134 I. THEORETICAL  PERSPECTI vES AND  CONCEPT uAL uNITS
how to live a good life in America (though 
there are certainly others), one that seems to 
hold special appeal to many men and women 
in the midlife years.
Master narratives are particularly visible 
in cases of cultural assimilation. Members of 
Group A desire to become (or find that they 
must  become) members of Group B,  and 
they do so by appropriating the master nar -
ratives Group B holds dear. Adopting a soci -
ological perspective, Chen (2008) described 
the cultural transitions that traditionally 
secular Taiwanese immigrants make when 
they come to California and join Taiwanese 
American churches. By becoming observant 
Christians, the immigrants become Ameri -
can, Chen argues. The churches provide a 
panoply of resources and activities—  from 
Sunday afternoon dinners to English lan -
guage classes—  that help the immigrants ac -
climate to the new setting. They also provide 
a moral community within which new life 
narratives may be imagined and expressed. 
Chen (2008, p. 111, emphasis added) wrote, 
“Taiwanese immigrants narrate their reli -
gious conversions as freedom from tradi -
tional Taiwanese expectations that prevent 
them from being who they really are. ” Ap -
propriating a new master narrative, the im -
migrants come to see their lives as redemp -
tive tales of liberation, stories of escaping 
what is now perceived to be the oppressive 
family duties of traditional Taiwanese life 
in order to discover their own unique, au -
thentic selves, in the spirit of American icons 
such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oprah 
Winfrey.
Master narratives of culture may also 
come into clear focus in cases of cultural 
conflict. Hammack (2009, 2011) has paid 
special attention to how individual stories 
may sometimes reproduce those features of 
master narratives that perpetuate conflict 
between different groups. His case in point 
is the long-  running conflict between the Is -
raelis and the Palestinians. Hammack noted 
that the citizens of the state of Israel and the 
Palestinian people who were displaced by 
its founding hold to dramatically different 
master narratives regarding the meaning of 
recent historical events. For the Israelis, the 
establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 
marked a redemptive conclusion to unparal -
leled suffering. Their master narrative tells how 6 million innocent Jews were extermi -
nated in the Holocaust of World War II, and 
how these resilient people rallied to establish 
their own promised land after the war. The 
master narrative commemorates the horror 
they endured and celebrates the subsequent 
triumph of a democratic and enlightened na -
tion.
By contrast, Palestinians refer to the events 
of 1948 as al-Nakba,  Arabic for “the catas -
trophe.” As many as 700,000 Arabs fled or 
were expelled from their homes during the 
first Arab–  Israeli war. Hundreds of thou -
sands of Palestinians were later displaced 
by the war of 1967, with some becoming 
refugees twice over. Their master narrative 
is about peace-  loving people who were ruth -
lessly uprooted from their homeland. It is 
a contamination story  (McAdams, 2013), 
tracking a sudden transformation from 
positive to negative, while holding to the 
desperate hope for a reversal. Through in -
tensive interviews of Israeli and Palestinian 
teenagers, Hammack (2009, 2011) found a 
consistent tendency for the stories of Israe -
li youth to match the upward trajectory of 
their culture’s master narrative, and for the 
stories of Palestinian youth to show the same 
downward spiral that is conveyed in stories 
of “the catastrophe.”
In an important theoretical advance, 
McLean and Syed (2015) delineated five 
defining features of master narratives of 
culture. First, all master narratives exhibit 
utility . Individuals who identify with a par -
ticular cultural group look to master narra -
tives to provide them with guidelines in life 
and useful information about the history, 
goals, values, and identities of the group. 
Second, master narratives are nearly ubiqui -
tous within a given cultural context. Even if 
members of a group do not accept the master 
narrative, they are intimately familiar with 
the narrative’s outlines. At the same time, 
master narratives are typically invisible . 
McLean and Syed write, “Individuals do 
not have to work hard to learn how to be a 
good member of a culture.” Instead, “people 
can largely automatically and unconsciously 
adopt master narratives” (p. 327). The nar -
ratives do not typically become visible and 
explicit until a person violates the narra -
tive’s norms or gains exposure to alterna -
tive narratives that call the master narrative 