The Sopranos: Narrative Knowledge to Disrupt Academic Language

Abstract

This chapter is somewhat strange, somewhat out of place and somewhat nonsciencelike. Of course all of this is somewhat ‘not true’. For almost a quarter of a century, I moved in and out of social sciences to understand a little of policing and security. Throughout the years from time to time, my dissatisfaction with theory, concepts, methodology and other scientific rules and regulations popped up. As Goffman states, ‘Life is too complicated for theories’. Along the line I developed an interest in ‘narrative knowledge’. Telling stories goes right back to the dawn of civilisation. Ancient myths are still today strong and powerful ways for us to understand life and death. I trained as a historian in the 1980s and remember the often-heated academic debates on whether or not history is an academic discipline or merely an art of telling (convincing) stories. Narrative need not involve language only; ‘it often gains impact through enactment or the emotional focusing that music offers in dance, theater, opera or film, or the visual focus in stage lighting, comics or film’.