The justification story. A tool for the analysis of Francoism

Abstract

This article faces the question of how to analyse biographical testimonies from the perspective of anthropological investigation. To this end, we inquire into the formal dimension of the testimonial story noting how people who have lived their childhood during the beginning of Francoism speak about their lives in that time. Here we will study a narrative form used by subjects of that generation to transmit their ideas and perceptions: the «justification» story, a kind of subgenre of the narrative story. The analysis of the testimonies allows for us to look into subjective versions of divergence between social rules and individual activities, thereby contributing to the analysis of the social phenomenon and the condcious mind. The first part describes the context of the biographical and historiographical research for the historical memory of Francoism. A second part introduces the characteristics and the possibilities of the biographical interview. The third section uses excerpts of interviews as examples to unravel the operation of the justification story as a tool for the analysis of the Francoism socio-cultural phenomenon.