José Latour

This text aims to intro­duce dif­fer­ent kinds of nar­ra­tive (onto­log­i­cal, pub­lic, con­cep­tual, and meta nar­ra­tives.) Accord­ing to the author, onto­log­i­cal nar­ra­tives are per­sonal sto­ries that we tell our­selves about our place in the world and our his­tory. “ Col­lec­tive nar­ra­tives shape and con­strain these per­sonal nar­ra­tives.
Pub­lic nar­ra­tives, on the other hand, are sto­ries elab­o­rated by insti­tu­tions such as fam­ily, media, and nation. They, like per­sonal nar­ra­tive, can change sig­nif­i­cantly, some­times after only a few months. These nar­ra­tive can focus on one per­son when that per­son has become an insti­tu­tion (Nel­son Man­dela was an exam­ple, but Barack Obama and Bush now come to mind.)
Con­cep­tual nar­ra­tive is the most slip­pery con­cept. It is often the brain­child of a scholar, such as Darwin’s evo­lu­tion con­cept, and gen­er­ates a dis­course that can go beyond the orig­i­nal discipline’s scope. Trans­la­tion plays a major role, as it can help manip­u­late the orig­i­nal nar­ra­tive to con­vert into a dif­fer­ent one.
Lastly, meta nar­ra­tives con­sist of sto­ries of dra­matic, his­tor­i­cal event that shaped soci­ety. Exam­ples are: com­mu­nism, Que­be­cois sep­a­ratism, and mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. They can also be reli­gious in nature, or polit­i­cal, such as the “War on Terror.”