraine 2002). In the twentieth Direct all correspondence to Oriana Bernasconi, Department of Sociology, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Cienfuegos 46, Santiago, Chile; e-mail: obernasc@uahurtado.cl. SI3401_02.indd 20 1/17/11 5:15:36 PM