Narrative as Social Practice

Narrative as Social Practice sets out to explore the complex and fascinating interrelatedness of narrative and culture. It does so by contrasting the oral storytelling traditions of two widely divergent cultures - Anglo-Western culture and the Central Australian culture of the Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara Aborigines. Combining discourse-analytical and pragmalinguistic methodologies with the perspectives of ethnopoetics and the ethnography of communication, this book presents a highly original and engaging study of storytelling as a vital communicative activity at the heart of socio-cultural life. The book is concerned with both theoretical and empirical issues. It engages critically with the theoretical framework of social constructivism and the notion of social practice, and it offers critical discussions of the most influential theories of narrative put forward in Western thinking. Arguing for the adoption of a communication-oriented and cross-cultural perspective as a prerequisite for improving our understanding of the cultural variability of narrative practice, Klapproth presents detailed textual analyses of Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal oral narratives, and contextualizes them with respect to the different storytelling practices, values and worldviews in both cultures. Narrative as Social Practice offers new insights to students and specialists in the fields of narratology, discourse analysis, cross-cultural pragmatics, anthropology, folklore study, the ethnography of communication, and Australian Aboriginal studies.

Auteur

Danièle M. Klapproth is Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Berne, Switzerland.

Texte du rabat
Narrative as Social Practice sets out to explore the complex and fascinating interrelatedness of narrative and culture. It does so by contrasting the oral storytelling traditions of two widely divergent cultures - Anglo-Western culture and the Central Australian culture of the Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara Aborigines. Combining discourse-analytical and pragmalinguistic methodologies with the perspectives of ethnopoetics and the ethnography of communication, this book presents a highly original and engaging study of storytelling as a vital communicative activity at the heart of socio-cultural life. The book is concerned with both theoretical and empirical issues. It engages critically with the theoretical framework of social constructivism and the notion of social practice, and it offers critical discussions of the most influential theories of narrative put forward in Western thinking. Arguing for the adoption of a communication-oriented and cross-cultural perspective as a prerequisite for improving our understanding of the cultural variability of narrative practice, Klapproth presents detailed textual analyses of Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal oral narratives, and contextualizes them with respect to the different storytelling practices, values and worldviews in both cultures. Narrative as Social Practice offers new insights to students and specialists in the fields of narratology, discourse analysis, cross-cultural pragmatics, anthropology, folklore study, the ethnography of communication, and Australian Aboriginal studies.

Résumé

"This book is a useful reference for those who are interested in the theoretical and methodological issues in contrastive study of narrative, and particulary for those who carry out research into the linguistic and cultural pratices of Australian Aborigines."
Judy Woon Yee Ho in: Discourse & Society 2/2006

Contenu
AcknowledgementsFigures, tables, and maps Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1. Encountering the Other 1 2. Aims of the study and methodological background 42.1. Aims 42.2. Theoretical background 62.3. Methodology and research design 8 3. The data 113.1. Cultural and linguistic origins of the data 123.2. Choice of the data 16 4. Summary: The plan of the book 22 Part One: In the web of the wor(l)d: The narrative structuring of experience Chapter 2 Creating webs of significance: The role of narrative in the socio-cultural construction of reality 27 1. Of butterflies and lepidopterists 27 2. Culture as a web of discourses 292.1. Language in the construction of reality 312.2. Provinces of meaning and their integration in a symbolic universe 342.3. Discourse and the colonising of the institutional order 35 3. The role of narrative discourse in Anglo-Western culture 383.1. The myth of objectivity: The denarrativising of knowledge 393.2. Narrative and identity: The discursive creation of a coherent self 433.3. Kid stuff: Fairy tales in the contemporary Anglo-Western world 47 4. The role of narrative discourse in Australian Aboriginal culture 534.1. The Tjukurpa: A fundamentally narrative view of the world 534.2. The voice of the Rainbow Serpent: Re-enacting cultural identity 584.3. Narrative and the transmission of knowledge in Australian Aboriginal culture 624. 4. Suspended in webs of significance: Culture, discourse and identity 64 Chapter 3 The narrative sharing of worlds: Storytelling as communicative interaction 71 1. What is a story? 721.1. The problem of story definition 731.2. Labov's high-point analysis 761.3. Towards a formal and semantic definition of the story 811.4. Towards a functional definition of the story 84 2. Solidifying reality: The construction of narrated worlds 862.1. Reflections in the mirror: The ontological status of the narrated world. 872.2. The narrated world as a mental model and narrative as a social institution 91 3. The creation of narrative involvement 953.1. Narrative and involvement 963.2. Subjective evaluation and moral involvement 102 4. Storytelling: The narrative sharing of worlds 1044.1. A theory of communicative levels in storytelling 1044.2. Creating and sharing worlds in narrative 107 Chapter 4 Exploring the structure of narrated worlds: The search for story schemata 113 1. The study of narrative within the cognitive science framework 114 2. The cognitive science framework and the study of stories from the oral tradition 1152.1. Stories from the oral tradition as research data 1152.2. Universal versus culture-specific properties of story schemata 119 3. The search for a schema for stories 1203.1. Stories as problem-solving episodes 1203.2. Episodic analysis: The Johnson and Mandler story grammar 122 4. The cross-cultural applicability of schema-theoretical story models: A critical evaluation 1264.1. Schema-oriented story models: Data and experiment designs 1274.2. A schema for stories: Problem-solving and the cross-cultural analysis of narrative texts 130 Part Two: Storytelling as social practice: A cross-cultural perspective Chapter 5 The Beautiful and the Beastly: Cultural specifics of Anglo-Western narrative aesthetics 137 1. Analysing a traditional Anglo-Western narrative: Beauty and the Beast 1371.1. The notion of narrative aesthetics 1381.2 Methodological considerations 1391.3. Story prototypicality and the concept of problem-solving 140 2. The story 1422.1. The story text: Beauty and the Beast 143 3. Towards a description of the story's structural organisation 1503.1. Episodic analysis of the story Beauty and the Beast 1503.2. Episode embedding and thematic packaging 1553.3. Identifying the core problematic of the story Beauty and the Beast 1583.4. Bound by promises: The thematic organisation of the story Beauty and the Beast 164 4. What makes a good story in Anglo-Western culture? 1704.1. Criteria for good narratives 1714.2. Anglo-Western narrative aesthetics and its conceptual foundations 174 Chapter 6 Always keeping track: Text building strategies in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara storytelling 179 1. Analysing a traditional Pitjantjatjara narrative: Tjitji Maluringanyi 1791.1. The story text: Tjitji Maluringanyi 181 2. Towards a description of the story's structural organisation: Applying an Anglo-Western narratological framework 1942.1.…