Storytelling As Narrative Practice : Ethnographic Approaches to the Tales We Tell [1 ed.] 9789004393936, 9789004372795

Citation preview

Storytelling as Narrative Practice

Studies in Pragmatics Series Editors Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (University of Manchester) Kerstin Fischer (University of Southern Denmark) Anne Barron (Leuphana University Lü neburg)

volume 19

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sip

Storytelling as Narrative Practice Ethnographic Approaches to the Tales We Tell

Edited by

Elizabeth A. Falconi Kathryn E. Graber

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Falconi, Elizabeth (Elizabeth A.), editor. | Graber, Kathryn E. (Kathryn Elizabeth), editor. Title: Storytelling as narrative practice : ethnographic approaches to the tales we tell / edited by Elizabeth A. Falconi, Kathryn E. Graber. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2019] | Series: Studies in pragmatics, 1750-368X ; Volume 19 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019016954 (print) | ISBN 9789004372795 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004393936 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Storytelling. | Narration (Rhetoric) | Language and culture. | Anthropological linguistics. | Ethnology–Methodology. | Ethnic groups. Classification: LCC GR72.3 .S77 2019 (print) | LCC GR72.3 (ebook) | DDC 398.208–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016954

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. ISSN 1750-368X ISBN 978-90-04-37279-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-39393-6 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Notes on Contributors

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Introduction: Ethnographic Approaches to Storytelling as Narrative Practice 1 Elizabeth A. Falconi and Kathryn E. Graber

Part 1 Boundaries of the Self Introduction to Part 1

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1 Defining Choices Redefined: Heroic Life Narratives of Taiwanese Buddhist Monastics 29 Hillary Crane 2 Telling Stories, Enacting Institutions: Learning How to Narrate “Coming Out” Experiences 53 Stephen M. DiDomenico

Part 2 Negotiating Heritage Introduction to Part 2

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3 The Heritage Narratives of Yiddish Metalinguistic Community Members: Processes of Distancing and Closeness 90 Netta Avineri 4 Trajectories of Treasured Texts: Laments as Narratives Korina Giaxoglou

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Part 3 Constructing Discursive Authority Introduction to Part 3

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5 Telling Traditions: The Dynamics of Zapotec Storytelling Elizabeth A. Falconi

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6 Etiological Storytelling and the Interdiscursive Trajectory of a Diagnostic Odyssey 196 Jennifer R. Guzmán 7 “Syphilis Is Syphilis!”: Purity and Genre in a Buryat-Russian News Story 226 Kathryn E. Graber Index

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Notes on Contributors Netta Avineri has a Ph.D. in Applied Lingusitics from UCLA and is an Associate Professor in the TESOL/TFL Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). She serves as the Intercultural Competence Committee Chair there and teaches Service Learning and Teacher Education courses at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). Netta is an Associate Editor for the Heritage Language Journal, previously served as a Core Member of the American Anthropological Association’s Language and Social Justice Task Group, and currently serves as the American Association for Applied Linguistics Public Affairs and Engagement Committee Chair. Her book Research Methods for Language Teachers: Inquiry, Process, and Synthesis was published in 2017, and she is a co-editor and contributor for the 2018 volume Language and Social Justice in Practice. Her research interests include critical service-learning, community partnerships, interculturality, narrative, language and social justice, and heritage and endangered languages. Netta is committed to building collaborative environments in which societal inequities can be both explored and resisted, through the inclusion of diverse voices and ways of knowing. Hillary Crane has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brown University and is Associate Professor at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, where she teaches classes on Chinese culture, linguistics, religion, and medical anthropology. She is the coeditor of the book Missionary Impositions: Conversion, Resistance, and Other Challenges to Objectivity in Religious Ethnography. Her research ranges from the gender identities of Taiwanese Buddhist nuns to the narratives of people living with celiac disease in the United States. Stephen M. DiDomenico has a Ph.D. from Rutgers University and is an Assistant Professor of Qualitative Communication Inquiry in the Department of Communication at the State University of New York at New Paltz. His research examines interpersonal encounters as related to issues such as the use of mediated technologies, mental health help seeking, and the communicative accomplishment of identities and relationships.

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Elizabeth A. Falconi has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan and is a lecturer in the Anthropology Department at the University of West Georgia. Elizabeth is currently serving as the Digital Media Director for the Society of Linguistic Anthropology. She recently co-authored a chapter for the Handbook of Linguistics, Second Edition, released in May of 2017, entitled “Linguistic Anthropology and Ethnolinguistics,” and a chapter in the co-edited volume Rural Voices: Language, Identity, and Social Change Across Place, released in September of 2018, entitled “The Social Mediatization of a Zapotec Transborder Community.” Her research investigates the relationship between language, migration, and belonging amid language shift in a Zapotec transborder community that extends between a rural village in Oaxaca, Mexico and Los Angeles, California. Korina Giaxoglou holds a Ph.D. in Modern Greek Sociolinguistics from King’s College, London, and a postgraduate certificate in Learning and Teaching from Kingston University. She is a lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the Open University. She has published a number of articles in recent years in journals including Social Media + Society; Discourse, Context, and Media; and Applied Linguistics Review. Her research focuses on how we craft and share stories, with a focus on “big” and “small” stories of life and death online. Her interests lie at the intersection of linguistic anthropology, the sociolinguistics of narrative, and discourse analysis. Kathryn E. Graber has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan and is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She specializes in linguistic anthropological approaches to media, minoritized languages, and semiotics in Russia and Mongolia. Her first book, forthcoming with Cornell University Press, examines the creation of a “minority language public” through mass media and its role in ethnonational politics in the Russian Federation’s Buryat territories. A new long-term project focuses on how value is narrated and interactionally co-constructed in the Mongolian cashmere industry. Her work can be found in American Anthropologist, Slavic Review, Problems of Post-Communism, Language & Communication, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and other journals and edited volumes. Jennifer R. Guzmán has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCLA and is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Program in Linguistics at the

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State University of New York at Geneseo. Her publications include “The Epistemics of Symptom Experience and Symptom Accounts in Mapuche Healing and Pediatric Primary Care in Southern Chile,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 24(3):249–276. She has conducted research in Chile and the United States examining provider-patient communication across a range of conventional, complementary/integrative, and indigenous medical paradigms. Her theoretical interests include storytelling, speaking rights and speaking obligations in medical settings, and the cultural construction of clinical realities.

introduction

Ethnographic Approaches to Storytelling as Narrative Practice Elizabeth A. Falconi and Kathryn E. Graber

What is at stake in a story? Telling stories is one of the fundamental things we do as human beings. It is a way for us to make our idiosyncratic lived experiences intelligible to others, a way to manage alliances within and across communities, and a way to imagine alternative possible pasts and futures. The contributors to this volume, among them anthropologists, communications scholars, and sociolinguists, view storytelling as a diverse set of narrative practices by which the crucial links between individuals, communities, and the language(s) they use are reaffirmed and reworked. Stories, and the way they are told, enacted, or written, showcase linguistic possibility and linguistic constraint. They may illustrate through allegory some kind of moral ideal, or show what should not be done. Stories assume myriad forms in the human social world: some are fictional tales with embedded moral lessons, some are personal narrations of significant lived experiences, and some come in the form of official reports about world events, stripped of all personal detail and affect. Some are delivered in dramatic fashion on stage, only after being developed and rehearsed for weeks or months, while others are told on the spur of the moment between friends. Some are ancient and being told for the thousandth time, while others are new—or at least they seem so to the tellers or listeners. Stories encompass this wide variety of forms, but they are not all easily or equally recognizable as such. In particular, stories that are considered more “traditional,” such as myths, folk tales, and epics, have often been analyzed separately from the narratives of personal experience that we all tell on a daily basis. The division has often fallen along disciplinary lines, with folklorists and anthropologists of oral performance studying the former, under the broad banner of “storytelling,” and sociolinguists, conversation analysts, and narratologists the latter, under the broad banner of “narrative practice.” Grounded in linguistic anthropology, a hybrid discipline that brings together these disparate forms of inquiry, this volume makes the argument that the analytic distinctions assumed to obtain between storytelling and narrative practice often obfuscate more than they reveal about the social life of stories. We argue that

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004393936_002

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there is much to be gained by considering these practices together, not least because demarcating a subset of human communicative practices as “stories” or “personal narratives” is something that humans do; they are not analytical categories a priori. Recent contributions to the field of narrative analysis, most notably The Handbook of Narrative Analysis (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2015), have similarly championed attending to conversational storytelling within the scope of narrative inquiry. As the field of narrative analysis has shifted toward practiceoriented approaches, so too have its practitioners shifted toward viewing stories “not just as texts, amenable to a purely formal analysis, but as socioculturally shared practices, interactionally drafted in specific local contexts” (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2015:2). Indeed, the way stories are told, who tells them, and how are all deeply shaped by cultural and social context, as well as by interpersonal discursive histories. The authors in this volume draw on in-depth knowledge gained from long-term ethnographic fieldwork, combined with the careful and detailed examination of language use in-situ, to present a rich and nuanced analysis of storytelling-as-narrative-practice across a diverse range of global contexts. Collectively, our work is thus grounded in anthropological perspectives with a long history of paying close attention to cultural and linguistic diversity, as well as to the dialogic relationship between the mundane interactions that comprise everyday life and the cultural contexts within which interactions unfold (Boas 1889; Duranti and Goodwin 1992; Goffman 1981; Hymes 1972; Malinowski 1935; Sapir 1949; Silverstein and Urban 1996; Tedlock and Mannheim 1995). Each contributor to this volume takes a holistic ethnographic approach to understanding the practices and processes of telling stories, rather than beginning with a particular text and selectively looking for its sociocultural context. We advocate three approaches. First, we question the analytic division between formal and informal performance that has justified treating storytelling and narratives of personal experience as fundamentally separate practices. Analysts have traditionally contrasted practiced, “expert” storytellings with everyday narratives of personal experience, assuming that the former involve some kind of conscious calculation or strategy, while the latter are essentially emergent or sponatneous. But distinguishing between these types of narrative events is something that people do, and that is ethnographically discoverable. It is a distinction used and renegotiated in practice, not an analytic starting point. Moreover, few performances are pure types. We take seriously Erving Goffman’s (1959) observation that in practice, people routinely blur categories, integrating elements of more formal or obvious stage-like “Performance” with elements of less formal or less obvious performance in their

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everyday presentations of self. Thus the speech events that people hold to be formal or informal in fact share many attributes. Second, we explain how narrative renders life experience coherent by attending to interdiscursivity—defined here as the myriad ways that particular stretches of discourse are linked, as well as the culturally-specific principles used by speakers and listeners to decode or create such links from one moment of conversation to the next. This is a move that others have championed theoretically (see discussion below; also Irvine 2005; Silverstein 2005), and that we collectively highlight in this volume through our ethnographic analyses of diverse discursive contexts. Our authors describe, in different cases, how speakers collaboratively construct coherent renderings of experience, and then subsequently analyze how such renderings are used as a communicative resource in subsequent interactions to build and reinforce a particular presentation of self (see Haviland 2005). These interdiscursive chains allow us to trace the complex twists and turns that comprise the communicative lives of our research participants, and enable us as researchers to reflect on our own roles as participant-observers. Third, each chapter engages with how communicative resources are collaboratively produced and shaped by speakers’ engagements across discursive contexts. By engaging different domains of talk, and diverse geographic and cultural contexts, we are collectively able to think through how theoretical categories such as “narrative,” “performance,” and “interview” might be refined or reimagined based on a researcher’s specific engagements with speakers across these contexts. In particular, we show how the interview may be approached as a rich site for examining storytelling and narrative practice—not because the interview is a simple method by which analysts elicit stories, but precisely because it is not (see De Fina and Perrino 2011). Although the chapters to come employ diverse methodologies and are based on material from varied ethnographic contexts, they all share these core commitments and make these key interventions. One of the first questions to ask about any story is who is telling it. The authors in this book write from a range of allied perspectives in anthropology, folklore, linguistics, and media and communication studies, all fields that are centrally concerned with stories both as sources of data and as interesting human practices worthy of attention in their own right. In the chapters to come, we explore different types of storytelling in a diverse range of social, linguistic, and geographic contexts, including Mapuche medical narratives in Chile, personal narratives among Yiddish heritage language-learners, counternarratives of Taiwanese Buddhist monastics, coming out stories on a college campus in the United States, family laments in the Maniat region of Greece,

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Buryat-Russian television news stories in Siberia, and Zapotec folktales in Mexico. Considering this global range of ethnographic and discursive contexts allows us to compare more “traditional” kinds of storytelling with personal narratives as well as less conventionally studied narrative forms. We explore how stories of all kinds accrue different types of social and cultural value through circulation, finding commonalities and divergences across discursive contexts. At the same time, we consider how genres may be both durable and vulnerable to modification, by examining the social consequences of the gaps and transformations that emerge between tellings and retellings. Collectively, the studies brought together here reveal how stories and storytelling function as sites for the negotiation of rights to authorship and authority, both among different sorts of tellers and across shifting social, political, and historical circumstances. To get the most out of this book, it will be useful to have some knowledge of the debates that have informed our approach and inspired us to bring together this collection. In this introduction, we offer a brief overview of the key analytic developments, insights, and tensions relevant to the chapters to come. Our review here initially follows the fields as they have developed separately: we begin with research on traditional storytelling, folklore, and formalized domains of use, then turn to research on “everyday” narrative practice and narratives of personal experience. We then discuss interviews as hybrid spaces incorporating—and challenging—elements of both.

1

Traditional Storytelling, Folklore, and Formalized Domains of Use

1.1 Myths and Stories The scholarly analysis of stories has a long and complicated history that would likely fill many volumes. As such we focus here more specifically on anthropological approaches to traditional storytelling and oral performance. The ethnographic description and analysis of stories across cultural and geographic contexts has developed in part out of the classical study of Greek and Roman myths. A formerly independent branch of study, mythology has “become an adjunct to various subdivisions of the humanities and social sciences” (Dorson 1973:108). Perhaps the most prominent collector and analyst of myths within anthropology is Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose structural approach to the study of a vast corpus of South American myths bridges the universalist approach favored by the many literary scholars who view mythology as a window into the “psychic unity of mankind” (Dorson 1973:109), and the more particularist approaches of ethnographers who attend to specific oral traditions grounded in one place and time.

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While Lévi-Strauss conducted extensive fieldwork with communities in Brazil and elsewhere in South America, he stressed the thematic continuity, grounded in systems of binary oppositions, which undergirded the particular expressions of myths across ethnographic contexts. In his most famous structural analysis of a myth, the Tsimshian “story of Asdiwal” recorded on the North American Northwest Coast, Lévi-Strauss distinguished between intertwined geographic, techno-economic, sociological, and cosmological “levels” within the myth that had “different codes” but were used “to transmit the same message” (Lévi-Strauss 1967[1960]:14). Myths, he suggested, are governed by a structured, depersonalized “field of mythical thought” encoding social commentary within reflections and inversions of reality (Lévi-Strauss 1967[1960]:43). In contrast, some contemporaries of Lévi-Strauss emphasized the slipperiness of the generic categories used to delineate myths (often linked to cosmology, ritual, and religion) from other prevalent forms of storytelling often labeled “folk narratives,” “fairy tales,” and “legends.” What was the difference between a “myth” and a “folktale,” in practice? Such analysts recognized that “myths contain folktale elements and reflect the styles of individual storytellers” (Dorson 1973:111). This recognition of the contextual embeddedness of oral myths and traditional stories is reflected in extensive anthropological scholarship on “oral literature” and performance, which focuses on “content as well as structure,” grounded in the “empirical observation of myth tellers” rather than an “a priori dogma about the structure of the human mind” (Dorson 1973:111). 1.2 Folklore and Folkloristics Scholarship conducted within folklore studies has also shaped contemporary anthropological approaches to storytelling, and in fact the two disciplines have many founding mothers and fathers in common (e.g., Franz Boas, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and the Brothers Grimm). Indeed, collecting stories as a project of salvaging the past comes from much the same epistemological impetus—and historical anxiety—as ‘salvage’ documentation projects in ethnography and linguistics. Genealogies of the field of folkloristics (e.g., Bauman and Briggs 2003; Dorson 1968, 1973) highlight the development of antiquarianism in 17th-century England, when hobbyists collected artifacts and built “cabinets of curiosities,” as a formative moment in which folk tales began to be identified and valued as objects to be rescued, recorded, and stored for posterity. As representations of European modernity coalesced in this period, so too did representations of modernity’s oppositional Others: those people and times to be salvaged or rescued from being forgotten in a brave new world. With its emphasis on restoring historical continuity in the face of temporal disjuncture, a documentary approach to (folk) storytelling has often served

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regionalist and nationalist interests. Many studies of traditional storytelling in rural areas, including literatures referenced in the chapters in this volume by Korina Giaxoglou and Elizabeth Falconi, are indebted to traditions of nationalist folklore scholarship, especially as developed in Europe, which have sought to define a literary cultural patrimony (see Dorson 1973). At the same time, valorizing folklore almost definitionally excludes political, intellectual, and social elites. What, after all, is entailed by using the term “folk” in “folklore”? At issue is the assumption, implicit or explicit, that what is (or should be) of greatest relevance to scholars are the creative expressions of the poor, “common,” rural, subaltern, marginalized, or otherwise disenfranchised members of society who are not already recognized as verbal artists by the mainstream artistic institutions of their society. As Dennis Preston (1982) has illustrated, sometimes the orthographic conventions and terminology used by folklorists carry implicit assumptions about whose stories or cultural forms count as “folk.” Similarly, anthropologists of language have often divided scholastic from non-scholastic views by calling the latter “folk,” such as in discussions of “folk etymology” and in Michael Silverstein’s (1981, 1993[1981]) influential analysis of “folk metapragmatics.” In both cases, the “folk” views are those that are in some sense demonstrably wrong, even if they are rational, which may unfortunately be read as patronizing on the part of intellectual elites. Given this baggage, what constitutes a “folk” tale, as opposed to any other tale, bears careful thought. While most of the stories that humans tell— including most of the stories related in this volume—are not considered part of folklore, the questions that folklorists routinely ask are relevant to myriad forms of storytelling: what stories are most valuable, what is (or should be) emblematic of a community, what should scholars pay attention to, and what should be preserved for future generations? 1.3 The Poetics and Performance of Oral Literature Within anthropology, the broader term “oral literature” has generally supplanted more particular terms like “myth” and “folklore.” We might define oral literature as “a form of communication which uses words in speech in a highly stylized way” (Murphy 1978:113), and thus encompasses a broad range of verbal artistic genres (see Hymes 1971, 1975). Several chapters in this volume have been influenced by scholarship on the social contexts and participant structures within which oral literature is embedded, and the various social uses to which such forms are put. This approach originated in part in the work of Franz Boas, who emphasized how the meanings contained within imaginative tales, myths, and the like were bound up with the social lives of those who told them and to whom they were told (see Boas 1938, 1940; Murphy 1978). For example,

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the performance of stories, as well as other forms of oral literature, has been shown in many ethnographic contexts to enhance the social status of the performer within their communities and social networks, or even their material wealth, as is the case with insult poetry performed by Wolof-speaking griots (see Irvine 1989). Additionally, Malinowski’s insistence that the “real linguistic fact is the full utterance within its context of situation” (1935:11), explained in his careful study of the organization and deployment of garden magic spells, clearly shaped the approach that came to be known as “the ethnography of communication” (see Hymes 1962). The study of oral literary forms was further developed by scholars who focused their analytic attention on the social contexts within which these forms were produced and circulated. One of the lasting contributions of this work was the understanding that “an oral literary text may not only have different meaning in different cultures but also in different contexts of use in the same culture” (Murphy 1978:129). Such contexts of use themselves are not static, and thus cannot be objectively or completely described, but are rather “active processes of negotiation in which participants reflexively examine the discourse as it is emerging, embedding assessments of its structure and significance in the speech itself” (Bauman and Briggs 1990:69). Building on this insight, analysts have increasingly focused on how texts are actively, collaboratively decontextualized and recontextualized over time. Both processes depend on “entextualization,” the process through which discourse is rendered extractable, though still bearing traces of its “history of use” (Bauman and Briggs 1990:73). In their extensive work on the complexities of performance-oriented research in linguistic anthropology and other related disciplines, Bauman and Briggs note that analysts of verbal art have had to attend to context and to processes of contextualization precisely because “verbal art forms are so susceptible to treatment as self-contained, bounded objects separable from their social and cultural contexts of production and reception” (1990:72). While any stretch of discourse may be entextualized, oral literary forms are especially prone to it, being “among the most consciously traditionalized” types of talk (Bauman 2004:8). This is a tendency shared cross-culturally and cross-linguistically, even as specific performances of texts are shaped by site-specific processes of contextualization. Additionally, Bauman (2004:9) observes that performance genres across cultures share some formal features, including special formulae, devices, special registers, and figurative language, all of which “recur with impressive frequency” across the ethnographic record. These frameworks for understanding oral literature and verbal art forms like traditional storytelling have been particularly useful for addressing “[p]erhaps the most basic persistent problem confronted by students of oral literature,”

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that of “gauging the effect of the interplay of tradition and innovation, persistence and change, as manifested in the oral text” (Bauman 1986:78). These observations have in turn spawned attention to the processes of discursive circulation by which verbal art forms are reproduced and transformed over time, as they move between speakers and across social contexts of use (see Silverstein and Urban 1996; Tedlock and Mannheim 1995). Many scholars have addressed this problem by comparing the same individual’s performances across contexts. When we do this, we find multiple layers embedded within performances, marked by phenomena such as repetition, codeswitching between linguistic varieties, metalinguistic commentary, and the interactive input of audience members. For example, Paul Kroskrity (1993) describes an interaction with a Tewa performer whom he had seen tell the same story twice, several years apart. In the second telling, some explicit details were included that had not appeared in the first. Kroskrity subsequently discovered that his own presence as a white man at the performances was to blame, as the narrator, who had been unfamiliar with him during the first performance event, had been inhibited about making lewd references in front of him. He and others in his community associated white people with missionaries who had “neo Victorian attitudes about the body” (1993:158). Only during the second telling, after years of working together and developing rapport, was he granted access to the more elaborated version of the story reserved for more sympathetic audiences. Many of the techniques that contribute to the reproduction and transformation of stories and other verbal art forms are those which “contribute to the immediacy of the performance” (Kroskrity 1993:159) by allowing narrators to bring the story physically and emotionally into the present (e.g., eye contact, corporeal orientation, bodily contact, etc.). Briggs suggests that: Skillful use of stylized language prompts the hearer to look beyond appearances to grasp the meaning with which the creator has imbued this world. Such artists also have the ability to ‘read’ the ‘real’ world in which their audiences live and thus to find the sorts of imaginary scenes and existential problems that will fit the experiences of their interlocutors. The interpretive task that confronts the artist is thus twofold— interpreting both the imaginary sphere and the perceiver’s own world. But oral performance has a third component as well. The gifted artist uses stylistic devices in such a way that the form and content of the performance reflect the artist’s view of the way these two worlds, imaginary and real, are connected. Briggs 1988:2

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All of this work points to the tension between oral literary forms as rooted in discursive traditions, and as bound to the pragmatic dynamics of the emergent social interaction in which performers assume “responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative virtuosity” (Bauman 2004:9). Close analytic attention to the intersection between the formal and pragmatic dimensions of oral literature allows us, as analysts, to see links between discursive domains that might otherwise go unnoticed. Although domains such as formal, staged storytelling performances, classroom discussions, and conversations between family members may at first appear distinct, speakers continually draw on multiple such domains. It is through these intertextual linkages that new forms of meaning are produced, and, as discussed below, that otherwise disparate experiences are knit together in the lives and social worlds of speakers.

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Narrative in Everyday Life

If traditional storytelling has been approached as a set of regimented practices in formalized domains of use, narrative has been approached primarily as occurring in less formalized domains—those of “everyday life.” Narrative analysis, or narratology, developed in large part out of William Labov’s observation in the 1960s that people could be put at ease by telling some kind of narrative. Unfettered by the self-consciousness that tends to accompany microphones, laboratory settings, and contexs of elicitation, speakers would, he observed, provide more “natural” linguistic material, closer to what they would produce spontaneously away from the gaze (or ear) of the linguist (see especially Labov 1972, quoted below; also Labov 1984, 2004). Studies of narrative have developed since then in diverse fields, including rhetoric, literary theory, psychology, and psychoanalysis, as well as linguistics and anthropology. Across these fields, narrative studies share an emphasis on people narrating not folk tales, myths, or traditional(ized) stories, but ordinary events, or events that arise in the course of daily life.1 Approaching narrative in this way immediately raises two sets of interrelated questions. First, what constitutes the “everyday”? Do we hold the “every-

1 Despite this commonality, practitioners across these fields have differed in the extent to which they view the “ordinary” events being narrated as inextricably embedded in daily life. Ethnographers, for instance, have tended to emphasize social context more than psychologists or corpus linguists.

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day” to be a category of practice, and thus differently defined depending on a speech event’s sociocultural and historical context, or is there some sense in which this is a category of analysis? Is the “everyday” extractable and generalizable across contexts? To what extent is the “everyday” speech event isolable from surrounding experience? Second, if the “everyday” consists of domains held apart from traditional storytelling, how are excerpts from “everyday life” related to storytelling events? 2.1 Locating the “Everyday” The first question presents methodological quandaries regarding the location of speech events for analysis, particularly in the relationship between narratives of personal experience produced in more and less institutional settings. Personal experience narratives have been investigated primarily within broader literature on language use in institutional contexts. Doctors’ offices, courtrooms, classrooms, and offices providing support services for political refugees and asylum seekers have proved rich fields within which to examine how individual speakers interface with institutions in and through narratives. Researchers have examined how people tell stories in therapeutic interactions between therapists and clients (Carr 2011; Labov and Fanshel 1977), for example, and how asylum seekers narrate personal experience for refugee status (Blommaert 2005). And much of narratology has focused on medical contexts (see especially Mattingly 1998; Mattingly and Garro 2000). The methodological tendency to focus on institutional sites may appear counterintuitive because narratology has also emphasized spontaneity, sincerity, and quotidian contexts. A strong emphasis on the “everyday” proceeds from the understanding, as Bauman writes, that “ ‘ordinary,’ ‘unpolished’ stories of personal experience represent the elementary form of narrative expression … which are occluded in expert storytelling by the formal complexity of artfully wrought texts or the extended holding of the floor that characteristically attends performance” (Bauman 2004:82). Yet institutionally motivated and contextualized narrative events are rarely informal and variably spontaneous. This apparent paradox might be at least partially explained by narratology’s roots in psychology and the twin psychological insights that humans organize their experience through narrative and that these narratives are governed not by formal logic’s truth requirements, but rather by sociocultural convention. As Jerome Bruner put it, “Narratives … are a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by convention and ‘narrative necessity’ rather than by empirical verification and logical requiredness, although ironically we have no compunction about calling stories true or false” (1991:4–5). In an effort to examine both

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subjective expression and the conventions structuring that expression, narratologists have sought out those domains in which we routinely express and construct the Self through narrative, many of which are institutional (Ochs 1996). Katharine Young (1987, 1989), for instance, has examined how patients tell stories to doctors, interpreting the scars, bumps, and other marks on their bodies in terms of personal experience (such as traumatic wartime experiences in Auschwitz) rather than limiting the interaction to what would be strictly medically necessary. This is the patient’s effort, Young argues, to “reinsert” into the realm of medicine “an alternate reality in which the patient can reappear in his own person,” thus reclaiming and reasserting a sense of self “without disrupting the ontological conditions of the realm of medicine” (1989:161). 2.2 Telling Stories about Everyday Life By now it should be clear that the “everyday” is less a category of analysis than a category of practice—that is, a category that is created by speakers in a particular historical and sociocultural context. But if, as we have argued, the “everyday” consists of domains that tellers and listeners hold apart from traditional storytelling, how are excerpts from “everyday life” related to storytelling events? Increasingly, research in the anthropology of language has been turning to the processes by which people—not necessarily trained or practiced as authoritative storytellers per se—piece together meaningful stories, collaboratively and intertextually. Much of the labor of piecing together stories, and of recognizing them as such, requires the same attention to form shown by trained storytellers and analysts. Recognizing a stretch of discourse as a narration requires recognizing rhetorical devices that demarcate the narrative from surrounding talk, cordoning it off as something special or otherwise outside the normal spacetime of the interaction. Following Goffman, sociologists and anthropologists of language have often discussed this demarcation in terms of “framing” (Goffman 1974; Young 1982). Narratives populated by dramatis personae make up an alternate social field with its own interactional norms and its own goals, a suspended spacetime that Wallace Chafe (1980) calls the “story world.” Analyses following Chafe on this point include Jane Hill and Ofelia Zepeda’s study of rhetorical strategies to mitigate responsibility within a narrative of personal experience (Hill and Zepeda 1992), discussed below, among many others.2 Framing events as having occurred within a “story world” separate from surrounding talk is easi-

2 See the volume by De Fina and Perrino referenced herein.

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est if you, as the teller, can begin with “Once upon a time …,” but narratives of personal experience have their own framing cues that are subtler but no less conventionalized. Within a story, characters are constructed and reconstructed, often from bits and pieces of reported speech and the voicing of characters external to the narrator. From a linguistic anthropologist’s perspective, this makes stories treasure troves of quotatives, evidentials, directionals, and other linguistic forms that give us insight into how humans ascribe intentions to one another, how they manage information and signal its veracity, and how they organize time and space. Many of the narrative texts mined for this kind of material would be best categorized as myths or traditional tales,3 but some tell tales of more quotidian experiences. Jane Hill (1995), for instance, showed how a single man, Don Gabriel, telling the story of his son’s murder used a series of different voices with different stances, moving fluidly between them. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of heteroglossia, or ‘many-voicedness,’ in novelistic discourse, Hill argued that “the ‘Don Gabriel’ constructed through his deeply felt narration is a complex construction, which cannot be seen as mere elaboration around a single ‘essential’ core of the self” (1995:111). The self that was constructed was rather an “intertextual entity” specific to this particular interaction between the interviewers and Don Gabriel. What is being constructed or negotiated in these interactions? Why have interactionally demarcated narratives of personal experience, displaying many of the same formal features as storytelling and some of the same pragmatic features as regimented oral performance, been treated as analytically separate? It is possible that in the anthropology of language, a focus on oral performance and formal storytelling events has obscured the importance of personal experience narratives. In Living Narrative, Ochs and Capps stress that their text: focuses on ordinary social exchanges in which interlocutors build accounts of life events, rather than on polished narrative performances. The narrators are not renowned storytellers, and their narratives are not entertaining anecdotes, well-known tales, or definitive accounts of a situation. Rather, many of the narratives under study in this volume seem to be launched without knowing where they will lead … Ochs and Capps 2001:2

3 For an example, see Silverstein’s (1985) analysis of a Chinook narrative text.

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Is the difference, then, primarily one of expertise? Certainly learning to tell a story well—or not—is a crucial part of language socialization, and of linguistic specialization within a community. This process is apparent in all of the chapters in this volume, to varying degrees and in different ways. At the same time, anthropological work on language has increasingly focused on the collaborative co-construction of talk, disfavoring accounts of unitary speakers or single authors acquiring skills. Indeed, Ochs and Capps stress in the same passage that “narratives are shaped and reshaped turn by turn in the course of conversation.” In the process of telling a story “with” another person rather than simply “to” another person, “narrative activity becomes a tool for collaboratively reflecting upon specific situations and their place in the general scheme of life” (2001:2). To locate narrative expertise, then, we need to look in the social spaces between narrators, between narrative events, and between one instantiation of a text and the next. If it is important to recognize that (and how) people piece together stories from daily experience, and that they do so collaboratively in interactions, it is equally important to consider how they link up stories across time and space to make them meaningful, and to (re)inform past and future tellings (see Haviland 2005; Wortham and Rhodes 2015). A growing interest in intertextuality may serve as something of a bridge between these categories of scholarship that have often been seen as discrete—i.e., performance and personal narrative— because it brings our attention to relationships across domains of use and across genres. Much of the more recent work on oral literature, verbal art, and performance within linguistic anthropology has focused attention on the interactive processes that reproduce the distinctions between genres, or categories of speech, as they are deployed in social life. Scholars have described and analyzed the characteristics of political speech-making, ritual language, and storytelling, among other genres, with an eye for how these forms of talk retain their resemblance as they circulate between speakers, across contexts, and over time. A particularly productive outgrowth of this work has developed as researchers have paid increasingly close attention to the intersections, overlaps and blurred boundaries between genres of talk within unfolding interactions. Rich as this work has been, personal experience narratives have often been left behind. In A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality, Bauman identifies “marked tendencies in the scholarly literature surrounding personal experience narratives to exclude or bracket on principled grounds […] discursive organizing principles” such as performance, genre, and intertextuality (Bauman 2004:82). There has been a tendency to oppose generically regimented storytelling events to narratives of personal experience

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(such as in the passage from Ochs and Capps quoted above),4 as though the latter offered unfettered access to the “real” or underlying “elementary form of narrative expression” (Bauman 2004:82). In the search for authentic, unpracticed narration, Bauman suggests, the intertextuality of everyday narrative practice has been intentionally downplayed or even excluded from consideration (Labov and Waletzky 1997[1967]:12; Polanyi 1989:47–50; Stahl 1977). The alternative, Bauman argues, is an approach “that takes into account the interrelationships linking the expressive forms individuals may employ in representing their lives to others, however these forms may be generically packaged, presentationally keyed, or semiotically encoded” (Bauman 2004:82–83). Rather than assuming life experience to be more basic, original, or quintessentially individual, we might consider the many ways in which people employ it “as an expressive resource, using it to shape and present the social self in dialogue with others” (Bauman 2004:83). This volume operationalizes these insights. Some of the contributions address these claims directly, in particular as regards the role of narrative in contrast with polished instances of oral performance, demonstrating that the interweaving of multiple genres of talk in and around these performances is part of this same process of collaborative self-making and reflection that has been more exclusively associated with “everyday” conversational narratives. Stephen DiDomenico, for instance, points out the collaborative process by which LGBTQ individuals sharing coming out stories learn from university peer leaders to include the types of anecdotes and narratives of transformation that are deemed to have the greatest impact on a listening audience. Thus while we might expect a narrative of one’s own “coming out” experience to be spontaneous, and a quintessential expression of an authentic and individual Self, we see that such narratives are in fact rehearsed and delivered in much the same way as a theatrical monologue. Many of the chapters here demonstrate the fluidity of the boundaries that delineate different genres of discourse and the extent to which different forms of talk interpenetrate one another stylistically, or through the use of direct and indirect quotation. 4 In more recent work, Ochs emphasizes the “progressive and non-linear” nature of meaning, which she describes as “reaching from utterance to situation and back, transcending momentary interpretations” (2012:154), and she champions extending concepts used by Victor Turner (with a longer intellectual history linked to Dewey and Dilthey) to analyze formal theatrical performances to “everyday informal encounters” (Ochs 2012:153)—foci that suggest a turn to intertextuality and a softening of the analytic boundary between formal and informal speech events. At the same time, however, she insists that “[u]nlike formal events in which topic, order, code, and participation are pre-regulated, informal events are at once regulated and emergent” (Ochs 2012:155).

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Approaching Interviews as Data

Just as many scholars have eschewed verbal art forms and performance genres in favor of more “ordinary” or “spontaneous” forms of talk (e.g., personal narratives, multiparty conversation), the use of interviews as a source of discursive data has long been controversial. Many scholars of language view interviews as fabricated interactions in which interviewers elicit responses from interviewees that do no reflect how they talk, or talk about themselves in ordinary contexts. Within sociolinguistics, for example, elicitation has been framed as a problem to be overcome through the use of various techniques, including William Labov’s well-known “danger of death” question, in which an interviewee is asked to recall an experience when he/she felt that his/her life was in imminent danger: We have developed a number of devices to overcome the constraints of the face-to-face interview and obtain large bodies of tape-recorded casual speech. The most effective of these techniques produce narratives of personal experience, in which the speaker becomes deeply involved in rehearsing or even reliving events of his past. The ‘Danger of Death’ question is the prototype and still the most generally used … [B]ecause the experience and emotions involved here form an important part of the speakers’ biography, he seems to undergo a partial reliving of that experience, and he is no longer free to monitor his speech as he normally does in face-to-face interviews. Labov 1972:354–355

Others, influenced by the fields of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, have suggested that this method and others designed to overcome the constraints of the interview context are insufficient, and result in an equally distorted narrative telling (see, e.g., Goodwin 1990; Schegloff 1997). For many of these scholars “naturally occurring” conversations that would presumably take place in the course of everyday life with or without the presence of the researcher have been categorized as something of a gold standard for discursive and narrative analysis. For example, Schieffelin (1990) emphasizes both the importance of spontaneity in recorded data, and the need for the researcher to be highly knowledgeable about local speech conventions, in this case regarding interactions between individuals from different generations and social strata. This implies that the use of interviews is inappropriate, particularly for a novice researcher still becoming acquainted with the sociolinguistic landscape of the research

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context.5 Likewise, Briggs has written extensively on the methodological quagmire of the process he has so aptly termed “learning how to ask” (1984, 1986), directing much-needed analytic attention to the lack of researcher reflexivity that has and continues to characterize the use of interviews in much social scientific scholarship (see also Mischler 1986). He suggests that while interviewing is “perhaps the most central mode of data collection in the social sciences and linguistics … it is one of the least understood” (Briggs 1984:25). In an effort to make explicit the biases and ideologies that can limit the usefulness of “the interview” as a speech event, Briggs offers insights he was able to gain from his own initial incompetence, and lack of success with interviewing with Mexicano communities in New Mexico. Briggs points out that in this cultural context, question-answer sequences are embedded within the process of socializing young children into how to speak and behave as culturally competent community members. The kinds of questions that can be asked by individuals, and to whom they can be addressed “presuppose a knowledge of appropriate age and gender roles and of authority relations” (Briggs 1984:20). Within this sociolinguistic context shaped by “rhetorical hierarchy,” direct researcher-initiated questions can frequently go awry, as they often ignore, or distort local interactional conventions: [N]onnative ethnographers enter the society lacking acquaintance with norms for comportment and speech. Instead of acquiring communicative competence by ascending through the established succession of developmental tasks, however, interviewers skip the stages of observation and repetition of their senior’s words to move immediately to the generation of original utterances—questions which emerge from their own interests … Such procedural problems thus sugges[t] to the hearers that their interlocutor lacks sufficient competence. Briggs 1984:22

As such, Briggs insists that researchers take seriously the documentation and careful analysis of metacommunicative practices prevalent within researched communities, as these offer insight into how speakers in the course of unfold-

5 Schieffelin does, however, reference data collected from interviews with Kaluli women regarding their views and experiences with food taboos, as well as data from the long question and answer sessions that accompanied her process of producing annotated transcripts of conversational data with Kaluli language consultants, suggesting that there were some contexts within which she deemed the elicitation of data appropriate and useful.

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ing speech events offer “an ongoing interpretation of [the interaction’s] own significance” (1986:106). Some scholars have managed the complex task of collecting and productively analyzing discursive data within interviews, including complex experiential narratives. For example, Hill and Zepeda (1992) consider an extended narrative produced by a study participant they dub Mrs. Patricio, during a study of local regional variation of the Tohono O’odham language in and around the San Xavier Reservation near Tuscon, Arizona. In her narrative, Mrs. Patricio constructs a complex picture of the role of sociolinguistic differentiation amongst local residents and is able to use her unfolding story to “ ‘distribute’ responsibility for an undesirable situation” (her son’s trouble in school) outward and away from herself (Hill and Zepeda 1992:208). Similarly, Hill’s (1995) piece on the complex voice system of Don Gabriel, discussed briefly above, was produced spontaneously during a sociolinguistic interview that was ostensibly about language shift in a Mexicano-speaking region of central Mexico. Both examples show the active role of interviewees in the context of interview-based interactions, and the myriad discursive goals that interviews can serve (though it is important to note that in both cases the participants in question were interviewed by native speakers of their mother-tongues). These examples additionally point to how much vital cultural and linguistic insight can be gleaned by researchers from narrative forms that are produced within interview-based contexts. Recently, researchers have explicitly revisited the methodological and theoretical implications of interviewing in qualitative research, revitalizing dialogue about the forms of data that can be obtained through interviews. In the introduction to a special issue of Language in Society devoted to this topic, De Fina and Perrino (2011) confirm the insights of previous scholarship that interviews need to be seen as real communicative events deserving of the same analytic attention as other speech events. Further, they and the other authors in the volume point to the myriad forms of discursive data that can be and frequently are obtained from interviews that challenge prior assumptions about the limited usefulness of elicited speech, including the way interviewees position themselves interactionally within their narratives (see Wortham et al. 2011). Of particular significance to this collected volume is their synthesis of how researchers are increasingly relying upon interviews, elicited stories, personal narratives, and the like amid a “narrative turn” in social science. De Fina and Perrino highlight the interactional dynamics of interviews within which narratives are produced, documented, and subsequently drawn on for analysis, arguing that “narrative genres not only are intricately interconnected with interactional roles but also subject to continuous redefinition as interviews

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develop.” Further, they provide numerous examples in an effort to demonstrate that “interviews are events in which people often reproduce social action and beliefs that are typical of their community” and that “they may repeat stories that they tell to others in their community making the same kinds of points that they would make with interlocutors other than researchers.” (De Fina and Perrino 2011:8) The authors in this volume contribute to this ongoing dialogue in innovative ways, drawing attention to the various forms interview-like events may assume in the course of research-related interactions, how participants understand these events, and the ways in which research “subjects” deploy interviews themselves in the context of their own personal and professional lives. Jennifer Guzmán (chapter 6) focuses on the epistemic underpinnings and outcomes of Mapuche pelotun, in which the illness of an individual—and, crucially, who has the right to pronounce on it—is sussed out over the course of multiple interviews. The interviews take place not between Guzmán and the patient or between Guzmán and the healer as a form of elicitation, but rather between the patient and healer. (And the extent to which this is a process of elicitation is debatable.) Similarly, Graber (chapter 7) describes nervous interviewees being interviewed by journalists for the evening television news, not by the anthropologist. These encounters, in Mapuche medical interviewing and Buryat-Russian news story interviewing, are structured by interviewers’ and interviewees’ mutual expectations of what that speech event entails and requires, and as such are rich sites for witnessing both the regimentation of speech genre and its unexpected interruptions or slippages. By contrast in chapter 3, Avineri is the interviewer and her subjects the interviewees, but their stories and foci subtly shift over successive interviews. She offers detailed discussion of “person-centered” interviews, demonstrating the analytic payoff of this particular interviewing method. In chapter 1, Crane discusses the challenges of conducting an interview-based study within a religious community whose members engage in prosthelytizing and are thus disposed to interpret her questions about their experiences and way of life as the personal interest of a potential new initiate, rather than the academic interest of a qualitative researcher. The monastics that Crane worked with often used conversations and interviews with her as an opportunity to impart Buddhist religious teachings through historical narratives about the Buddha’s past lives. Taken together, these studies push the boundaries of our understanding of the relevance and utility of the methodological techniques that comprise the anthropological “toolkit.” By drawing attention to the use of interviewing within a range of ethnographic contexts, we offer new insights into the ways in which individuals in these social contexts and communities interpret, and deploy, a

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tool that has long been considered the exclusive property of social scientists. The diverse manifestations of interviews, and data gathered from those interviews, challenge conventional assumptions about who conducts them, what they get out of them, and their contexts of use.

4

The “Small” and the Unexpected

Within the anthropology of language, storytelling and narrative practice have often been studied discretely, and many who specialize in one of these areas have pointed to the problems with depending on the others for primary data about the relationship between language and social life. Throughout this volume, we collectively emphasize what we gain analytically, theoretically, and methodologically from considering the interdiscursive links that bind diverse forms of talk across interactional contexts. Here intertextuality emerges as a discourse strategy. It is through intertextual linkages that new forms of meaning are produced, and that speakers knit together what are otherwise disparate experiences in their lives and social worlds. Throughout this volume, we engage with the dynamic relationship between discursive genres—including autobiography, coming out stories, laments, news stories, medical interviews, and storytelling—and the practices of individual speakers. By juxtaposing our analyses of these diverse speech practices, drawn from a range of ethnographic contexts, we aim to demonstrate the insights to be gained from considering together speech practices and contexts that are often viewed as distinct, or even unrelated. We collectively strive to rethink the taken-for-granted distinction between spontaneous, everyday personal narratives, and formal oral performances, by focusing on how speakers deploy both forms of talk within a single interaction, or speech event. Ethnographic research, most especially within the subdiscipline of linguistic anthropology, has long been grounded in the observation, documentation, and analysis of the minutiae of diverse forms of communicative encounters. This includes discursive forms more recently referred to as “small stories,” meaning “under-represented narrative activities,” in an effort to draw attention to “the smallness of talk, where fleeting moments of narrative orientation to the world” might otherwise be missed (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012:116). Allusions to previous narratives, deferrals, and outright refusals to narrate fall into this category, as do the other unexpected “small stories” described in the chapters to come. All of the chapters in this volume point in some way to unexpected kinds of stories, unconventional ways in which stories are told, elicited, or inter-

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preted by speakers, and the complex ways such stories are woven into the fabric of daily life. The three parts of the volume explore the different purposes to which people put their stories: establishing and probing the boundaries of the self, negotiating heritage, and constructing discursive authority. We thus build from smaller to larger social aggregates. But the approach throughout is ethnographic, applying the insights of a “deep dive” into a particular sociocultural context to articulate what stories do for the people who tell them. Collectively, we demonstrate the need to rethink the lines that we as scholars draw around particular genres of discourse and communication. We detail, for example, how a personal, experiential narrative can undergo the same process of entextualization and recontextualization as a traditional folktale, and can serve many of the same social functions. Similarly, we strive to disrupt the conventional distinctions drawn between spontaneous narration and rehearsed performance through analyses of the collaborative construction, rehearsal, practice, performance, and editing of what otherwise seem to be spontaneous, authentic renderings of experience and essential selves. By the same token, we must attend to and take seriously the role that research participants and collaborators play in shaping the contexts in which we conduct our observations of their lives and gather our data, including those activities and practices that closely mirror or overlap with our own. The myriad stories we researchers are told by our research participants become, in turn, part of the stories we tell others. We thank those who have shared with us their stories, and invite you to learn from and enjoy them.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bauman, Richard. 1986. Story Performance and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bauman, Richard. 2004. A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 1990. “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59– 88. Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Boas, Franz. 1889. “On Alternating Sounds.” American Anthropologist 2:47–53.

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Boas, Franz. 1938. “Mythology and Folklore.” In General Anthropology. Franz Boas, ed. Pp. 609–626. Boston, MA: Heath. Boas, Franz. 1940. “The Development of Folktales and Myths” and “Mythology and Folktales of the North American Indians.” In Race, Language and Culture. Pp. 397–406. New York, NY: Free Press. Briggs, Charles L. 1984. “Learning How To Ask: Native Metacommunicative Competence and the Incompetence of Fieldworkers.” Language in Society 13(1):1–28. Briggs, Charles L. 1986. Learning How To Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Briggs, Charles L. 1988. Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bruner, Jerome. 1991. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18:1–21. Carr, E. Summerson. 2011. Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chafe, Wallace L. 1980. “The Deployment of Consciousness in the Production of a Narrative.” In The Pear Stories. Wallace L. Chafe, ed. Pp. 9–50. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. De Fina, Anna, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.). 2015. The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. De Fina, Anna, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. 2012. Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. De Fina, Anna, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. 2015. “Introduction.” In The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, eds. Pp. 1–17. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. De Fina, Anna, and Sabina Perrino. 2011. “Introduction: Interviews vs. ‘Natural’ Contexts: A False Dilemma.” Language in Society 40(1):1–11. Dorson, Richard M. 1968. The British Folklorists: A History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dorson, Richard M. 1973. “Mythology and Folklore.” Annual Review of Anthropology 2:107–126. Duranti, Alessandro, and Charles Goodwin. 1992. Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Giaxoglou, Korina. 2009. “Entextualizing Vernacular Forms in a Maniat Village: Features of Orthopraxy in Local Folklore Practice.” Pragmatics 19(3):419–434. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Doubleday. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York, NY: Harper and Row. Goffman, Erving. 1981. “Introduction.” In Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goodwin, Marjorie. 1990. He Said She Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Haviland, John B. 2005. “‘Whorish Old Man’ and ‘One (Animal) Gentleman.’” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):81–94. Hill, Jane H. 1995. “The Voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and Self in a Modern Mexicano Narrative.” In The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim, eds. Pp. 97–147. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hill, Jane H., and Kenneth J. Hill. 1986. Speaking Mexicano: Dynamics of Syncretic Language in Central Mexico. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press. Hill, Jane H., and Ofelia Zepeda. 1992. “Mrs. Patricio’s Trouble: The Distribution of Responsibility in an Account of Personal Experience.” In Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse. Jane H. Hill and Judith T. Irvine, eds. Pp. 197–225. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hymes, Dell. 1962. “The Ethnography of Speaking.” In Anthropology and Human Behavior. T. Gladwin and W.C. Sturtevant, eds. Pp. 13–53. Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington. Hymes, Dell. 1971. “The Contribution of Folklore to Sociolinguistic Research.” Journal of American Folklore 84(331):42–50. Hymes, Dell. 1972. “Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life.” In Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. John Gumperz and Dell Hymes, eds. Pp. 35–71. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Hymes, Dell. 1975. “Breakthrough into Performance.” In Folklore: Performance and Communication. Dan Ben-Amos and Kenneth S. Goldstein, eds. Pp. 11–74. The Hague: Mouton. Hymes, Dell. 1981. “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Irvine, Judith. 2005. “Commentary: Knots and Tears in the Interdiscursive Fabric.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):72–80. Kroskrity, Paul V. 1993. Language, History, and Identity: Ethnolinguistic Studies of the Arizona Tewa. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, William. 1984. “Field Methods of the Project of Linguistic Change and Variation.” In Language in Use: Readings in Sociolinguistics. John Baugh and Joel Sherzer, eds. Pp. 28–53. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Labov, William. 2004. “Ordinary Events.” In Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections. Carmen Fought, ed. Pp. 31–44. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Labov, William, and David Fanshel. 1977. Therapeutic Discourse. New York, NY: Academic Press. Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. 1997[1967]. “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience.” Journal of Narrative and Life History 7(1):3–38. [Reprinted from Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, by William Labov and Joshua Waletzky. 1967. June Helm, ed. Pp. 12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press.]

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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1967[1960]. “The Story of Asdiwal.” In The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism. Edmund Leach, ed. Nicholas Mann, trans. Pp. 1–48. London, UK: Routledge. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1935. Coral Gardens and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands. Vol. II, The Language of Magic and Gardening. London, UK: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Murphy, William. 1978. “Oral Literature.” Annual Review of Anthropology 7:113–136. Mattingly, Cheryl. 1998. Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mattingly, Cheryl, and Linda Garro. 2000. Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ochs, Elinor. 2012. “Experiencing Language.” Anthropological Theory 12(2):142–160. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. 1996. “Narrating the Self.” Annual Review of Anthropology 25(1):19–43. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Preston, Dennis R. 1982. “Ritin’ fowklower daun ’rong: Folklorists’ Failures in Phonology.” The Journal of American Folklore 95(377):304–326. Sapir, Edward. 1949. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1997. “Whose Text? Whose Context?” Discourse & Society 8:165– 187. Silverstein, Michael. 1981. “The Limits of Awareness.” Texas Working Papers in Sociolinguistics #84. Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. Silverstein, Michael. 1993[1981]. “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function.” In Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. John Lucy, ed. Pp. 33–58. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, Michael. 1985. “The Culture of Language in Chinookan Narrative Texts; or, On Saying that … in Chinook.” In Grammar Inside and Outside the Clause. Johanna Nichols and Anthony Woodbury, eds. Pp. 132–171. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, Michael. 2005. “Axes of Evals: Token Versus Type Interdiscursivity.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):6–22. Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban. 1996. “The Natural History of Discourse.” In Natural Histories of Discourse. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, eds. Pp. 1–20. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban (eds.). 1996. Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tedlock, Dennis, and Bruce Mannheim. 1995. “Introduction.” In The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Pp. 1–32. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Wortham, Stanton, and Catherine Rhodes. 2015. “Narratives Across Speech Events.” In The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, eds. Pp. 160–177. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Wortham, Stanton, Katherine Mortimer, Kathy Lee, Elaine Allard, and Kimberly Daniel White. 2011. “Interviews as Interactional Data.” Language in Society 40:39–50. Young, Katharine. 1982. “Edgework: Frame and Boundary in the Phenomenology of Narrative Communication.” Semiotica 41(1–4):277–315. Young, Katharine. 1987. Taleworlds and Storyrealms: The Phenomenology of Narrative. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Young, Katharine. 1989. “Narrative Embodiments: Enclaves of Self in the Realm of Medicine.” In Texts of Identity. Pp. 152–165. John Shotter and Kenneth J. Gergen, eds. London, UK: Sage.

part 1 Boundaries of the Self

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Introduction to Part 1 In this first part of the volume, we examine stories that are—or at first glance appear to be—quintessentially about the self. Taiwanese Buddhist monks and nuns narrate how they chose a monastic life path, and LGBTQ American university students narrate how they “came out” to family and friends. In both cases, individuals narrate transformative experiences that strike at the heart of who they imagine themselves to be. How are these autobiographical tales fashioned? Some narratological research has pointed out the complex interplay between two scales of identity, one at the level of some sort of collective, such as an office, a corporation, or a nation-state, and the other at the level of the individual. For example, Charlotte Linde (2000) examined the rhetoric produced by a major American insurance company to show how the company “inducts” individuals into collective memory through the stories the institution tells about itself and its members. Individuals are socialized into the communicative norms of a surrounding community, which includes learning to pick out certain pieces of one’s personal experience to the exclusion of others, and to narrate in particular ways (Miller, Koven, and Lin 2012). Institutions and social collectivities create and reproduce themselves not (only) through grand declarations or momentous occasions, but, perhaps more importantly, through the “everyday” narratives told to and by ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. In the two chapters to come, we see the interpenetration of broader socio-political projects and individual concerns, as people learn to narrate personal experiences in response to the expectations of their audiences. Hillary Crane analyzes the counter-narratives of Buddhist monastics in Taiwan, which are circulated to build a positive image of monastics in Taiwanese public spaces. This positive image challenges negative stereotypes that cast monastics, who choose to leave their families and other earthly ties to pursue a life of seclusion and devotion, as selfish, desperate, and morally suspect. In contrast, monastics’ own counter-narratives reframe their life choices as the result of a spiritual calling to serve others that provides greater satisfaction than material acquisitions and other worldly pursuits. Similarly, DiDomenico’s analysis of “coming out stories” at an American university demonstrates how the most personal of narratives can be deeply shaped by institutional norms and expectations. The data examined by both DiDomenico and Crane are examples of autobiographical narratives that are in fact structured and constrained by the communicative norms of a larger community. In Crane’s example, these narratives

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point to political stances, and prejudicial social attitudes, which interpenetrate what are, on the surface, autobiographical accounts. DiDomenico frames this relationship differently, by starting with the institutional context within which narratives of personal experience are co-constructed. He emphasizes that the LGBTQ “coming out” storytellers “construct a particular performance of self that is not simply about representing and performing a ‘narrative self’ ” (DiDomenico, this volume). By participating in tellership circles and mentoring one another in how to tell coming out stories, these students also enact a collective identity and form collective memory. Notice that this is not to say that the self is entirely subsumed by the collective, or that the collective narrative construction of one’s memory is so totalizing as to preclude personal experience. DiDomenico leaves room in his analysis for the possibility of personal experience that remains outside of—or predates—the narrative construction. Rather, he says, this is a “dialectical compromise between the individual’s personal experiences as an LGBTQ individual and the normative practices for framing ‘remembering’ in an institutionally appropriate way” (DiDomenico, this volume). As disparate as these two ethnographic contexts and narrative genres may seem, they both demonstrate how communicative norms mediate the boundaries of the self. Buddhist monastics’ life histories come to stand as an argument about what kind of persons they are—in moral terms. Similarly, “coming out” stories matter because they are about showing the value of yourself as a courageous, worthwhile person, and the value of your community as the place where you can express your most authentic self. Such stories also provide a form of moral validation to the broader institutional, social, and political contexts with which storytellers are situated. Participants on organized “coming out” panels, for instance, index qualities such as tolerance, diversity, and inclusion, which are regularly touted as strategic goals for institutions of higher education. Together, these two chapters point to the subtle, and often unexpected ways in which narratives of the self, through “dialectical compromise,” can become stories about larger social institutions and collectivities.

Works Cited Linde, Charlotte. 2000. “The Acquisition of a Speaker by a Story: How History Becomes Memory and Identity.” Ethos 28(4):608–632. Miller, Peggy J., Michele Koven, and Shu-min Lin. 2012. “Language Socialization and Narrative.” In The Handbook of Language Socialization. Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi B. Schieffelin, eds. Pp. 190–208. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

chapter 1

Defining Choices Redefined: Heroic Life Narratives of Taiwanese Buddhist Monastics Hillary Crane

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Introduction

“How old are you?” I asked a nun at the start of our interview. “From what life would you like me to begin counting?” she responded, explaining that we are not merely the current versions of ourselves that we are familiar with, but instead are the products of countless lifetimes of karmic action that have resulted in who we are now, and that the choices we make in this lifetime will have repercussions in many lives to come. Although other Taiwanese Buddhist monks and nuns I interviewed at Zhi Guang Mountain monastery responded in a more conventional way to this question, this nun’s particular answer illustrates recurring themes of monastics’ discourse—discourse that was situated in several overlapping contexts and that served multiple purposes. One of these purposes stemmed from the role of monastics as religious personnel interested in sharing their knowledge of Buddhism. As members of the sangha (the Buddhist monastic community), their first priority is the religious instruction and spiritual cultivation of others. Their life history narratives did more than just inspire and guide, however; they also served to produce a new, positive public image of monastics to supplant the negative one that, founded on a long history of prejudices against Buddhist monastics in wider Chinese contexts, dominated Taiwanese discourse. In having narratives serve multiple purposes, the monastics in this community are not alone. As many have shown, narratives may create or change the social order (e.g., Basso 1996; Bhabha 1990) and make selves (e.g., Bruner 1991; Ochs and Capps 2001; Pavlenko 2007; Zigon 2008). Through narratives, we come to know ourselves as our narratives enable us to “apprehend experiences and navigate relationships with others” (Ochs and Capps 1996:21). Because they serve wider purposes, narratives cannot be taken simply as straightforward reflections of the narrator’s reality, or even their perception of it, but must be seen as situated within specific contexts. As Bauman advocates (and as discussed in the introduction to this collection), rather than downplay the intertextuality of everyday narrative practice, an alternative is to consider “the

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interrelationships linking the expressive forms individuals may employ in representing their lives to others, however these forms may be generically packaged, presentationally keyed, or semiotically encoded” and see how speakers employ narrative of life experience “as an expressive resource, using it to shape and present the social self in dialog with others” (Bauman 2004:83). Within life story narratives, tellers endeavor to conform to wider cultural ideologies. For example, in Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence, Charlotte Linde (1993) finds that middle-class Americans carefully craft stories of how they wound up in their current occupations, in order to present a moral vision of the self that conforms to taken-for-granted and widely shared ideologies of what constitutes a good and stable person. Their narratives emphasize their own personal agency as well as their intentions and desires in their career choice. Building on Linde’s research, Chris McCollum (2002) examines other stories of middle-class Americans: those of how they selected their romantic partners, or more accurately, how they came to be with their romantic partners independent of their personal agency. While he similarly found that speakers draw on abstract cultural principles to narrate their lives, the themes McCollum uncovered differed dramatically from those Linde found. Rather than emphasize personal agency, intentions, and desires, McCollum discovered that middle-class Americans described the origins of their romantic relationships as involuntary, negating any personal agency. Both studies show the lengths to which narrators will go to ensure their stories adhere to culturally defined themes. That narrators express discomfort when their narratives appear to deviate from these themes also corresponds with the “Looking Good Principle” (Ochs, Smith, and Taylor 1989), according to which narrators generally make themselves look better than the others who appear in their stories. What happens when narrators chafe at themes in wider discourse and seek to challenge or undermine them? In a study of narratives and counternarratives in a small North Carolina town, Sofia Villenas (2001) demonstrates how North Carolinians, particularly white North Carolinians, use moralizing narratives to disparage Latina mothers’ parenting skills, and the ways in which these Latinas produce “counterstories.” These counterstories assert that their parenting before migrating was exemplary and that any problems they have with parenting in North Carolina are a consequence of the new setting rather than their own limitations as parents. Thus Villenas shows that instead of hewing to dominant themes, these Latinas’ narratives work to challenge them, specifically by undermining the stereotypes with which they are associated. Similarly, as I will discuss below, the monastics in this study confront negative stereotypes that dominate their wider societal context, and challenge these stereotypes by positing counter-narratives. After exploring the monas-

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tics’ interest in proselytizing both to me and to a wider audience as a context that influences the interview encounter, this chapter will focus on the monastics’ response to negative stereotypes and their endeavors to craft a new, positive image of monastics. I will argue that they employ the heroic trope of the da zhangfu (大丈夫, ‘great man’) to reconceive as heroic the life choices they have made that wider Taiwanese society characterizes as immoral. I will show that through their life history narratives, and most particularly with the stories of how they decided to chujia (出家, ‘leave home’), renounce the world, and become monastics, they attempt to reframe monastics as people willing to make tremendous sacrifices for the benefit of humanity. I will demonstrate that through the strategic use of metaphors, coupled with a reframing of what constitutes moral behavior, monastics’ life history narratives challenge stereotypes that dominate wider Taiwanese discourse.

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Ethnographic Context of Research: Zhi Guang Mountain Monastery

The larger ethnographic study this discussion draws from examines monastic life in a Chan (Zen) monastic community, and began in a time when most large Taiwanese monasteries experienced significant growth. The monastery and its wider affiliate community, which I have given the pseudonym Zhi Guang Mountain, grew exponentially—expanding from 10 monastics in the mid-1980s to over 1000 in the late 1990s—although that growth leveled off shortly thereafter. As is common in Taiwan, about three-quarters of the monastics were women. (Some Taiwanese monasteries are single sex, but the majority of monastics live in communities that include both males and females.) The monastery also housed a relatively small number of lay individuals, most of whom were considering becoming monastics. While the monastery at Zhi Guang Mountain was the organization’s largest facility, housing a fluctuating population of between 300–600 people, the organization also had other, smaller temples and branch meditation centers throughout Taiwan, and in other countries. The main monastery housed separate Buddhist colleges for men and women. As most monastics were still relatively new to the role, many of those living at the monastery were in school learning about their particular branch of Buddhism, and also how to teach it to others. A significant emphasis of monastery culture was the need to educate others about “right cultivation”— how to live in a way that leads to generating good karmic merit and avoid generating bad. Those who had moved on to branch temples and meditation

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figure 1.1 Taiwan, located off the east coast of mainland China and formerly also controlled by Japan, has experienced successive waves of Buddhist missionizing efforts. Base map by Peter Hermes Furian/Shutterstock.com; modified by K. Graber

centers either taught Buddhism to the lay community or served in a supporting role to those educators. The monastery also housed many other facilities involved in outreach, such as a museum of Buddhist art and relics, and a construction complex for its expanding facilities. For an ethnographic research project focused on the reasons for exponential growth in the number of Taiwanese Buddhist monastics as well as their gender identities, I spent several months attending courses offered at an urban branch meditation center, went on meditation and chanting retreats, and lived for several additional months at the main monastery at Zhi Guang Mountain. I was given a role there in the guest relations office, where I poured tea and

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translated on occasion for visitors. As a place where monastery residents and visitors waited for meetings and for transportation into town, this office was a useful setting to make connections to possible interview subjects and conduct participant observation, as well as being a place where I could engage in informal conversations with monastics. I conducted formal interviews, which focused on life histories and emphasized individuals’ choice to become monastics, with fifty monastics and lay residents of the monastery. These interviews and the participant observation I conducted in these various settings form the core of my research.

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Many-Layered Contexts

As many have shown, discourse is always rooted in social settings and cannot be understood without sensitivity to setting-specific, underlying meanings that people access in social contexts (e.g., Briggs 1988; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990; Sherzer 1987). Interviews pose a particular challenge to those hoping to gain data that are not affected by the interview process. While some endeavor to control for the effect of the researcher on the materials produced in interviews (e.g., Labov and Waletzky 1997[1967]), others emphasize the degree to which interviews are co-constructed between the interviewer and interviewee and the texts generated therein a form of discourse useful to examine as such (e.g., Mishler 1986:vii). As Pavlenko writes (citing Edwards 1997), Different versions of the same experience may be constructed with different goals in mind, they may be told to justify, to apologize, to hide, to reveal, or to mislead, and, without exception, they are told in an attempt to construct a particular self. Conversation and interaction analysts have repeatedly argued that narrative has to be examined as a fundamentally interactional activity, or, in other words, that we have to analyze not only its structure or rhetorical devices, but also the interactional goals speakers are trying to achieve by telling particular stories. Pavlenko 2007:178

Narrators choose stories, and selectively emphasize elements within those stories, in order to accomplish the narrator’s goals in constructing a particular self; the interviewer collaborates by serving not only as audience but also as co-creator. While the influence of the researcher in shaping the interview encounter is inevitable and worthy of explicit examination, such influence takes pecu-

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liar shape in religious contexts, particularly when those being interviewed are members of a community engaged in proselytizing and the researcher is not a believer. Missionizing religious communities generally welcome newcomers interested in their lives and faith; indeed they anticipate just such interest from potential converts. In such a context, the researcher’s questions can be misinterpreted as being of personal instead of academic interest (and researchers may in fact blur those lines themselves). In her research with American evangelical Christians, Susan Friend Harding (2000) discusses how her own position as a secular person led her interviewees to turn their conversations into evangelizing sessions: they would “witness” to her by describing their conversion experiences. She, in turn, found herself influenced by these encounters, even though she did not convert. For example, driving home after one emotionally intense interview, she describes nearly getting into a car accident: Halfway across town, I stopped at a stop sign, then started into the intersection, and was very nearly smashed by a car that seemed to come upon me from nowhere very fast. I slammed on the brakes, sat stunned for a split second, and asked myself “What was God trying to tell me?” It was my voice but not my language. I had been inhabited by the fundamental Baptist tongue I was investigating. Harding 2000:33

For Harding, the witnessing of her interviewees, motivated by their desire to convert her, did lead to a transformation in her thinking, even if only temporarily. Similarly, several anthropologists in the collection Missionary Impositions (2013) examine the role their own faith (or lack of it) played in how they engaged in their research as well as how their interlocutors understood their interest in their lives and utilized the research context as an opportunity to proselytize.1 The monastics’ perception of me as seeker inevitably influenced how they responded to my interview questions. In interactions with me, monastics would regularly employ a number of well-worn rhetorical strategies to try to communicate Buddhist lessons. These strategies resembled those of the Apache in Basso’s study who used place names to serve a communicative purpose aimed at the listener:

1 See Crane 2013 in the above-mentioned collection, for a discussion of the challenges I faced trying to navigate being a non-believer who was nevertheless interested in Buddhism as well as the ways that being understood as a potential convert provided entree into the community.

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In addition to everything else—places, events, moral standards, conceptions of cultural identity—every historical tale is also “about” the person at whom it is directed. This is because the telling of a historical tale is almost always prompted by an individual’s having committed one or more social offenses to which the act of narration, together with the tale itself, is intended as a critical and remedial response … This metacommunicative message is just as important as any conveyed by the text of the storyteller’s tale. For Apaches contend that if the message is taken to heart by the person at whom the tale is aimed—and if, in conjunction with lessons drawn from the tale itself, he or she resolves to improve his or her behavior—a lasting bond will have been created between that individual and the site or sites at which events in the tale took place. Basso 1996:55

Much as Basso’s interlocutors used the names of places to “shoot” those who needed to be reminded of a particular lesson, the monastics at Zhi Guang used their conversations with me to offer religious instruction. Their stories were in fact aimed quite explicitly at trying to help me see the truths of Buddhism. For example, monks and nuns regularly told tales of miracles or of extraordinary feats to illustrate the truth of Buddhism. These included stories of remarkable children (themselves monastics at Zhi Guang) who recited, at the sickbed of a grandparent, sutras they had not previously heard. They also shared accounts of pearl-like relics found among the ashes of the cremated bodies of Buddhist spiritual masters. Monastics also emphasized basic Buddhist teachings. For example, they repeated many of the Jataka tales of the historical Buddha’s previous lives, which take various animal and human forms. In each tale, a life narrative illustrates a virtue of Buddhism. Monastics also regularly relayed the temple’s own stories wherein the Master teaches important lessons to students, usually by giving them an impossible or puzzling task to undertake that ultimately allows them to see a profound truth. For example, several monastics told me a story about the monastery’s head gardener being told to repeatedly replant a valuable tree despite the replanting damaging the plant. When the gardener voiced his concerns, the Master’s reply emphasized the idea of impermanence and importance of letting go of attachments. Through this apparently futile, and even costly exercise, these abstract concepts became concrete for the gardener and he realized the replanting and eventual killing of the tree had been an object lesson. In relaying this story, monastics sought to teach its lesson to a wider audience. In a similar vein, when asked about their lives before leaving home, monastics would endeavor to persuade me of the rightness of that choice—often

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explicitly recommending it to me as one I should also choose. Indeed, they used their life histories as inspiring models in their conversation with me, in hopes that they would serve to persuade me to become a nun or possibly to inspire others through my work. Their stories would highlight the monastic life as one that enables a practitioner to separate themselves from the habits that lead to bad karma, such as eating meat. They also highlighted that monastic life allowed for concentration on freeing oneself from the attachments that lead to reincarnation and for teaching Buddhist truths to others. At another monastery where I attended a retreat, my expressed desire to study and write about the lives of monastics led to me being denied permission to continue;2 at Zhi Guang, however, monastics saw their own lives as inspiring and my writing about their lives for a wider audience as a possible means of reaching others. Not surprisingly, this agenda influenced their life histories. As Ochs and Capps (1996:25) state, “Personal narratives about the past are always told from the temporal perspective of the present. Narrators linguistically shape their tellings to accommodate circumstances such as the setting as well as the knowledge, stance, and status of those in their midst.” While the interview context, interviewer-interviewee relationship, and interview audience all must factor into how we examine interview-generated discourse, other factors may also influence that discourse. In her discussion of various sub-populations’ retellings of the tale of the 1947 Malagasy rebellion, Jennifer Cole (2003) suggests such foci capture only part of the picture. While narratives are certainly co-created in the interview process, and therefore not only reflect the teller’s understanding of the story but also are shaped by the interrelationship with the interviewer as well as the interview process itself, Cole argues that the wider socio-political meanings of the story may also profoundly influence their telling. She found that narrators depicted the same events in disparate ways depending on the role of “moral projects” in shaping the story. These moral projects fell along generational or rural/urban lines. For Taiwanese monastics, the wider context of the reputation of Buddhist monastics influences the way they describe their life histories and their choice to become monastics. It is this reputation to which I now turn.

2 That monastery’s Master gave me permission to write about my experiences on the retreat but said that studying monastics as people would generate bad karma for me and any future readers of my writings. He explained that monastics are human and therefore flawed but since they are holy, it is bad to doubt them. If my writing caused people to doubt monastics, those doubts would produce bad karma for my readers and for the monastics who were doubted, as well as for myself for generating that doubt. For more discussion of this topic see Crane 2013.

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Bad Reputation

It is worth noting that the problematic reputation of Buddhist monastics in contemporary Taiwan is not a recent invention. Buddhist monastics were historically cast in an unfavorable light in the Chinese tradition that is part of Taiwan’s cultural inheritance. In that wider milieu, describing monks and nuns as immoral is nothing new. In her depiction of Qing-era China (1644–1912), historian Susan Mann (1997) explains that historic and literary depictions of monastics describe them as morally suspect, and that Buddhist monastics had a reputation for corrupting others—particularly women they would lead out of seclusion. Because Buddhism challenged traditional Chinese values by encouraging people to emphasize detachment from the world rather than moral obligations to parents and ancestors, Buddhist monastics were regularly accused of immorality. These accusations included scandalous claims against temples, as the following statement by a magistrate illustrates: “Women go to temples or shrines in droves and, on the pretext of burning incense and worshipping idols, they actually participate in orgies on the premises” (in Mann 1997:195). Much of the animosity was directed at nuns in particular; for example, a popular saying from the Qing era claimed that nine out of every ten nuns was a prostitute, and the other was mad. Families in Qing-era China did not want their children to become monastics. As illustrated in the novel Dream of the Red Chamber, elite families in particular wanted to keep their daughters from becoming nuns: “It would look very bad for a girl from a family such as ours to enter a nunnery. That really is unthinkable” (in Mann 1997:190). By reputation, most Qing-era nuns and monks chose the monastic life out of desperation and came from poverty.3 Contemporary Taiwan is of course a different place and time from Qing-era China, yet the negative stereotype of monastics persists. In historical dramas on television, nuns in particular are portrayed as quite silly and often love-struck. Many other images of nuns on television do not enhance the community’s reputation. One nun in particular (whose credentials as a legitimate nun some of the people I spoke with doubted) made regular appearances on Taiwanese game shows, singing and acting in skits. Most monastics describe this behavior as inappropriate; indeed, it arguably violates at least a few monastic precepts. Aside from problematic portrayals on television, monastics’ poor reputation may stem, in part, from their choice to renounce the world, which is a choice

3 For more on monastics’ reputation in history, see Crane 2004.

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that offends modern sensibilities much as it did those of the past. Taiwanese children are expected to take care of their parents (or their husband’s parents) as they age and to provide them with grandchildren. Further descendants care for ancestors in the afterlife so they can avoid becoming “hungry ghosts”: those with no descendants to make offerings to their spirits. A monastic life wherein one retreats to a temple and pursues spiritual goals may be perceived as a selfish shirking of responsibility by those who remain in the world taking care of those obligations. Familial concerns are not limited to males who produce heirs. Unmarried daughters, including daughters who become monastics, pose a threat to the family as well, as Stevan Harrell describes: A girl who dies unmarried cannot have a place as an ancestor on her father’s altar. Her family can worship her in some back room somewhere, or donate her spirit table to a Buddhist “vegetarian hall,” but in some cases they choose to find a husband for her, marrying her to a living man in a posthumous wedding … and having her spirit tablet enshrined on her husband’s family’s ancestral altar. In this way, a dangerous ghost, an anomaly in the family system, has been domesticated by placing her posthumously in the normal structural position of a wife and, at least for purposes of ancestor worship, a mother. Harrell 1986:108

Unmarried daughters, then, are a threat to their families after death, leaving parents in a spiritual bind when their daughters join a monastery. Not only are monastics not taking care of their parents as they age and as ancestors in the afterlife, but without descendants, they pose a potential danger to the family after their own deaths. The reputation of contemporary Buddhist monastics in Taiwan was further damaged in the 1990s, when several monastics were revealed to be swindling and scamming their followers. Although rare, such problematic behaviors were covered by the media and widely discussed in Taiwan. These scandals included some monastics claiming supernatural abilities and doctoring photos of themselves (e.g., using photo editing to add lightning bolts radiating from their bodies, or showing themselves hovering in mid-air), and swindling many individuals out of significant sums of money. Although not as dramatic, some monastic involvement in politics also damaged the wider community’s reputation. Fo Kuang Shan [Fo Guang Shan],4 a large monastic community in southern Tai4 For proper names I’ve maintained whichever Romanization the individual or community employs. The brackets here and elsewhere include the mainland Chinese pinyin system.

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wan, drew international attention in 1996 when one of its branches, based in California, hosted a fundraiser for then-U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Most Taiwanese people I spoke with believe that Buddhist monastics should stay removed from politics and other mundane, worldly interests. Such involvement, even though limited to a small minority of monastic communities, confirms stereotypes of monastics as immoral or power-hungry. Some also see monasteries as schemes to strike it rich. Many I met in Taiwan lauded my choice to study Buddhist monastics by saying it was a good way to learn how to make money. As one acquaintance said, “They all drive Mercedes.” With such reputations, it is perhaps not surprising that, for the majority of Taiwanese families, having a son or daughter become a monastic is a source of shame. One nun describes her family’s reaction to her decision to chujia: “When I became a nun in the 1970s, people thought that becoming a nun was something for grandmothers and women who couldn’t support themselves, widows and abandoned wives. My father thought it was a huge loss of face that I wanted to be a nun and slapped me. I had to run away from home to do it” (in Tsai 1997:3). (See Salgado 2013 for a discussion of Buddhist nuns in other traditions and their perception in wider discourses.) Parental displeasure was particularly apparent in the summer of 1996 at Chung Tai [Zhong Tai] temple in Puli, when, after a summer retreat, over one hundred participants—mostly college students—decided to become monastics and the monastery’s Master tonsured them without first securing their families’ approval. The media, including international media, showed parents picketing in front of the monastery claiming that the Master had brainwashed their children. They protested that the monastery would not allow them to bring their children home or even to see them. Eventually, the situation was resolved; some of the new monastics returned to their families and others persuaded their families to let them remain. Because a significant number of those involved were students at highly competitive universities, many Taiwanese expressed shock that they would throw away promising futures to renounce the world and enter a monastery. This event was not entirely isolated, as monasteries grew exponentially around that time to the puzzlement of many. Frequently acquaintances in Taiwan told me about someone they knew—a sister’s friend, a college classmate, a cousin’s ex-girlfriend—who had become a nun or monk. These anecdotes followed a similar pattern: invariably, the young people had been attractive and good in school, had promising careers lined up and good marriage prospects when, to the surprise of friends and family, they renounced the world, shaved their heads, and joined a monastery. These stories were always juxtaposed against what “everyone knows”: that becoming a monk or a nun is a last resort of

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those who have suffered a personal tragedy and lost everything. Alternatively, “everyone knows” that most people who become monastics were never good enough “in the world” to succeed in work or school or to find a spouse and so becoming a monastic is a last resort—an alternative to suicide.

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Countering the Stereotype

Despite widely believed stereotypes that successful people would not choose monasticism, the narratives of monastics at Zhi Guang described lives wherein they had money, good jobs, good marriages, or, in the case of younger monastics, good prospects. Only one monk described a life of tragedy that fit the conventional wisdom. As he told it, first his sister, then his mother died of a slow, debilitating illness. Shortly thereafter, he lost his job, and his father died suddenly—developing a headache one morning and dying before nightfall. A year later, after his house burned down taking his dog with it, he was arrested. He owned a gun that he did not know he owned (he inherited it with his father’s possessions on his death), and that gun was used in an argument between his business partner and his wife. He was tried and found guilty of illegal firearm possession and served three years in jail, and during his trial, his business failed. He said that it was on leaving jail that he became interested in Buddhism, because it explained his suffering though the concept of karma. When telling his story, he was adamant that despite his bad luck, his choice to become a monastic was not made out of desperation. Instead, he insisted, his misfortunes revealed the truth of Buddhist teaching, and that truth led him to the monastic life. While his story conformed to the stereotype in significant ways, he emphasized his choice to chujia as the result of what his misfortune had taught him rather than a last resort. Most monastics’ life history narratives told a different kind of tale, one in which they lived precisely the kind of life to which others in Taiwan aspire. Rather than forced into monasticism out of desperation, they had what appeared to be good lives, but had found them unsatisfying. For example, one nun explained her decision to chujia as the consequence of her successes. She said she had accumulated so many rental properties that she had grown bored; to maintain her wealth she only needed to sit around collecting rent checks. She had trouble finding things to do with her time, and what she did do was unsatisfying. Television was interesting for only a little while, and she found short-lived pleasure in food, travel, and friendship. Eventually she wanted to find something more fundamentally satisfying, and she started reading Buddhist sutras. From them she learned that she would never find happiness in

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life’s successes or pleasures—that the ultimate goal should be to escape from the suffering of the world and to help others escape it. She said this insight inspired her interest in a meditation class, then meditation retreats, and finally, her desire to become a nun. Her narrative highlighted her choice to chujia as one not of desperation due to limited options, but rather of a deep dissatisfaction due to abundance. Monasticism, in her narrative, is a higher calling and more satisfying than worldly pursuits. Most monastic narratives similarly describe recognizing in Buddhism an alternative to the hollow satisfaction of worldly successes. Particularly for young monastics, life in the monastery offered an appealing alternative for those who wondered whether there was more to life than marriage, career, and family. The teachings they encountered on retreats and in meditation classes characterized those things as attachments that make it harder to escape the wheel of reincarnation. At a time in their lives when they started to question what meaning is to be derived from a life in the world, Buddhism provided them with an answer and suggested an alternative: that the best way to live is to leave home and become a monastic. Part of the appeal of joining the sangha, according to the monastics at Zhi Guang, was that it required the sacrifice of worldly successes and pleasures in favor of the loftier goal of becoming a bodhisattva. A bodhisattva is someone who, through insight built on years of diligent spiritual cultivation—or from a sudden inspiration—achieves the ability to not be reincarnated, freeing the self from the wheel of reincarnation. But the bodhisattva does not use this ability, instead vowing not to leave the world until all sentient beings also attain liberation. The bodhisattva’s willingness to take this vow stems from compassion for all living things and a willingness to forgo one’s own reward for the sake of teaching and liberating others. The bodhisattva takes this vow because of the fundamental belief that life is suffering and that reincarnation keeps us trapped in the ceaseless wheel of rebirth. The means for attaining the enlightenment that leads to becoming a bodhisattva is a lessening of attachments, which can best be achieved through severing connections with the regular world and its distractions of various pleasures and ties of affection. According to Zhi Guang’s monastics, taking this vow requires a significant commitment. To prove one has the ability to endure the limitless suffering of a bodhisattva, during the vow-taking ceremony monastics hold the lit end of three incense sticks to the skin of the forehead, just above where the hairline would be (if monastics did not shave their heads) and burn three scars into their skin.

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Heroism

These scars are a manifestation of what the monastics see as the heroism of their decision to take the bodhisattva vow. In their life history narratives, monastics describe themselves and one another as da zhangfu. The words mean literally ‘big’ (da) and ‘husband’ (zhangfu), although alone zhangfu is commonly translated as ‘fellow.’ Outside of the Buddhist context, the use of the term is broad; it is applied to war heroes and people of renown. One nun explained to me that usually da zhangfu is only used to describe men, and then only very brave, courageous, and wise leaders or war martyrs: “Who is a good example of a da zhangfu? In Western history perhaps Napoleon or Alexander the Great. In Chinese history, maybe Sun Yat-Sen, or heroic soldiers in the Sino-Japanese war. There were many heroes in that war; they are all da zhangfu.” Outside the temple, it can be used to describe anyone who is exceptionally brave, strong, and daring—even criminals. A non-monastic friend of mine told me that when he hears the word, he thinks of gangsters or crime syndicates.5 In a 1992 article, Miriam Levering, a scholar of Chinese Buddhism, discussed the concept of da zhangfu as it is found in the Buddhist literature from the Sung dynasty (roughly the 11th and 12th centuries). Levering describes a da zhangfu as someone with great courage, who never hesitates or retreats. “He is fearless, and regards any feat of daring anyone else can accomplish as something he should be able to do also. He does not look up to anyone else, nor is he afraid of anyone else. He is independent, and carves out his own way.” (Levering 1992:142) Levering describes this concept as masculine, and quotes the Hou Han-shu to demonstrate its gendered association. “A great man, (tachang-fu),6 should be able to fly like a male, not submit like a female” (144). Despite being masculine, the term is sometimes applied to women, yet “[only one who] has seen the Principle of the Buddha-nature is … called chang-fu … [T]he Nirvana Sutra states: One who has seen the Buddha nature, even if she be a woman, is also called ‘man’ … ‘Man’ is equivalent to ‘chang-fu’ ” (145).7

5 This term is also found in Korean (taijangbu), where, according to anthropologist C. Sarah Soh, it means more or less the same as it does in Mandarin (personal communication). The same characters are used in the Japanese expression daijobu, where it means “It’s OK,” or “It’s all right, no problem.” 6 Ta changfu is the same as da zhangfu. Levering uses another system of Romanization. 7 The Nirvana Sutra is widely read at Zhi Guang and at other Taiwanese temples.

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While Levering writes about literature that is almost 1000 years old, the term da zhangfu is still used today at Zhi Guang in much the same way. One nun contrasted the ordinary understanding of the term with the meanings it holds at the temple, but echoing the Buddhist texts in which Levering examines it: “Here it symbolizes strength, not violence; we’ve changed the connotation in Buddhism when we use the term. Other people may connect it with violence, but for us it means strength.” The specific example of a da zhangfu most often cited in monastic narratives is Mulan (also known as Hua Mulan or Fa Mulan).8 Although different versions vary in details, the basic outline of her story is that she left home dressed as a man and fought in the army for twelve years as a substitute for her father, who was ill, and for her brother who was too young to fight. Throughout the twelve years, the story goes, she fought valiantly, no one suspected she was a woman, and her chastity was preserved. After her years in the army ended, she returned home and changed back into her woman’s clothing, returning to her role as daughter and eventually wife.9 For the monastics at Zhi Guang, Mulan is a model of a da zhangfu and a hero whose actions, like their own, are unconventional. Outside the monastery, Mulan is usually held up as the model of filial piety, as she went far beyond what is normally expected of a daughter to serve her father. Mulan’s story, like Bakhtin’s words (1981:283), exists in other people’s mouths and other people’s contexts before being utilized for this purpose in monastic narratives. It has, as Bauman and Briggs (1990:73) say, “a history of use.” Monastics put a different spin on her story, though, when they compare their own choice to become monastics, in which they leave behind their obligations to serve their families, with her willingness to step outside her expected roles to accomplish heroic feats. They describe their decision to chujia as similarly requiring stepping outside their expected roles. Instead of serving their families in the limited way of a child taking physical and financial care of parents or a descendent taking care of ancestors through ritual actions such as burning ghost money, through their bodhisattva vow they help their families, as they help all sentient beings, by educating them about karma and the importance of self-cultivation and engaging in right action. In this way, they serve as models, not of filial piety, but of Buddhist cultivators. Where Mulan’s filial piety might seem the precise opposite of the monastic choice to chujia, in monastic narratives the decisive

8 The actual historical figure Mulan probably lived during the Wei dynasty (386–557CE). 9 Of course the Disney version differs considerably, most significantly with a love story and a plot point around the revelation she was physically female.

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moment is a parallel, unexpected, unselfish, heroic act. By invoking Mulan in their own stories, monastics provide not a counter example of filial piety but a comparable one of self-sacrifice outside normal social roles, and one that leads to significant heroism for the greater good. The Zhi Guang community is well aware that most Taiwanese do not think highly of monastics. By drawing the comparison with Mulan and invoking the da zhangfu trope, the community hopes to alter the way monastics are perceived outside the temple. Because da zhangfu are courageous, determined, and heroic, the monastics use the term to argue that they, too, are brave heroes who take a courageous and unusual step when they decide to become monastics, instead of choosing the temple after failing in the world. In this situation, the use of Mulan and da zhangfu could be understood as an argument of tropes. James Fernandez (1986) suggests that within certain contexts tropes can be used argumentatively, to shift the perception of the thing associated with the trope. For example, Fernandez explains that when a king is called a lion, there may be three effects of metaphoric movement. First, on hearing the king called a lion, provided the public does not already have an alternative and clear image of the king, and provided the king has some lionlike qualities, the public begins to think of the king as lion-like. Second, on hearing himself referred to as a lion, again, assuming the metaphor fits into the king’s own self-concept (or he lacks a clear self-concept), he begins to perceive himself as lion-like. The final step is for the king to start acting like a lion. “The metaphoric predication can be self-fulfilling. The king can be told so often that he is a lion that he comes to believe it. He roars at his subjects and stealthily stalks those he thinks are enemies to his interest. He finally springs upon them in full and summary justice.” (Fernandez 1986:20) Although the first two stages of metaphoric movement may be common, Fernandez says that this last effect of metaphors is rare: Such persistence in the application of metaphors does not often occur, so that persuasion does not usually pass over into performance. But at a deeper level of fantasy men may hold to predications which cause them irresistibly to organize their world, insofar as they can, so as to facilitate or make inevitable certain scenarios. Fernandez 1986:20

According to Fernandez, a metaphor’s effectiveness stems from the basic human problem of uncertainty. To shape a person’s self-perception, metaphors draw on our own lack of self-awareness. Since most people have a vague sense of self, a metaphor can fill in some of the places in which we feel vague about

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ourselves: “In the privacy of our experience we are usually not sure who we really are. A metaphor thrust upon us often enough as a model can become compelling.” (Fernandez 1986:20) These types of metaphors are not unlimited in their power. They only work on an individual for whom the metaphor is apt. If the king has no lion-like qualities, the metaphor will not work, and no one will see the king as being lion-like. If the king acted more like a predatory shark, or a playful puppy, then the lion metaphor would not catch on, but if he already roars when angry, others may see his direct action taken against his enemies as “pouncing.” When the metaphor is apt, a king who has only some lion-like qualities can be seen as having even more. Moreover, he may begin to see himself as lion-like and might even start acting like a lion. When the monastics describe themselves as da zhangfu, an argument through metaphor takes place and they are perceived of, perceive themselves as, and then begin to act like da zhangfu. When the monastics defined da zhangfu in their conversations with me, they did so in an attempt to frame the way others perceived them. The framing was primarily in opposition to the character of girls, who they describe as having many negative, unheroic characteristics. According to one student at the Buddhist institute: In Buddhism when we say someone is a da zhangfu we mean he has qualities like decency and purity. He has a pure mind and he does good for others. He is not like a woman who only cares about beauty, her own children, about a small world. He is not like a girl who just talks to you, and chats about meaningless things … Da zhangfu is about qualities that are found on the inside, not the outside. It’s about qualities such as not being afraid of the darkness, and not being the kind of person who is waiting for someone to save you, to give you happiness. Using the da zhangfu metaphor, the monastics try to show to others that they are not like women, who they describe as weak and afraid; instead they are brave and fearless like da zhangfu. Another nun draws a contrast between a negative stereotype of girls and da zhangfu when she explains: Da zhangfu are daring and resolved, not like women who are hesitant and stuff. Da zhangfu are open-minded, purposive … You know how indecisive girls are; a da zhangfu is much more decisive. Yes is yes, and no is no … So that’s what da zhangfu means … Like girls take forever to decide and to think … We say that girls have more worldly thoughts. They like to make themselves pretty and they are narrow-minded … Women

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are more emotional and hesitant. Girls are more emotional; they get really angry and really happy. A da zhangfu is by definition, then, not like girls. By drawing this contrast, monastics juxtapose their own character to the negative stereotype of girls. Like Mulan, monastics, particularly nuns, leave behind feminine characteristics and instead move about in the world heroically as Mulan did, as da zhangfu. One nun with whom I worked at the reception office told me a story about how all nuns are da zhangfu, and therefore men, even if they appear to be women: When I was in 7th grade I had a classmate that looked like a nun I knew, which was the first time it occurred to me that the nun was a woman. So after school I went to her and said, “you are a girl!” The Master answered, “No, I’m not a girl. I’m a boy. I’m a da zhangfu. Becoming a monastic is a big deal; not all men could do it. After becoming a nun, you realize that and you don’t think of yourself as a girl. Da zhangfu means a manly man. It means you have enough courage to give up everything. Everybody likes to pursue pleasure, fortune, etc. But when you decide to become a monastic, you have to give up what you have owned. Doesn’t that sound like a manly man?” That’s why the Master said she was a man not a woman. With her story, this nun explained that the nun she had known was heroic, heroic enough to decide to become a monastic, and therefore a da zhangfu. This heroic aspect is key to the definition of a da zhangfu and is crucial to the first stage of Fernandez’s metaphoric movement. For others to see the monastics as da zhangfu, they need to identify qualities in the monastics already that match the metaphor. Monastics tell the stories of deciding to renounce the world in ways that emphasize the self-sacrifice and bravery involved, highlighting the ways in which their own chujia narratives match up with the character of a da zhangfu. The nun with the above story went on to tell me that these days she herself feels much like that nun had described herself feeling, including in how she looks; the experience of being a nun had changed her appearance. She showed me a picture of herself when she first became a nun to contrast her current appearance with how she used to look. She saw herself as growing visibly more capable. When it works, the da zhangfu metaphor moves others to perceive monastics as having positive, masculine qualities. In the second phase of metaphoric movement, it also causes the monastics’ self-perception to change, as it does

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for the nun above. When they hear others describe them, or when they hear all monastics described as da zhangfu, they identify the traits within themselves that are like those of a da zhangfu; they begin to see themselves as da zhangfu in the same way that the king begins to perceive himself as lion-like when he hears himself described as such. In taking on new identities as monastics, they have dramatically altered the course of their lives and their own sense of self is similarly altered. There is, consequently, an inchoate self that does not yet have a clear shape and metaphors can provide that shape that the self is lacking (Fernandez 1986). The da zhangfu helps them to shape a new self-image in the light of its characteristics. Or, to borrow directly from Fernandez, the metaphor predicates upon the inchoate; an apt metaphor fills in the gaps of knowledge about the self. For the metaphor to have an effect on the nuns’ self-perception, they must already perceive themselves as having some of these qualities. In their narratives, they demonstrate they have already acted heroically by making the difficult decision to become monastics. The da zhangfu image is also reflected back when they look in the mirror and see their shaved heads and grey tunics. They describe themselves as decisive, unafraid, unemotional, compassionate, wise, and calm—the traits of a da zhangfu. They may have associated some of these traits with themselves before they hear themselves described as da zhangfu, others they begin to see after they begin to think of themselves as da zhangfu—affirmed by the dramatically heroic step of renouncing the world. The first two stages of metaphoric movement are followed by a third stage in which the monastics begin to act like da zhangfu. Again, Fernandez describes the lion-like king as first being seen by others, then seeing himself as lionlike. He then may, under certain circumstances, start acting more lion-like. This change through metaphor is true of the monastics as well, as their narratives show that they have started not only to see themselves as having the qualities of a da zhangfu, but have also started to act like da zhangfu. One nun describes how as a da zhangfu she acts differently from before. “Now that I’m a nun, and a da zhangfu, I’m much more decisive and I never get scared.” Similarly, another nun feels stronger and says that she is “able to lift up many people” with the strength of a da zhangfu. These character traits that the monastics associate with the da zhangfu lead monastics to act in new, stronger, and more fearless ways. The da zhangfu trope thus shapes monastics’ sense of self, and monastics cast stories about themselves in this heroic light. For example, one nun described a dream she had that explained her ease with English, her love of swimming, and why she had the good karma to become a nun. In the dream, she was an African-American woman who was being murdered by drowning.

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She explained that this dream was a memory from her previous life and her love of swimming in this life was her attempt to overcome the bad karma. In the dream, as she was drowning, she decided to forgive her murderers and die in peace. She believed this act of forgiveness in a previous life produced the good karma that enabled her to become a nun. She described it as a heroic, selfless act: the act of a da zhangfu. She uses her self-identification as da zhangfu as a lens through which to frame her past (dream) self. As Ochs and Capps (1996:20) state, “personal narrative simultaneously is born out of experience and gives shape to experience.” A regular feature in monastic discourse was a “seed” metaphor they used to illustrate karma and rebirth. According to temple cosmology, every action taken in this life has a consequence, either later in this life or in the next. In this lifetime, the seeds are planted that control the outcome of the next. Having the seed alone does not lead to that rebirth, though; the seed can die without the right kind of light, water, and soil to grow. Both the seed and the other supporting inputs are necessary for the growth to occur. The seed metaphor is used frequently at the temple and in its literature, where diagrams of plants are labeled in karmic terms. Monastics use the seeds of past lives to explain why some are born healthy and others sick, and why only some people have the good fate to be born in a culture where they will be exposed to the dharma. Many monastics say they became monks and nuns because in a previous life they did something extraordinarily good, or because they planted a seed when they made a vow. One nun describes her life in karmic terms using the seed metaphor explicitly: “It’s as though I had a seed before and in this life, the seed blooms into a flower. Fate is like a seed, it grows up inside you naturally and then it flowers. That’s the reason we become monastics.” With this metaphor, too, monastics challenge the notion that they chujia only out of desperation. Instead, they say, they are reaping what they sowed in previous lifetimes. They are only able to become monastics in this lifetime because they planted a seed in a previous life and cultivated it with right action.

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Although the stereotype of monastics as immoral is old and entrenched, Zhi Guang monastics’ narratives are not the only challenge to that received wisdom. Now even television has a larger number of serious monastics delivering lectures than it does stereotypical depictions of non-serious monastics in historical dramas and game shows. Many monastics are widely seen as significant scholars and accomplished practitioners. Perhaps the best-known monastic

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in Taiwan is known for her charitable work in Taiwan and abroad. Master Cheng Yan [Zheng Yen], who is sometimes described locally as Taiwan’s Mother Teresa, has founded hospitals and schools, and many Taiwanese donate money and goods in addition to time to her charities. Through her many good works, she has done much to improve the perception of Buddhist monastics in Taiwan (Madsen 2007).10 Although many in Taiwan contribute to her charity and admire the works of her organization, many other monastics believe that the kinds of community efforts her organization engages in do not address the core of society’s problems. For example, monastics I knew at Zhi Guang claimed that their own work—teaching about how to avoid accruing bad karma—would help more people in the long run as their students became cultivators themselves. The narratives of Zhi Guang’s monastics contribute to tipping the scales in the favor of others seeing their life choices in a positive light. While traditionally Taiwanese culture values obligations to family and ancestors, monastics’ framing of their own actions as like those of Mulan contributes an unusual twist both to her story—which is usually framed as the prime example of filial piety—and to their own choices as extraordinary, not in their shirking of their responsibilities to the world, but as similarly reaching beyond expectation to do something heroic. Framing the choice to leave home as a choice made in service of humanity rather than abandoning their families and filial obligations, chujia is an act that embodies the heroism of the da zhangfu. To monastics, of course, this act does not seem selfish—they see their spiritual practices as earning karmic merit for not only themselves but for all those around them. Monastics view taking the bodhisattva vow—promising to continue being reincarnated even after achieving release from reincarnation in order to help all other sentient beings also attain release—as a supremely selfless act grander than what their own parents ask of them: to remain in the world and produce heirs. Through moralistic language, Buddhist imagery, and heroic tropes monastics endeavor to tell their stories in a way that alters how they are perceived by others. In turn, the tropes they use also shape their own self-understanding— as having renounced their previous lives they are new selves—and predicate on the inchoate with a new, improved self-image. As they shed their old lives, they narrate those former lives in ways that help them frame who they are now, not just for a wider audience but also for themselves as their new monastic selfidentities are emerging. As Ochs and Capps (1996:29) explain, “narrative is born

10

Some recent scholarship adds to the positive portrayal of monastics in Taiwan, particularly of nuns. See, for example, DeVido 2010 and Yü 2013.

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out of such tension in that narrative activity seeks to bridge a self that felt and acted in the past, a self that feels and acts in the present, and an anticipated or hypothetical self that is projected to feel and act in some as yet unrealized moment—any one of which may be alienated from the other.” For monastics, the model of Mulan and the trope of the da zhangfu provide a useful means of framing not only past selves, but also new and emerging selves in their narratives. Monastic narrators, like others telling their life stories, obviously do not work in a vacuum. As narrators, we evaluate specific events in terms of communal norms, expectations, and potentialities; communal ideas of what is rational and moral; communal senses of the appropriate and the esthetic. In this way, we affiliate with other members of society both living and dead. We come to understand, reaffirm, and revise a philosophy of life. Ochs and Capps 1996:30

Whereas the stories of middle-class Americans discussed by Linde and McCollum consistently utilize particular narrative themes to conform to American ideologies about choosing careers and romantic partners, instead, like the Latina mother narrators Villenas described, Taiwanese monastics confront and subvert dominant themes in their stories. These monastics directly challenge the dominant ideologies about their life choices. In doing so, they wrestle, as do Cole’s interlocutors, with the wider socio-political and historical contexts their stories draw on and speak to. Because these monastics are invested in shaping others’ perception, in this study the interview setting provided a useful, if particular, tool for eliciting narratives. The stories themselves served a purpose for their narrators when told to me; they were designed, in part, with me as an audience member, as well as potential future audiences that could be reached through me, in mind—both with the aim of shifting the audience’s perception of monastics and with the aim of aiding in the spiritual cultivation of that audience. The interviewer’s position in the eliciting of these narratives is key. I was both a target of their proselytizing and a potential vehicle through which others could be inspired. I was also someone in a position to help them change their reputations. So while one is normally concerned with, and perhaps interested in controlling for, researcher effects on the interview situation, here the researcher’s effect is explicit, and for the interviewees, explicitly useful in that by persuading me (and my future audiences) of the rightness of their lives, they not only change how they are perceived but also help these audiences learn to accrue better

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karma by following their heroic models. What is at stake in these stories is to correct the widely held negative image of monastics in Taiwanese society as well as to provide for themselves a perspective on their own previous life as one that was usefully overcome when they opted to leave it behind and become new people as monastics.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Austin: University of Texas Press. Basso, Keith. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. Bauman, Richard. 2004. A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 1990. “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59–88. Bhabha, Homi. 1990. Nation and Narration. London, UK: Routledge. Briggs, Charles L. 1988. Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bruner, Jerome. 1991. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18:1–21. Cole, Jennifer. 2003. “Narratives and Moral Projects: Generational Memories of the Malagasy 1947 Rebellion.” Ethos 31(1):95–126. Crane, Hillary. 2004. “Resisting Marriage and Renouncing Womanhood: The Choice of Taiwanese Buddhist Nuns.” Critical Asian Studies 36(2):265–284. Crane, Hillary, and Deana Weibel (eds.). 2013. Missionary Impositions. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Crane, Hillary. 2013. “Flirting with Conversion: Negotiating Researcher Non-Belief with Missionaries.” In Missionary Impositions. Hillary Crane and Deana Weibel, eds. Pp. 11–24. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. DeVido, Elise Anne. 2010. Taiwan’s Buddhist Nuns. Albany: State University of New York Press. Edwards, Derek. 1997. Discourse and Cognition. London, UK: Sage. Fernandez, James W. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harding, Susan Friend. 2000. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Harrell, Stevan. 1986. “Men, Women, and Ghosts in Taiwanese Folk Religion.” In Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds. Pp. 97–116. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. 1997[1967]. “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience.” Journal of Narrative and Life History 7(1):3–38. [Reprinted from Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, by William Labov and Joshua Waletzky. 1967. June Helm, ed. Pp. 12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press.] Levering, Miriam L. 1992. “Lin-chi (Rinzai) Ch’an and Gender: The Rhetoric of Equality and the Rhetoric of Heroism.” In Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender. José Ignacio Cabezón, ed. Pp. 137–158. Albany: State University of New York Press. Linde, Charlotte. 1993. Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lutz, Catherine A., and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds.). 1990. Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Madsen, Richard. 2007. Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mann, Susan. 1997. Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. McCollum, Chris. 2002. “Relatedness and Self-Definition: Two Dominant Themes in Middle-Class Americans’ Life Stories.” Ethos 30(1–2):113–139. Mishler, Elliot George. 1986. Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. 1996. “Narrating the Self.” Annual Review of Anthropology 25(1):19–43. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ochs, Elinor, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor. 1989. “Dinner Narratives as Detective Stories.” Cultural Dynamics 2(2):238–257. Pavlenko, Aneta. 2007. “Autobiographic Narratives as Data in Applied Linguistics.” Applied Linguistics 28(2):163–188. Salgado, Nirmala S. 2013. Buddhist Nuns and Gendered Practice: In Search of the Female Renunciant. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Sherzer, Joel. 1987. “A Discourse-Centered Approach to Language and Culture.” American Anthropologist 89:295–309. Tsai Wen-ting. 1997. “Daughters of the Buddha.” Sinorama, Vol. 12. Villenas, Sofia. 2001. “Latina Mothers and Small-Town Racisms: Creating Narratives of Dignity and Moral Education in North Carolina.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 32(1):3–28. Yü Chün-fang. 2013. Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Zigon, Jarrett. 2008. Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. New York, NY: Berg Publishers.

chapter 2

Telling Stories, Enacting Institutions: Learning How to Narrate “Coming Out” Experiences Stephen M. DiDomenico

This chapter focuses on a particular narrative genre, the coming-out story (henceforth COS), as it is learned and utilized for the purpose of speaker panels at college campuses. These panels consist of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBTQ)1 individuals telling these stories for an audience as part of a larger effort to educate others about LGBTQ identities and issues (Hugelshofer 2006; Lucksted 1998). An extract of one such narrative, as performed on a speaker panel, appears below (see Appendix A for a transcription key; the full transcript of Tim’s narrative can be found in Appendix B): Extract 1: (COSP-6:1) 13 TIM: 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

So (0.3) about like freshmen year in high school I remember uh (.) started havin’ like a crush on a guy I was like “Whoah this is not right” cause I grew up in a very Roman Catholic military family both my parents are in the air force (0.2) and they were like all the time th- they weren’t like completely like homosexuality is wrong you shouldn’t do that but it’s (.) it was it was obvious in the family just you don’t talk about stuff like that you keep things quiet (0.2) and then I realized I started having feelings for some of the guys in my class, and I was like “Whoah this is not good.” (.) that became really hard for me to deal with because (.) I thought at that time that homosexuality is completely wrong, I can’t do that because that makes me a bad person, so I dealt with that for awhile it was harder and harder and eventually I just felt like I was being (.) a liar to everyone.

1 I recognize that there are many other ways of formulating an acronym for this community, many of which recognize additional categories (e.g., queer, ally, etc.); however, I choose this iteration since it is the acronym that best describes the participants who are involved in this study (individuals who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgender).

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As this short example begins to illustrate, COS narratives are typically organized around individuals’ life experiences of coming to terms with and, eventually, disclosing their sexuality to others (i.e., friends, family members, coworkers, etc.). Since the onset of the gay liberation movement in the 1970s (D’Emilio 1998; Marcus 2002), narratives such as this one, cast within the coming out story genre, have become increasingly pervasive for LGBTQ-identifiying individuals (Plummer 1995; Saunston 2015; Zimman 2009).2 The act of telling one’s coming-out story has been described as a method for spreading awareness of LGBTQ identities and issues as well as potentially “giving” others a story of their own to tell (i.e., the story of knowing someone who came out as LGBTQ), thereby expanding tellership. Put simply by Plummer (1995:56), “stories breed stories.” McClintock (1992:53) underscores the importance of “speaking up” for the LGBT movement: Speaking up is a self-empowering act in a world that continually tells me I should hide and be ashamed of who I am. I speak about my experience of being a lesbian in a homophobic world because it is one way that I can break the silence about our lives. This quote captures some of the complexity of LGBTQ members’ tellings in that the line between personal experience (“I/me”) and collective experience (“us”) may in some instances be blurred. That is, in telling one’s story he/she may seek to accomplish some larger, socio-political “jobs” beyond simply talking about one’s past. The act of disclosing one’s sexuality has been described by social science researchers in a number of ways, including “articulating one’s gay or lesbian identity to the non-queer world” (Bacon 1998:251), a speech act that “brings … a new gay self into being” (Liang 1997:293), and the ubiquitous “coming out the closet” metaphor (Savin-Williams 1989).3 The most extensive body of literature on this topic primarily emphasizes the types of psychological and developmental struggles that LGBTQ youth face when attempting to come to terms with their LGBTQ identity. These obstacles may include engaging in behaviors that place their physical, mental, and sexual health at risk (Carragher and Rivers 2002), closely monitoring their own behaviors to avoid victimization among

2 Regardless of when the COS genre gained prominence, it is also true that its process of regimentation is ongoing even today. 3 See Chirrey (2003:34) for a discussion of how the increasing use of this metaphor has led to a semantic change in what this verb (‘to come out’) may mean.

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their peers (Pilkington and D’Augelli 1995), and even resorting to engaging in heterosexual sexual activities that result in lower levels of self-esteem (Pilkington and D’Augelli 1995). Although this scholarship is especially important for providing the support that these youth need, it largely limits itself to individual or psychological-level traits and narrowly views coming out as a developmental process that occurs over a number of fixed stages of identity development (Martin et al. 2010; Savin-Williams 2005, 2016; cf. Craig and McInroy 2014). In contrast, the current chapter looks beyond understanding coming out as a psychological experience or single act of disclosure in order to examine the specific communicative activities through which individuals engage with, rehearse, and “perform” narratives about coming out. This is consistent with recent work that has extended our knowledge of how issues of sexuality (and gender) are understood, dealt with and contested through the situated activities of particular communities of practice (e.g., Barrett 2017; Gray 2009; Jones 2014). The study discussed in this chapter aims to extend research on the coming out story genre by looking beyond structural features of these narratives (or of their performance) to the process of how this story gets told the way it does. More specifically, this means examining the social contexts in which the genre is learned, performed, and negotiated for the purposes of future re-tellings. I draw upon a corpus of interactions and narratives related to college “coming out panels” to examine how they engender a particular type of institutional remembering (Linde 2009) and, in the process, shape how tellers are socialized into a particular set of communicative activities and beliefs related to LGBTQ identities (DiDomenico 2015). To engage with these issues, I examine communication in the institutional activities that comprise the training sessions required of individuals who wish to take part in coming out panels as well as the eventual performance of these narratives at panel events. My analysis thus focuses primarily on two core activities related to these narratives and their enactment: First, training activities in which trainees and panel experts listen to each other’s stories and provide feedback, and second, the serial tellings that constitute the panel events themselves. This research contributes to what we know about the narrative practices associated with different domains of social life, how narratives may be told and packaged together for particular institutional purposes, and the stable forms of identity socialization which they may advance.

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Ethnographic Context of Research

The analysis from this paper draws from field research conducted at a pair of U.S. colleges, Jensen University and Stella University (both pseudonums), in the late 2000s.4 Each campus featured an office that was primarily dedicated to LGBTQ issues and offered an array of educational programs, social events, and meeting spaces for LGBTQ campus members and allies. One of the longest running programs put on by each of these offices was the coming out speaker panel (or “speakers bureau”), which offered students, staff, and faculty the opportunity to share their coming out experiences to a range of audiences such as regular courses (ranging from large lectures to smaller seminars), dormitory council meetings, and even audiences mainly consisting of members of communities that surrounded the colleges. Throughout my field research, I observed and interacted with the participants of a half-dozen speaker panels, several training sessions intended to prepare new members for serving on the panels, and in select cases, I was able to conduct in-depth interviews with participants about their experiences with many of these events. In the end, my data consisted of over twenty hours of audio recordings of training sessions, indepth interviews, and panel events, as well as field notes regarding these and other activities that took place throughout my research. A common goal of the speakers bureaus I studied was to share personal experiences through stories in order to cultivate greater knowledge and compassion about the LGBTQ community and the issues it faces.5 While the exact format of each panel event may vary, most panels consist of the following set of communicative activities: introductions from each of the speakers, performance of each of their stories, and a final question and answer portion where audience members can ask any questions they have about the stories they heard or LGBTQ issues more generally. Before any interested individual may become involved with the speaker panels they typically must complete a formal training, which may range between a few hours to several days in length (depending 4 Although the primary interest that guided my field research at the two campuses was the broader phenomenon of coming out panels, there were key differences in the activities I chose to focus on (and that I received permission to research) on each campus. For instance, at Jensen Univeristy, my focus was largely on the rigorous training that prospective members had to complete in order to serve on the panels (see DiDomenico 2015 for a comprehensive discussion of this training process), while at Stella University, I was not able to study the trainings. While I acknowledge differences between the two colleges when relevant, a comparative analysis is not within the scope of the current chapter’s focus. 5 Lucksted (1998:356–357) provides a very comprehensive review of the various issues and choices one must make in implementing a speaker panel on a college campus.

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on the university). Only after this training is completed may these individuals volunteer to present their stories at individual speaking panel events on campus (see DiDomenico 2015 for a more thorough discussion of these trainings as they occurred at Jensen).

2

Narrative Performance as Embedded within Institutional Frameworks of Activity and Socialization

This section provides an overview of theory and research from three diverse but closely related areas of discourse and communication inquiry. These include the following: Narrative performance, talk in institutional settings, and language socialization. Each of these perspectives will later be applied in the analysis to generate deeper insight into the complexities of narrative practice and coming out panels. 2.1 Oral Performance and Performativity One of the most influential theories regarding everyday performance is Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical approach to mundane social encounters.6 The theatrical metaphor advanced in this work presumes that speakers (or “actors”) continually project an idealized identity (or “character”) to their recipients (or “audience”) in any interaction by utilizing a repertoire of interactional and material resources (“fronts”). In addition, interlocutors may support or threaten the performance that a speaker projects, highlighting the dynamic and collaborative nature of identity management during ordinary social encounters. Most significant for the current chapter is Goffman’s description of the way the social arenas where we enact our mundane performances can be demarcated in terms of which (if any) recipients may be privy to our behavior. What he termed the “front stage” refers to interactions in which speakers have greater awareness of the dramaturgical aspects of their conduct and thus the performer-audience relationship. A basic example of this is the ways that wait staff of a restaurant interact with their customers and each other when their conduct is visible or audible to the customers. On the other hand, the “back stage” involves interactions in which the speakers knowingly contradict, rehearse, or modify a performance away from an audience. Returning to the restaurant example, these interactions would be the staff’s informal conversations in the kitchen

6 Also see Goffman (1974) for a more specific application of this framework to conversational storytelling.

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or break room (where their “audience” is not within earshot or cannot see the behavior that could contradict their front-stage encounters). This conceptual distinction from Goffman is a useful framework for examining COS panels because of the intensive training and preparation necessary—all back-stage activities—before one can perform their narrative on stage for an actual panel event. Scholars of discourse and communication have had a long-standing interest in issues of narrative and performance.7 Bauman (1975) examined oral narratives in an effort to understand “verbal art as performance, as a species of situated human communication, a way of speaking” (291) and how it is made recognizable to audiences via “culturally conventionalized metacommunication” (295). Bauman discussed a number of other linguistic devices for demarcating certain talk as verbal art such as archaic or esoteric lexical items, figurative language (e.g., metaphor), stylistic devices (e.g., rhyme), and particular patterns of tempo, stress, and pitch, among others. In the context of COS panels, speakers make use of specialized knowledge and linguistic resources in order to frame their telling as something unique and reflective of their identity journey. A further aspect of COS tellings that parallels research on performance is their tendency to be told and retold through different events (such as training sessions, panel events, etc.). Prior work by Sherzer (1983, 1990) has examined the Kuna Indians of South America and the relationship between their telling and retelling of narratives. His findings suggested that close attention to linguistic resources (such as rhetorical strategies and narratives of magical beliefs) revealed how aspects of the Kuna Indian culture were instantiated and valorized by both tellers and narrative audiences. Sherzer’s emphasis on narrative performances within particular communities of practice (see Bucholtz 1999; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992) underscores the significance of how a type of performance (such as the COS) may be situated within a framework of local beliefs and discursive conventions. For COS panels, then, even across multiple (re)tellings, the core narrative is expected to meet specific, local expectations for audiences (cf. DiDomenico 2015). As I will show later, one of the key chal7 It is worth mentioning that Chirrey (2003) has written about the performative dimensions of “coming out.” Furthermore, a sizeable amount of linguistic and anthropological research has investigated the linguistic resources that speakers use to index particular social identities or personae related to one’s sexuality (e.g., Jones 2014; Kitzinger 2005; Land and Kitzinger 2005; Liang 1999; Podesva 2007; Podesva, Roberts, and Campbell-Kibler 2002) and the connection between language and sexuality more broadly (e.g., Bucholtz and Hall 2004; Cameron and Kulick 2003; Jacobs 1996; Kulick 2000; Milani 2017; Queen 2014; Schwieter 2010; Wong 2005; Zimman, Davis, and Raclaw 2014). Although this literature is clearly relevant to the enactment of one’s sexual identity “on stage,” I do not centrally engage with this work here.

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lenges for tellers is to frame their storytellings in a way that is locally recognizable as a COS through the communicative conventions of these communities of practice. 2.2 Talk in Institutional Settings Decades of scholarship in conversation analysis has documented how the mundane practices of social interaction can also be made “professional, task focused, or ‘institutional’” in nature (Heritage and Clayman 2010:2) across diverse settings such as medicine, law, education, and broadcast media. “Institutional interaction,” as it has come to be called, is characterized by a more restricted set of available (and appropriate) lexical forms, social actions, and sequences than those available in ordinary conversation (Drew and Heritage 1992; Heritage 1997).8 Such modifications are important for understanding institutions (and the work done within them) since, for instance, features such as distinctive modes of turn-taking can constrain opportunities for action and the degree to which parties can shape the focal business at hand (Heritage and Clayman 2010). Furthermore, these modifications represent the most general ways in which the character of this type of talk can be seen as uniquely institutional and as a further means by which participants “talk the institution into being” (Heritage 1984:290).9 Drew and Heritage (1992) describe a range of different characteristics which may reflect the institutional character of talk: sequence organization, referring to the social actions interactants build and present to interlocutors, how they are responded to, and how such interchanges are placed in larger courses of action (Sacks 1992; Schegloff 2007); turn-taking organization, the ways that interlocutors coordinate an answer to the question, “Who gets to talk when?” (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974); and issues related to how laypeople and institutional representatives manage asymmetrical rights to specialized knowledge (Drew and Heritage 1992; Heritage and Maynard 2006). The nature of how talk unfolds within institutional settings may also have consequences for how stories are told and the actions they are used to carry out (Mandelbaum

8 As noted by Drew and Heritage (1992) and Schegloff (1987, 1991, 1992), providing a clear definition of the boundaries of institutional talk is far from easy. Consequently, it is important to view this distinction as a participant’s distinction, warranted and discoverable in the way that they display an orientation to the activities they are engaged in together. Also see Drew and Sorjonen 1997. 9 Peräkylä (1995:34) offers her own synopsis of this point: “As a summary, it can be said that in the CA perspective the institutional context of interaction is a joint achievement of the participants; brought about through the details of their talk, on a momentary basis.”

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2003). Previous conversation analytic work has uncovered a wealth of practices associated with conversational storytelling,10 yet it is important to examine how these communicative practices are implemented and, if necessary, regimented to meet the local conventions and contingencies of the institution. As a type of institutional communicative activity, COS panels embody their own normative framework for how interaction (including storytellings) ought to unfold. Each panel is structured around a series of COS tellings which can be related to what Sacks (1992) calls “second stories” (cf. Goodwin 1990; Ryave 1978). One of several key opportunities for collaboration between the storyteller(s) and recipient(s) occurs upon the completion of the storytelling when the recipient(s) may respond with a second story (Sacks 1992, Vol. 1:537, Vol. 2:3– 5).11 These stories, according to Sacks, exhibit understanding of the previous story as opposed to simply claiming understanding as is the case with response tokens or appreciation markers (Sacks 1992, Vol. 2:6–8, 252–253). However, this type of understanding can only be successfully displayed when the second teller presents a properly characterized or “fitted” second story. Arminem (1998, 2004) extended Sacks’s general observation about storytelling practices to the institutional context of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings. Findings revealed that AA members may tell stories in ways that display a “second story” status by being produced in ways that are sequentially fitted to those which preceded it. In this way, eliciting narratives from members at these meetings affords a type of construction of shared experiences. Similarly, Hsieh (2002) examined how members of a transplant support group present and exchange narratives as a way of constructing a shared identity and framework for interpreting illness experiences. With regard to the current chapter, investigating precisely how COS panels are co-constructed may reveal unique institutional practices for how tellings (and the narrated events and identities they implicate) are sequentially positioned relative to one another.

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For instance, previous research has documented how stories are collaboratively produced in multi-party interactions (Goodwin 1984; Lerner 1992; Mandelbaum 1987), how recipients of storytellings enact their recipiency (Goodwin 1986; Schegloff 1982), how recipients may produce responses that align or disalign with the action a storytelling is designed to implement (Duranti and Brenneis 1986; Goodwin 1997; Mandelbaum 1989, 2010), and how such recipient responses may affiliate or disaffiliate with the stance the teller embodies through his/her storytelling (Stivers 2008). See Mandelbaum (1989, 2010, 2013) or Goodwin (1984, 2015) for a review of other opportunities for recipient collaboration (and resistance) during storytellings.

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2.3 Language Socialization As I have discussed so far, the communicative activities surrounding COS panels involve both institutional practices related to their planning and rehearsal as well as more formal performances of narratives. Yet a further aspect of these processes involves how individuals are exposed to and come to learn the normative views, both explicit and implicit, that underlie the culture of COS panels. The language socialization paradigm affords further insight here into how members of a speech community become culturally competent both through language as well as with regard to its use (Ochs 1988; Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986). Despite the notion that “all social interactions are in some sense socializing contexts” (Schieffelin 1990:19), utilizing this type of ethnographically-informed approach to discourse allows one to “understand the significance of behaviors from the point of view of native members of a culture within the context of collectively shared beliefs and values” (Schieffelin 1990:6; cf. Geertz 1973; Hymes 1982; Miller, Fung, and Koven 2007; Schieffelin 1979). Language socialization is particularly useful for understanding the relationship between socialization and narrative (Miller, Koven, and Lin 2012). For instance, in a study exploring children’s strategies of learning the genre of personal storytelling, Miller et al. (2000) found that children strive to learn particular sets of generic constraints that define personal storytelling relative to their community by means of “exposure to explicit meta-linguistic interventions by more experienced narrators” (227). In this case, the children trying to acquire a specific speech genre do so by receiving a type of constructive feedback observed to teach them the boundaries “between what belongs in a story of personal experience and what does not” (227). Hence, in the activity of learning a speech genre, novices can be seen as progressively gaining an understanding of which linguistic features or personal experiences “count” as genre-appropriate. In my own data, a similar process was observed throughout the training as tellers had to learn how to attend to the generic, normative constraints of the COS genre on one hand and their own personal coming-out experiences on the other (cf. DiDomenico 2015). Returning to the context of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Cain’s (1991) ethnographic insights revealed how narrative can serve as a critical resource for creating and maintaining the ethos of AA. Newcomers were observed to both listen to and tell AA-appropriate stories, view their own selves as mediated via the AA “model” and, as a result, embody a range of the propositions and values of AA. Although Cain’s work dealt primarily with the identity work of recovering alcoholics, several parallels can be drawn to the context of COS panels. Prospective panel members must attend training sessions to learn about the shared beliefs

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and values of the speaker panels, learn the core features of the COS genre, and rehearse their tellings with the more experienced panel members.12 Throughout the trainings, then, prospective members can be seen as engaging in an active, effortful socialization process that is achieved through language while also entailing core beliefs about how language is to be appropriately used.13 Most relevant to my analysis in this chapter is that much of the work of institutional socialization is accomplished through the local, discursive constructions of current and prospective panel members. Each of these three areas of discourse and communication scholarship— narrative performance, institutional talk, and language socialization—provides useful analytic resources for understanding COS speaker panels and the communicative activities used to constitute them. While the tellings that comprise each panel event individually constitute a certain type of “performance,” they are also linked together through a larger constellation of practices through which the institutional occasion is enacted. Meanwhile, the norms and conventions regarding each of these constructs are incrementally learned and practiced, processes which language socialization brings to the forefront. More generally, the current chapter presumes narrative to be a fundamental communicative resource for managing meaning and identity in everyday social life (Schiffrin, De Fina, and Nylund 2010). Furthermore, it demonstrates the value of adopting a contextually-informed and interaction-centered approach to narrative practice (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012, 2015; Koven 2015; Wortham 2001) by placing actual communicative conduct at the center of the analytic process. I next proceed to an analysis of the practices that were observed during the trainings, followed by a look at those which constituted the formal panel events.

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13

Similarly, Peebles (2004) discusses the ideological alignment surrounding both individuals who identify as ex-gay and those who identify as ex-ex-gays. Ex-gays are individuals who are led to shun what they understand as “gay practices” in light of their conflicting moral and religious convictions, while ex-ex-gays have managed to reconcile their convictions with participating in gay practices and support such activity. As for the groups analyzed by Cain, identities are maintained through storytelling and regular discussion groups or support meetings. Also see Mertz (2007) for an analysis of language socialization processes in the context of law school.

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Serial Tellings and Social Identities on the “Front Stage”

COS panels typically involve three to four panelists at a public event (e.g., as part of a class, campus meeting, or community event). One of the core features of this institutional activity is structuring the event around a series of tellings.14 After a brief introduction to the panel and the resources available at the campus LGBTQ-related office, the panelists typically introduce themselves or begin the tellings while introducing themselves along the way.15 For each of the cases below, I provide a brief overview of some contextual features of the particular panel before proceeding to an analysis of the phenomena therein. In the first instance, Jen, a female undergraduate student who identities as a lesbian, is concluding her telling (the second on a three-person panel) before another teller, Sara, a female undergraduate student who also identities as a lesbian, continues the series of tellings: Extract 2: (COSP-2:1) 01 JEN: 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 AUD: 14

15

Um I feel like coming out is a process that I’m not (.) done with by any means um::: I’m mostly out (0.3) here, I’m out to most of my religious community? An::::d I th- but I think it will continue um I’m not out to one of my brothers or my sister in law, (0.3) or all of my friends down here. So: I think (0.4) uh::: (0.2) it will get better (0.2) as time goes on, ((Applause))

It is important to note that the tellings included in this section are likely to have been well practiced because of the training they had completed prior to the panel. However, there are exceptions to this principle such as when panelists proceed to tell a new version of their story or one that is geared towards the context in which the panel is scheduled within (e.g., religion courses, gender courses, etc.; see DiDomenico 2015). A disclaimer typically precedes the tellings at each coming out panel. The disclaimer that was read for the trainees went as follows: “The stories you’re going to hear are all terrifically personal and they are unique. No one of us speaks for a group. We can’t. Everybody’s coming out story is slightly different. Some have go through things that nobody else goes through. Some are easier some are harder but they are unique. And in those terms every panel member is speaking from their own perspective so um we won’t- what they see is not necessarily what other people see and it doesn’t need to be. The important thing is this is what the individual had to go through to be able to stand in front of you or sit in front of you or to be able to go out in public to be able to look in the mirror and say this is who I am.”

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Um:::: my name is Sara, I think I am the youngest >person here so my< (0.2) coming out story will not be as exciting um::: (0.3) bu:t I think it pro:bably started (0.4) when I was about six or seven (0.2) when the power rangers came out? I loved the power rangers. (0.2) An::d the pink ranger [(0.3) [((gasps and laughter)) I really liked. ((Laughter)) (…)

In the beginning of this extract, Jen displays a number of features that are recurrent in my corpus of panel performances: she explicitly refers to coming out as “a process” (line 01) and that is ongoing for the speaker (lines 02–09). After a short spurt of applause (line 10), Sara takes the floor to begin the next telling of the panel. She begins by acknowledging her younger age relative to the other panelists, indicating that the narrated events of her telling (or perhaps the telling as a whole) are less “exciting” than that of her peers. Sara moves to then mark the beginning context of the narrative as her childhood (lines 14–15) and what she presumably now views as the first indicator of her same-sex desire (in this case a strong affinity to a female character on a liveaction children’s television show that emerged in the early 1990s; see lines 15– 17). Her characterization of these events and versions of self occasion what appear to be affiliative responses from the audience (lines 18 and 20). This first extract provides a nice introduction to how the panels may typically be conducted as well as some recurrent narrative properties of the tellings themselves. In the next instance (taken after Sara’s telling from the same panel as Extract 2), Tina, a thirty-something university staff member who identifies as a lesbian, is wrapping up her story before handing the narrative floor to Dan, a gay male undergraduate: Extract 3: (COSP-2:2) 01 TIN: 02 03 04 05 06 AUD:

Since then we haven’t talked about it too much. Um:::: the biggest group I’ve come out to is probably this one. Um:: and I’m (0.3) u:h still in the process of coming out too, [((Applause was held until the end of the tellings))]

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07 08 DAN: 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 AUD: 16

[(0.5) I guess it’s my turn. Um:::: u::::h this is my first time so I- I’ma be a little shaky cause my memory’s not that great. But (0.2) I remember being a kid I was just an average gu::y. (0.2) I played a lot of sports, I had a lot of guy friends, girls were icky. I guess that kind of stuck with me. Girls are still icky. ((some laughter)) (…)

]

Prior to line 01, Tina was narrating the difficulties she encountered in her relationship with her mother after coming out to her. She then concludes by aligning with Jen’s displayed stance towards “coming out as a process” (lines 04–05). Following this, Dan takes the floor by explicitly acknowledging the normative turn-taking structure of the panels (“I guess it’s my turn,” line 08), implying the mutually understood speaker order they agreed to beforehand. Like the prior extract, the tellers show an orientation to their relationship as co-members (or their pragmatic import, as in the case of Sara’s remarks). These types of “tying” between stories provide further application of Sacks’s (1992) early work on second stories (see also Arminem 1998, 2004). In the remainder of the extract, Dan goes on to recall his childhood self and positions him as “just an average guy” (lines 11–12, along with subsequent description of markers of adolescent boyhood; also note the playful, joking tone here that resembles that of Sara’s telling). The final extract from the “front stage” of the COS panels illustrates several more discursive features. Lisa, a female undergraduate who identifies as a lesbian, finishes her telling before handing things off to Kory, a male graduate student who identifies as gay. Lisa is just coming to the end of her narration of disclosing her sexuality to her mother when this extract begins: Extract 4: (COSP-3:1) 01 LIS: 02 03 04 05 06 07

An:::d (0.6) we talked more. And she’s slowly coming around. Ya know she always loves me and I know that. (0.2) It’s just that me dating a female it’s just there’s various things she’s worried about, (.) an::d (0.2) hopefully one day she’ll come around, (.) but (.) my friends are

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08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 KOR: 16 17 AUD: 18 KOR: 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 AUD: 26 KOR: 27 AUD:

very accepting. All of ‘em are just like yeah we love you (0.2) no matter what. Ya know it’s fine. And then like (0.2) yeah (.) so um::: (0.4) it’s all going really really well for me. So: (.) it was difficult? At times, (0.2) bu::t (0.2) it all: worked out in the end. But yeah (.) that’s my coming out story, ((Displays a big grin)) Thanks. (.) U::::h ((LAUGHTER)) I feel bad interrupting. These are very interesting stories. U:::h (0.2) hi my name’s Kory, (0.2) And u:::h (.) I guess (.) Lisa representing the freshmen I’m representing the u:h graduating graduate students. this is my tenth year of college [(0.2) ] [((someone whispers “Oh my god”)) ] And I’m finally getting out. ((LAUGHTER))

In line 01, Lisa describes her relationship with her mom post coming out as one that is evolving (“she’s slowly coming around,” lines 01–02) and mentions her concerns regarding her sexuality (lines 04–05). After a brief account of the more positive response from her friends (lines 07–11), she produces what appears to be a global assessment of her current standing in the “process” (“it’s all going really really well for me,” lines 11–12) and providing a summative account of her broader coming out experience (“it was difficult … but it all worked out in the end”). Finally, she displays another recurrent feature of my collection by explicitly framing her telling as representing “my coming out story” (line 14). Kory, in line 15, moves to take the floor by thanking Lisa for sharing her story (line 16). After eliciting some laughter from the audience,16 he provides an account (“I feel bad interrupting”) related to his asking a question about Lisa’s telling near its beginning.17 He then produces a general assessment of 16 17

Kory was the primary “leader” of this panel and his jokes elicited a number of laughs from the audience at the beginning of the panel. As far as I know, there was no explicit rule about not interrupting another member’s telling. Nothing else was said about this particular interruption after the panel.

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the tellings that had taken place so far during the panel. Immediately following, Kory positions his class standing in relation to Lisa’s status as a freshman before eliciting further laughter from the audience about his lengthy career at the college (lines 20–23 and 26–27). Building upon the previous two, this extract illustrates further discursive efforts of the panelists to both linguistically “mark” their narratives as instances of the COS genre as well as link their tellings together, thereby enacting co-membership. The communicative activities that are implemented by co-participants (including the reactions from the audience) serve to construct the panels as particular types of institutional rituals. While tellers’ tendencies to frame their narratives as COS worthy demonstrate a general orientation to the genre itself, the panelists also demonstrate subtle collaboration in the ways that they transition between speakers and sequentially “tie” their stories together as a coherent speech event. I now move on to examine some of the institutional work that takes place back stage before the panels are scheduled and the tellers have even achieved their status as members.

4

The Collaboration and Institutional Socialization of the “Back Stage”

The training that is required before any member can participate on the speaker panels is complex and highly iterative in nature (see DiDomenico 2015). In the process of constructing and revising their stories, trainees are exposed to several rounds of what I will refer to as group tellings. In these activities, trainees proceed through a serial sequence of tellings in which each trainee proceeds to tell their story (in most cases, for the very first time) to the three or four fellow group members. Additionally, each group is joined by a more experienced “expert” panel member who focuses on facilitating the tellings, the feedback from the other trainees, as well as giving their own assessments and suggestions with the intent of improving their narratives. The first extract taken from these sessions demonstrates the delicate nature of the communication that must be managed between these parties, some of whom have greater access to the normative rules and procedures of the organization. This instance takes place near the beginning of a feedback session as Kim, a female lesbian in her early 20s, has just finished telling the first narrative, of what would eventually be a four-telling series, to the trainees in her group. Also present are Andrew, the expert teller, and fellow trainees Joe and Sam. After Kim finished her story, there was a short silence before Andrew took the floor to provide the first set of oral comments (though his initial remarks have been omitted here for the sake of brevity).

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Extract 5 (COSP-3:1) 00 01 AND: 02 03 04 05 KIM: 06 AND: 07 08 09 10 11 KIM: 12 13 AND: 14 15 16 17 18 19 JOE: 20 21 22 AND: 23 24 25 26 27 28 KIM: 29 AND: 30 31 32 33 34 35 KIM: 36 37

(…) I-I think that your story (0.3) hashas a lot o- of humor in it? And I think that you’re a really good storyteller an[d I think] as you [Thanks. ] become more comfortable (0.2) um telling it you’ll get a little bit>and it’s not like it’s audience interaction< because it’s not like you’re bouncing it of- >like you’re [bouncing it off them [Ri:::ght, without them actually saying anything?< and I think that you’re going to do that really well? and I really like that, Um:: I (0.8) def initely liked when you said in your story that “And by the end of the night it was no longer a lie that I had kissed a girl”, YEAH yeah that was a really good line. I liked that ha:heh[eh he::he [um I think you could give a little bit more detail um (0.3) what the girl was like t- the girl you had your first kiss with? Like the one who was (sort of) sitting across the circle from yo[u? [Yea:h [yea[Like give giv:e (0.3) visual detail. Was she blonde brunette, (0.2) what attracted you to her, did she have big boobs did she have a big butt? Like I’m not sure you want to be that graphic or that like (0.3)[>What’s the] word< [Uh huh. ] No but I know what you mean. She was [defini-

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38 SAM: [(°Like° other characteristics)] 39 KIM: She was definitely out and like a 40 power lesbian. ((talk omitted related to clarifying details about the rules of the particular game they had played)) 41 AND: 42 43 KIM: 44 AND: 45 46 47 48 KIM: 49 AND: 50 51 KIM: 52 AND: 53 54 55 KIM: 56 AND: 57 58 59 KIM: 60 AND: 61 62 KIM: 63 AND: 64 KIM: 65 66 KIM:

And um::: (0.2) yeah so so more det[ail like ] [Okay yeah] I can do that. like about what she looks like and also (0.2) wh- what were the initial feelings that really coursed through your bo[dy. [Ye:ah Was it like super exciting, w-was it nervous were you Mhm, Like “Oh shit people are looking at me” Like what are people going to think? Were you like damn I’m so turned o:n, Mh[m, [like things like that. Like to (0.2) to be a little bit more descriptive about what she looked like? Okay. An::d (0.2) how you felt because (0.2) that’s going to be a strong point in the story [Okay.] [ is ] that like first encounter i- is so real and (so forth). Mhm. (3.2) Great. ((spoken softly))

It is worthwhile to first note that this entire segment of talk (including the excluded portions) ran over four minutes in length, making Jay’s feedback the most thorough of any provided for the round of Kim’s telling. At a general level, this could be viewed as him enacting panel membership through not only providing such elaborative commentary but also the manner in which he links together each related action. Beginning in lines 01–04, Jay produces an

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assessment of the humorous nature of her narrative (line 02, “a lot of humor”) in addition to a more global assessment of her competency as a storyteller. Kim thanks him for this positive assessment (presumably related to the latter, more global action), while he sustains the speaking floor by extending his turn to include more detailed feedback (lines 06–14) pertaining to the degree of interactivity embodied in her telling.18 After Jim delivers a further positive assessment (regarding a segment of the story regarding her first kiss with a girl), Joe offers a second positive assessment to align with Jim’s stance (followed by laughter). Concurrent with Joe’s laughter, Jay moves to retain the floor and produces the first suggestion for Kim’s story. As seen in lines 22 and 23, this directive is highly softened by virtue of a number of features of its production (Goodwin 1990): prefacing with the mental verb “I think,” use of qualifications and hedgings (“could,” “a little bit”), as well as a within-turn pause and disfluency (“um”). Following this preface of sorts, the larger suggestion is produced with rising intonation (“… your first kiss with?”), marking it as being tentative in character (Heritage 2012). After a second formulation of this (lines 25–26), the directive receives some uptake from Kim (line 28, “Yeah”). Jay then follows up by elaborating upon his directive by listing a number of physical traits she could include to fulfill such a design choice. After further (minimal) uptake (line 35), Kim displays alignment with the suggestion and (in overlap with collaborative input from Sam in line 38) provides more detail about the female in question (lines 39–40). After a short segment of clarification about the girl from the story, Jay redoes his initial directive (though with fewer markers of indirectness; see lines 41– 42) with a summative account of their preceding discussion (“about what she looks like”). He then further extends his turn by specifying the role of emotion that could be inserted into the story (lines 45–47) while also identifying a range of candidate emotions: excitement (line 49), nervousness and fear (lines 50 and 52–53), and sexual arousal (line 54). Later, in lines 60–62 and built as a continuation of the previous talk (“and”), Jay embeds a further assessment by specifying that the portion about the first kiss is “going to be a strong point in the story.” Taken together, Jay’s feedback is quite complex in that it does the work of complimenting Kim’s progress with her story and overall competency as a storyteller while also embedding a fairly elaborate suggestion to foreground the character of the girl she kissed. Although it is

18

Jim’s comments here are likely related to the numerous moments in Kim’s telling that elicited laughter from her recipients.

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difficult to make a claim about whether or not Jay’s institutional identity as a panel expert is at work here, his final comment isolating this part of the story as a “strong point” displays a specific interpretation of the identity that is being enacted. At the same time, it is worth remembering that the comment as a whole was launched in an indisputably indirect fashion, displaying an attentiveness to the personal nature of the COS (and the tellers’ status as novices). A final extract illustrates another feedback session from the trainings. This segment occurs in a group of three participants: Jim, a female-to-male transgender graduate student in his early 20s; Sid, a gay male undergraduate in his early 20s; and Sandy, a male-to-female community member in her late 40s and expert teller (though Sandy does not speak in this extract). We join them shortly after Sid has finished his telling and other trainees have just complimented him on his telling. Extract 6 (COSP-4:1) 01 JIM: 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 15 SID: 16 17 18 19 20 JIM: 21 SID: 22

Yeah I-I guess the o-only thing that I wondered is if you could (0.5) um:: (0.3) inject a little more (3.0) sense of what l-like what you were feeling? When you were leading up to your decision to come out. Um: (0.2) because like (0.2) I-I understood but I wasn’t really connecting with you. Like when you were talking about (0.2) ya know what happened with your Dad (.) ya kno- I-I had this real sense of connection of like (0.2) ya know (.) WOW that’s really (0.6) ya know harsh. And I didn’t get that same sense of connection when you were talking about (.) um (0.3) trying to (.) sort of trying to (0.4) push everything down with religion I guess. Or like (0.2) ya know I wonder if there was some kind of specific experience you could relate there (0.2) that would reflect how unhappy you wer[e or s]omething. [Yeah.] I definitely can um (0.3) which (0.2) now that I think about it um (0.2) because there’s a difference between a time when you make a realization and when you actually imp[lement this realization [Yea::::h An::d (0.3) for me it was about three months. It was (0.2) the night I graduated was the night I decided you can

72 23 20 JIM: 23 24 25 26 JIM: 27 SID: 28 29 29 JIM: 30 31 32 33 SID: 34 JIM: 35 SID: 36 JIM: 37 SID: (…)

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be yourse[lf. [Yeah, But then that summer I was living with my grandmother, so I was depending on somebody who I knew (0.2) would not ac[cept me.] [Ye:::ah ] yeah. So (0.2) I had to wait to come to college to come out. So that was a decision I had to tell myself. (2.0) B-because I think (.) I think that’s an important thing that a lot of um (0.3) queer identified people in various ways go through is the (0.4) consideration of like (.) is it saf e to tell somebody about this, Yeah Am I gonna be facing physical or emotional violence. Yeah And so I think you could really (0.3) really (0.2) use that. Yeah (.04) Yeah.

The discourse featured here contains several links to the previous example, most notably in terms of the indirectness indicators littered throughout the feedback (including numerous within-turn pauses and hedges). In lines 01– 03, Jim presents his suggestion as something he was “wondering” and uses the qualifier “a little more” to mitigate the suggestion to demonstrate greater attention to the emotion felt by Sid’s narrated self (lines 02–04). Jim initially contrasts the affective character of the segment about Sid’s father (lines 06–09) with the struggles he described with his religion (lines 10–11). Following this, he recommends (“wonders”) the addition of something that demonstrated “how unhappy you were or something.” This formulation, while rather open-ended (“or something”), provides further evidence of how trainees (and members) embed particular interpretations of narratives within their own directives (or other actions) addressed to the teller. In the next segment, Sid acknowledges Jim’s suggestion (“Yeah” in line 15) before displaying his strong affiliation to the idea (“I definitely can” in line 16). He then proceeds to offer an account for his initial narrative design (lines 16– 19, which Jim strongly endorses in line 20) and reiterate his alignment with Sid’s action. After further talk related to Sid’s decision to come out (lines 21– 28) and a lengthy silence (line 29), Jim reclaims the floor and begins his turn with “because,” possibly marking what follows as a further account in support

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of his prior suggestion about Sid’s story. The account is related to the broader relevance and relatability of Sid’s fear to come out, something Jim assesses to be “an important thing” and something Sid “could really really use” in a future telling. This last conversational move by Jim further advances the prospect of modifying this portion of the narrative (which gets some uptake from Sam in line 37). Although Jim’s comments in this extract do not seem to match the epistemic certainty of Jay’s in the first example, a clear orientation to the typical obstacles and concerns of LGBTQ individuals is embodied in Jim’s suggestion. This exemplifies what the staff in each university’s LGBTQ office described as the core function of the COS panels: to educate audiences regarding the issues faced by the LGBTQ community. Furthermore, this case shows how a fellow novice can also participate (along with the expert tellers) in implementing the larger conventions of the COS genre and larger values of the institution itself. From both cases, it can be seen that the individuals collectively enact the “work” of the institution by collaborating on interpretations of narrative performances as well as stances as to how it might be modified to better fit the normative conventions. Meanwhile, participants also show an orientation to the interpersonally delicate nature of asserting a stance towards how one presents a self through narrative. Taken together, these institutional activities (from the back stage and front stage) showcase how the members of the speaker panels continually (re)negotiate selves through communication. Thus, each institutional context provides new opportunities for the performative staging of identity. In the next section of the chapter I discuss several broader implications of the issues raised in this analysis.

5

Extending the Narrative

The institutional communicative practices and stances analyzed in this chapter raise a number of issues related to oral narrative, communication, and language socialization in institutional settings, as well as how identity may be implicated with respect to each. These insights reveal how a range of traditional theoretical distinctions become blurred in and through COS panel activities: between so-called “ordinary” conversation and institutional interaction, between mundane self-presentation and more overt forms of communicative performance, and between socialization into a particular way of speaking and socialization to the enactment of particular categories of social identity. I elaborate on each of these themes below.

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5.1 Forms of Talk-In-Interaction The prior analysis reveals several general features of the types of communicative activities that are typical of the speaker panels as well as how talk shapes institutions more generally. First, it demonstrates how the normative organization of talk-in-interaction can be disciplined to meet particular institutional demands. On the COS panels, storytellings are conducted in “a round” and met with applause upon the completion of each telling. This is distinct from ordinary conversational storytelling in that recipients (in this case, the panel audience) may not provide a full assessment or type-fitted storytelling in second position (Mandelbaum 2013). Second, the group tellings examined here expand upon ordinary opportunities for recipient participation by opening up an opportunity for responses (including assessments, criticisms, etc.) from multiple recipients (and further, the potential to be extended, multi-unit turns). Finally, since positive and negative feedback is encouraged in these group sessions (i.e., the back stage), it is understood among participants that the ordinary preference structures of interaction are suspended for the purposes of improving one’s competency in telling their narrative. 5.2 Personal and Collective Forms of Self-Presentation In terms of the “front-stage” activities of the participants, the panelists collectively enact the broader context through the ways they conduct themselves. Telling the COS narratives in “a round” projects a particular definition upon the setting, one in which the individual experience of coming one becomes a collaborative presentation about what it means to disclose one’s sexual orientation (“come out of the closet”) to another person. Linde’s (2009) conception of “institutional remembering” is relevant here since panel members construct a particular performance of self that is not simply about representing and performing a “narrative self” (Ochs and Capps 1996; cf. De Fina 2015; Dunn 2017). Through their participation in the activities described here, they also enact a collective “remembering” by interactionally reconstituting the panel organization. This raises important theoretical questions about how we understand the role of communication (including oral narrative) in constructing and reconstructing a self (Dunn 2017; Koven 2015; Ochs and Capps 1996). In this case, the self is a type of dialectical compromise between the individual’s personal experiences as an LGBTQ individual and the normative practices for framing “remembering” in an institutionally appropriate way (cf. Linde 2009).

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5.3 Socialization through (and into) Social and Cultural Practices Through the lens of language socialization, it is possible to extract a further layer of texture from the activities analyzed in this chapter. The individuals who are trained to be a part of COS panels are exposed to valued ways of telling narratives, how to engage in related narrative practices with others, and broader functions of COS narratives in society (presumably, with respect to the values and mission of the larger LGBTQ rights movement). Consistent with prior research on narrative socialization (e.g., Miller, Koven, and Lin 2012), much of this process is conducted by modeling enactment of the narrative genre itself (i.e., through listening and responding to other’s narratives as well as telling and retelling their own). This narrative scaffolding of sorts is conducted among peers and experts alike, exposing novices to a larger community of “tellers” who share similar values. In this way, the shared identity of members is associated with “speaking out” by representing a specific set of ideological values about what it means to be a member of this community of practice, and more broadly, an LGBTQ advocate (Bacon 1998). To sum up, the COS panels analyzed in this chapter extend what we know about “habitual or stable practices of narrative identity socialization” (Miller, Koven, and Lin 2012:194).

6

Conclusion

This chapter has focused on putting the close study of communicative conduct at the center of analyzing the intersection of narrative practice, institutions, and LGBTQ identities. In examining the social contexts in which the COS genre is learned, performed, and negotiated, narrative has been shown to be a critical resource for enacting institutions, and further, larger socio-political purposes relevant to LGBTQ advocacy. Each of the back-stage and front-stage communicative activities examined here have illustrated how talk that takes place surrounding what we call “narrative performance” may both shape and reflect the type of story that ends up getting told. Thus, we see, once again, the utility of studying narrative through the situated practices of everyday social life.

7

Appendix A. Transcription Key (Based on Jefferson 2004)

. (0.5) italics :

indicates falling intonation (not necessarily end of sentence) indicates amount of silence, in tenths of seconds indicate a sound that is stressed indicates that the preceding sound is extended or “stretched”

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(hh) ? [] hhh ° =

indicates laughter incorporated into a word indicates rising intonation (not necessarily a question) marks the beginning and ending of overlap marks an audible out breath encloses speech that is produced quietly indicates a cutoff in the course of production indicates no interval between two utterances (“latched” together)

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Appendix B. Tim’s Story

001 TIM: 002 003 004 005 006 007 AUD: 008 TIM: 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 018 019 020 021 022 023 024 025 026 027 028 029

I guess it’s my turn. Um (.2) uh this is my first time so I’m- be a little bit shaky cause my memory is not that great. But I remember being a kid I was just an average guy. I like- I played sports I had a lot of guy friends girls were (icky) um (.) I guess it just kinda stuck with me girls are still ick[y. But ] [((LAU]GHTER)) I don’t ↑know (.2) I just I never felt like (.) like I was unu:sual or anything I just felt like a normal guy (.) havin fun with friends and stuff I h- I had some girlfriends in like high school and stuff but (.) that was only because I was like supposed to have girlfriends I didn’t really like them (all that). So (.3) about like freshmen year in high school I remember uh (.) started havin’ like a crush on a guy I was like “Whoah this is not right” cause I grew up in a very roman catholic military family both my parents are in the air force (.2) and they were like all the time th- they weren’t like completely like Homosexuality is wrong you shouldn’t do that but it’s (.) it was it was obvious in the family just you don’t talk about stuff like that you keep things quiet (.2) and then I realized I started having feelings or some of the guys in my class, and I was like whoah this is not good. (.) that became really hard for me to deal with because (.) I thought at that time that homosexuality is completely wrong, I can’t do that because that makes me a bad person, so I dealt with that for awhile it was harder and harder and eventually I just felt like I was being (.) a liar to everyone. So (.) eventually I broke down and told one of m::y female friends at the time and was like hey. I kinda have a crush on this gu:y and it’s ↑killin me cause (.) I don’t know what to d::o. I’m not

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030 031 032 033 034 035 036 037 038 039 040 041 042 043 044 045 046 047 AUD: 048 TIM: 049 050 051 052 053 AUD: 054 TIM: 055 056 057 058 059 060 061 062 AUD: 063 TIM: 064 065 066 067 AUD: 068 TIM: 069

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supposed to do this. She helped me a lot by telling me it’s okay (.) its (.) it’s not always gonna be guys like girls. So she was the first one who helped me realize it’s not (.) a horrible horrible thing to be gay. And then throughout high scho::ol I started tellin a few more fr- of my friends and stuff an(.) eventually like junior year I decided to come out to my mom I was like ok. most of my friends kno::w I think my mom should know. So I had this huge master plan. Where I get all of my friends they’d come sit with m::e and I’d tell my mom at the same time that way if anything bad happened I had them there to support me. I was like yes this is going to be awesome. So the day ↑arrives and one friend showed up. I was like hhhhh thanks guys that’s a lot of help. And the one friend was one of my ↑best friends, Nathan. And he’s a really awesome guy and stuff but (.) it wasn’t quite the same. So I was like “OK Nathan you stay down here and we go upstairs and tell my mom and then if something bad happens we can run.” [((LAU]GHTER)) [S:::::o ] I went up stairs like “Mom there’s something important I need to tell you. I’m gay.” She was like (1.0) “Kind of surpri::sed but I’m ok with that and I still love you cause you’re my son.” I was like awesome. But then her first question was she’s like so is Peter your boyfrie[nd down stairs? ]. [((LAUGHTER))] >I was like no no no< I was supposed to have friends over and help support and stuff but (.) it didn’t happen °that’s why (quite to plan). The::n (.) after that day I pretty much came out to everyone in my high school. I was like “Yeah, I’m gay, whatever.” They’re like “Rea↑lly? Cause you’re kinda flirtatious with girls all the time.” I’m like “It’s just (.) cause girls are fun to mess with like pullin their hair and stuff and (.) I’ve actually gotten kinda good at like unsnapping their braw real quick.” hhhhhhhhhhhh [hhhh>] [Which] they don’t like it but I think it’s hysterical cause they have to run to the bathroom real quick an- it’s not that I like them it’s just they’re fun to play with. (0.2) [U::m]

bu::t (.) my dad found out like inadvertently (.) cause you know (.) the wonders of the web everyone knows what it’s for.

78 070 071 072 073 074 075 076 077 078 079

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Um he accidentally clicked on a previous website and he’s like h::m. I know Debbie didn’t look for that. So one day he confronted me and he was like were you her::e, I was like “yea::h” and he’s like well I wish you would have told me cause I don’t really care. You’re still my son I love you. So (.) I was really surprised by my parents and their reactions cause they were hardco::re like g::r Roman Catholicism says n::o. And turned out to be really supportive of me which was nice. Since coming here to college, I’ve been openly gay, and okay with it. People have been okay with me. So.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Peggy Miller, Michele Koven, Annelie Ädel, and John Swales for their incredible support and encouragement in the early stages of this research. I am also grateful to the editors of this volume for their thorough feedback. Any remaining errors are my own.

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Schieffelin, Bambi. 1979. “Getting It Together: An Ethnographic Approach to the Study of the Development of Communicative Competence.” In Developmental Pragmatics. Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schiefflin, eds. Pp. 73–108. New York, NY: Academic Press. Schieffelin, Bambi. 1990. The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schieffelin, Bambi, and Elinor Ochs. 1986. Language Socialization across Cultures. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schiffrin, Deborah, Anna De Fina, and Anastasia Nylund (eds.). 2010. Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Schwieter, John W. 2010. “Describing and Perceiving Sexual Orientation Based on Linguistic Cues: At the Crossroads of Bilingualism and Language Acquisition.” In Readings in Language Studies, Vol. 2: Language and Power. John Watze, Miquel Mantero, and Paul Chamness Reece-Miller, eds. Pp. 89–111. New York, NY: International Society for Language Studies, Inc. Sherzer, Joel. 1983. Kuna Ways of Speaking. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sherzer, Joel. 1990. Verbal Art in San Blas: Kuna Culture through Its Discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stivers, Tanya. 2008. “Stance, Alignment, and Affiliation during Storytelling: When Nodding is a Token of Affiliation.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 41(1):31– 57. Wong, Andrew. 2005. “New Directions in the Study of Language and Sexuality.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(2):254–266. Wortham, Stanton. 2001. Narratives in Action: A Strategy for Research and Analysis. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Zimman, Lal. 2009. “‘The Other Kind of Coming Out’: Transgender People and the Coming Out Narrative Genre.” Gender and Language 3(1):53–80. Zimman, Lal, Jenny L. Davis, and Joshua Raclaw (eds.). 2014. Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

part 2 Negotiating Heritage

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Introduction to Part 2 In Part 1, we couldn’t help but see the outside world pushing inward, shaping and constraining even the most intimate, autobiographical narratives. In Part 2, we explore how individual accounts can be viewed as expressions of collective or group identity, reaching outward to the world beyond the self. The authors in this section explore articulations of heritage—ethnic, linguistic, religious, national, and cultural—that emerge as speakers strive to recount their memories of past experiences. In the process, they engage a central concern of research on language ideologies, meaning the perspectives and assumptions that people share about a language and its speakers, as well as how people are socialized into them (see especially Woolard 1998). A strand of research on how language ideologies are implicated in the selfconstruction of nation-states, or ethnic nationalism, could be said to be centrally about narrative in the sense that nations are largely constructed (and maintained) by successfully telling compelling stories about themselves. Benedict Anderson’s (1991[1983]) influential view of the process by which nations imagine themselves as such depends heavily on the success of self-narration: a story that French people, for example, tell other French people about being French, such that both the tellers and the readers sense that they share something they increasingly call Frenchness. Rarely are ethno-national(ist) ideologies told expressly as propaganda or nationalist rhetoric; more often, they appear innocuously in quotidian genres such as the novelistic prose that Anderson examines, jokes and anecdotes, poetry, laments for the departed, or personal experiential narratives. For example, through Avineri’s extended case study, which stretches across multiple interactions, we meet Deborah, whose relationship to the Yiddish language is densely interwoven with her personal relationships, her sense of family, her German and Jewish heritage, and even her body image. Through her examination of the person-centered interviews she conducted with Deborah, Avineri demonstrates how Deborah’s “access to, authenticity in, and ownership of” (Avineri, this volume) her cultural and linguistic heritage as Yiddish, and as a Yiddish speaker, has changed dramatically over the course of her lifetime. She points to the importance of carefully analyzing the production and maintenance of “metalinguistic communities” whose members’ sense of shared belonging is often articulated through accounts of linguistic and cultural loss or rupture. Deborah identifies with Yiddish less as a fluent speaker than as a descendent of Jewish people whose history and cultural traditions she feels a strong desire to connect with and learn about. As Avineri presents Deb-

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orah’s numerous accounts of past experiences and reflections, collected from a series of five interviews conducted in a relatively short period of time and guided by a very general opening provocation, “Tell me about yourself,” we as readers see the emergence of a life history that is fundamentally about language (Avineri, this volume). Concrete and specific memories of home and family life merge with more abstract references to Jewish and ethno-national identity, building towards the personal revelation that Yiddish was the truest and most authentic symbol of her cultural heritage. Additionally, Avineri shows us how Yiddish language learners’ narratives of personal experience and transformation, told in one-on-one interviews, point outward towards values learned from a larger Yiddish metalinguistic community in other interactions. Giaxoglou’s chapter illustrates the relationship between personal experiential narrative, ethno-national identity, and speakers’ ideologies about local traditions in an unexpected way, in this case by analyzing instances in which individuals violate cultural expectations by performing lament poems in the “wrong” time and place. She documents the particular aesthetic patterns and cultural conventions that constrain the circulation of Maniat Greek lament poems, and then offers us an example of a lament reproduced outside of the original contexts of rituals of mourning and moved into the domain of ordinary life. Giaxoglou highlights the particular moments when an individual Maniat woman undergoes a “breakthrough into performance” (Hymes 1975)—by performing something that was supposed to be more emotive and less performance-like in its first iteration as a lament. She conducts a fine-grained ethnopoetic analysis of how genres like “lament poetry” are created, maintained, and differentiated, arguing that these discursive practices contribute to the reproduction of a larger cultural order. Giaxoglou offers us a rare and powerful lens through which to view the historical and cultural significance of these Maniat laments in her discussion of the discovery of a trove of “treasured texts” contained in the belongings of her deceased grandfather. The case contained a collection of transcribed laments from the 1930s, which he had compiled as a philology student during a historical moment when such “vernacular” cultural forms were being collected and co-opted into the project of Greek nation-building. Thus, we see two personal renderings of past laments, one brought into the present through “treasured texts,” and the other recalled through a performance that is framed as “a cultural product that can represent the local worldview of pain” (Giaxoglou, this volume). Giaxoglou’s analysis reaches across social and discursive scales, building a complex portrait of the temporal and cultural context within which individual accounts of grief and pain can be understood, and in turn shows us how these accounts can be read as archetypes of a Maniat worldview that co-evolved with 19th- and 20th-century nation-building projects.

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Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. 1991[1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, UK: Verso. Hymes, Dell. 1975. “Breakthrough into Performance.” In Folklore: Performance and Communication. Dan Ben-Amos and Kenneth S. Goldstein, eds. Pp. 11–74. The Hague: Mouton. Woolard, Kathryn A. 1998. “Introduction: Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry.” In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds. Pp. 3–47. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

chapter 3

The Heritage Narratives of Yiddish Metalinguistic Community Members: Processes of Distancing and Closeness Netta Avineri

I don’t think it’s- it’s not really nostalgia, because I didn’t have it the first time. Deborah, Yiddish learner

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Introduction

This chapter explores the genre of “heritage narratives” among members of the Yiddish metalinguistic community. Drawing upon Jarrett Zigon’s (2008) research on narrative and morality, “heritage narratives” are meaning-making devices that connect aspects of one’s life story to a heritage language. A “metalinguistic community” is a community of positioned social actors engaged in practices that position language as an object (Avineri 2012). The chapter highlights the integral role of individual and collective narratives in building metalinguistic communities, especially as mechanisms for distancing and closeness. Zigon (2008:146) defines narrative as “those stories persons tell one another (or themselves) in order to create and maintain meaning and order in one’s (or a community’s) life.” This chapter’s analysis of Yiddish learners’ and teachers’ person-centered interviews underscores the role of narrative in creating selves and communities (Johnstone 1996, 2001; Ochs and Capps 2001; Pavlenko 2002, 2007; Zigon 2008). Building upon the notions of lingual life histories (Kroskrity 1993), language learning memoirs (Pavlenko 2001), personal language histories (Bilaniuk 2005), and narrative among language learners (Barkhuizen 2015), the research broadens current approaches to heritage languages and place secular engagement with Yiddish into the ongoing conversation about heritage language learners’ investments, motivations, and goals in language learning.

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Different versions of the person-centered interviewing paradigm (Hollan 2001) were employed with nine Yiddish learners and one teacher, aged twentyone to seventy-seven. The person-centered interviewing model provides an open-ended framework that allows individuals to explore their ideologies about their heritage language, in contexts defined by varying degrees of fragmentation, disruption, loss, emotion, and nostalgia. The chapter reveals distinct manifestations of the broader heritage narrative genre among these learners, which include age-specific language ideologies and continuous cycles of intentional choices and unintentional discoveries throughout the socialization process. In addition, it includes an in-depth exploration of Yiddish learner Deborah’s heritage narrative, whose distance from and affiliation with Jewish and Yiddish heritage has shifted throughout her lifetime. Ultimately, the analysis uncovers a genre defined by individuals’ recognition of a mutable access to, authenticity in, and ownership of their heritage. The analysis begins with a discussion of integrative and instrumental motivations (Gardner 2001; Gardner and Lambert 1959, 1972) and investments (Norton Pierce 1995), and augments these with a discussion of affective and intergenerational motivations to learn the language. It then moves to a discussion of age-specific language ideologies held by learners and teachers of various generations, of Yiddish as a hobby, affect-laden symbol, and/or tool. These differences were primarily based on age and generation from immigration/Yiddish proficiency. All the heritage narratives are embodied by revelation and transformation, of intentional choices and unintentional discoveries. The analysis therefore moves to participants’ previous experience, or in many cases lack thereof, with Yiddish language and culture and Yiddish source languages. Many also described the intentional choice(s) they made later in life to (re)connect with Yiddish by taking a course, either through a university program or a community-based organization. They frequently noted the process of unintentional discovery they experienced during the Yiddish courses, in which they learned unexpected information about themselves, their families, and Jewish culture more broadly. Interestingly, very few of them have continued any sustained engagement with the language after taking Yiddish courses. In this way, their involvement with the Yiddish metalinguistic community has been temporally bound. Older adults also noted their difficulties with learning the language later in life, a heritage narrative feature that also emphasizes notions of distance and the inability to capture what has been lost. We then learn a great deal about Deborah, with whom I conducted five personcentered interviews, and her process of experiencing closeness to, and distance from, the heritage language. Some of the primary themes in the chapter are: Yiddish as a connection to familial history/personal heritage, Yiddish as

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intellectual pursuit and community-building activity, and Yiddish and the narrative construction of identity.

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Background and Ethnographic Context

The broader research of which this chapter is a part provides an in-depth ethnographic analysis of contemporary secular engagement with Yiddish language and culture in the United States. The project is based upon nearly three years of fieldwork in Southern California, Northern California, and New York in over 170 language classes, programs, lectures, and cultural events, resulting in more than one hundred hours of video- and audio-recorded interactional and interview data. It also investigates literature, print media, and online sources related to Yiddish in secular milieus. Narratives were primarily collected through person-centered interviews conducted with individuals in a range of contexts in California and New York. One emphasis within a metalinguistic community is nostalgia socialization, a public attention to and affective appreciation of the past to understand one’s place in the present. Nostalgia socialization involves a simultaneous distancing from and closeness to the language, which can be manifested in the phenomenological reality of Yiddish endangerment (Avineri 2014), contested stance practices (public demonstrations of language ideologies that reveal internal and external tensions) (Avineri 2017), and heritage narratives (as discussed in this chapter). For approximately one year, I conducted person-centered ethnographic interviews with ten Yiddish learners and teachers who participated in Yiddish classes within university and/or community-based contexts. The interviewees included one undergraduate student, two graduate students, a middle-aged student, a middle-aged teacher, and five older adult learners. All the interviewees, except for one, identified themselves as culturally and/or religiously Jewish. Those who identify themselves as culturally Jewish see themselves as part of the cultural group of Jews and may engage in Jewish traditions, holidays, and rituals. They also may identify themselves in contrast to those who are more religiously observant. Those who identify themselves as religiously Jewish participate in these as well, and see their daily lives as informed by Jewish texts and traditions.

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Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks

3.1 Language and Community Building upon the notions of speech community (Duranti 1997; Gumperz 1968; Morgan 2006), linguistic community (Silverstein 1998), local community (Grenoble and Whaley 2006), discourse community (Watts 1999), and postvernacularity (Shandler 2008), “metalinguistic community” provides a novel practicebased (Bourdieu 1991[1980]) framework for diverse participants who experience a strong connection to a language and its speakers but may lack familiarity with them due to historical, personal, and/or communal circumstances. The research identifies five dimensions of metalinguistic community: (1) socialization into language ideologies is a priority (in some cases not including socialization into language competence and use), (2) language and culture are conflated, (3) age and corresponding knowledge are salient features, (4) use and discussion of the code are primarily pedagogical, and (5) the code is used in specific interactional and textual contexts (e.g., greeting/closings, assessments, response cries, religious and cultural lexical items, mock language). As discussed in Avineri and Kroskrity (2014), the relationships between language and community within particular contexts can vary greatly, highlighting the role of boundaries, temporality, and social borders in the construction of communities. In heritage and endangered contexts, communities can be fragmented both in reality and in individuals’ and groups’ imaginations. Bamberg, De Fina, and Schiffrin (2007) also highlight the relevance of narrative and identity within a range of sociolinguistic and ethnographic paradigms (e.g., Gumperz 1968, and the traditions of Labov and Hymes discussed in the introduction to this volume). Within the Yiddish metalinguistic community, participants have varying levels of proficiency but all orient to and value the language for diverse sociocultural reasons. In situations of destruction and displacement, metalinguistic communities provide a unique and inclusive environment in which members can demonstrate their collective moral orientation to valuing linguistic and cultural knowledge. The language is frequently constructed as deeply linked to the community’s cultural heritage, whether the individual is proficient in the language or not. Inherent in these practices is an ethno-expansion of the notion of “metalinguistic” to include references not only to linguistic structure and use, but also to experiential connections to a language’s history and that of its speakers (e.g., food, music, dance, and drama). Metalinguistic community practices are therefore identity-building, and nostalgic activities are focused on attempts at affiliation and identification. This phenomenological

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(e.g., Duranti 2009) engagement with the heritage language therefore provides members with opportunities to publicly perform their moral relationships to others in the past and present. 3.2 Social Constructivism and Language Socialization This chapter considers heritage language learning from a social constructivist perspective, drawing upon Hutchins (1995), Lave and Wenger (1991), and Eckert and McConnell-Ginet’s (1992) approaches to learning, distributed knowledge, and communities of practice. This is a view that “sees sociocultural dimensions such as identities, attitudes, and motivation as accomplishments (outcomes) of linguistically encoded acts and stances” (He 2010:72) and examines linguistic structures along with the “evolving norms, expectations, and preferences” associated with their use (He 2010:73). This approach foregrounds the ways that the heritage language and culture are intertwined in formal institutions like classrooms and informal settings like homes and communities. Few studies have provided a “sociocultural picture, life, and habitat of a particular heritage language” (Agnes Weiyun He, personal communication, July 20, 2010). The study builds upon recent scholarship using the language socialization paradigm, focused on “socialization to use language and socialization through the use of language” (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986:163), that examines heritage language contexts (e.g., Friedman 2010; He 2001; Lo 2004; Park 2008). However, as discussed by He (2010:68–70), many studies that examine heritage language learning use methods such as closed- and open-ended questions, grammaticality judgment tasks, self-assessments, and proficiency tests (e.g., Gibbons and Ramirez 2004; Jia 2008; Kondo-Brown 2005). These methods presume straightforward decision-making processes and life trajectories and do not allow for a fuller, broader picture of a language learner’s life experiences. The person-centered interviewing approach employed in this research, on the other hand, encourages individuals to make meaning through an exploration of how aspects of their life stories connect to a heritage language (see Deppermann 2015 for discussion of conceptions of self as tied to social discourse). 3.3 Yiddish as a Heritage Language In an era of increased globalization and migration, “heritage language” populations are growing, and several definitions for “heritage language” and “heritage language learners” have been proposed by scholars over the past few decades. Polinsky and Kagan’s (2007) broad versus narrow definitions provide a useful typology. The broad definition “emphasizes possible links between cultural heritage and linguistic heritage” (Polinsky and Kagan 2007:369), while the narrow definition corresponds to Valdés’s (2000) conception of heritage speakers as

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“individuals raised in homes where a language other than English is spoken and who are to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language” (Polinsky and Kagan 2007:369). As an example of this broad definition of heritage language and complementing the work of other scholars including Valdés (2001), Carreira (2004), and G. Cho, K. Cho, and Tse (1997:106), He (2010:66) writes that “in North America, the term heritage language has been used to refer to an immigrant, indigenous, or ancestral language that a speaker has a personal relevance and desire to (re)connect with (Cummins 2005; Fishman 2001; Wiley 2001).” He’s (2010) definition is especially relevant for individuals of various ages within the Yiddish metalinguistic community. In general, the trend has been that over time Yiddish proficiency in the United States has been decreasing (Benor and Cohen 2009:2). This resonates with Carreira and Kagan’s (2011:42) assertion that “beyond the third generation, few HL learners retain a functional command of their language (Fishman 1991; Silva-Corvalán 2003; Veltman 2000).” Undergraduate and graduate students in university-level Yiddish courses may not have heard Yiddish spoken at home when they were younger, but the language may have a “personal relevance,” and the learners may experience a “desire to (re)connect with” the language because their grandparents spoke it or their family was originally from Eastern Europe. Due to its “endangered”-like status within secular contexts, students have rarely heard the language spoken in their homes or in other settings. But many have heard Yiddish loanwords in English beyond those used in general American English (cf. Benor 2011; Benor and Cohen 2011). Older adults in (for example, evening) Yiddish classes may have heard Yiddish spoken at home when they were children and may therefore fit into more traditional definitions of heritage language learners, discussed below. However, He’s fairly broad definition, in contrast with those focused more explicitly on language proficiency in specific domains, would apply to them as well. Therefore, the broad definition resonates with the experiences of several generations of Yiddish language learners in the contemporary United States. Within the contemporary context, secular engagement with Yiddish takes a number of different forms, the vast majority of which are institution-based as opposed to family- and/or home-based. Language socialization therefore occurs in communities that are constructed by participants later in life, with their local hierarchies, norms, expectations, and practices. First, there are a variety of Yiddish language and culture institutes, most of which are held during the summer and are primarily geared towards graduate students and scholars who need Yiddish for their research projects. Around the country there are also Yiddish classes and clubs for individuals at different life stages and with

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varying levels of previous language knowledge. In addition, there are numerous Jewish cultural organizations focused primarily on Yiddish language and culture that organize cultural events, programs, and festivals for their communities. Most of these groups are primarily conducted not in Yiddish but in English and other languages, with some exceptions. There are also international multi-day festivals focused on Yiddish language, culture, and music. Also, as Shandler (2008:156) discusses, Yiddish is frequently incorporated into what he terms “semiotic souvenirs,” “objects inscribed with Jewish words or even with individual letters of the alefbeys … an important component of traditional Jewish material culture.” There are therefore a variety of ways that members of the secular community engage with Yiddish in the present-day world; these participants have diverse connections to and motivations to participate in the metalinguistic community. 3.4 Language Learning Motivations, Investments, and Ideologies Learners and teachers of diverse generations have multiple motivations for engaging with Yiddish later in life, which are shaped by their language ideologies. Leanne Hinton (2011:309) provides a comprehensive summary of the primary program goals; learner motives; expected future relationship of the learner to the language; possible influence on the language being learned; and considerations for teaching for foreign languages, majority languages, heritage languages, and endangered languages. In this study, the interviewees’ motivations to (re)connect with Yiddish can be categorized broadly into integrative, instrumental, affective, and intergenerational motivations. Gardner and Lambert (1959, 1972) and Gardner’s (2001) research on instrumental and integrative motivations for second language learning focuses on the desire to become part of the target language community (integrative) and the practical reasons for learning a language (instrumental). Norton Pierce (1995) highlights learners’ dynamic investments in language learning, and how those connect with identities and contexts. Affective and intergenerational motivations have been added to this list of motivations because many of the Yiddish learners noted a strong emotional component in their drive to learn the language, in addition to a strong determination to connect with their families and previous (though frequently not future) generations of Jews. For many learners, though not all, these affective and intergenerational motivations intersected. Intergenerational motivation could be primarily seen as a motivation to actually speak with one’s living ancestors who know Yiddish. However, it can also be an imagined intergenerational link, in which participants seek to connect with past, lost generations (whether or not they are those of their own families) through reading texts, watching plays,

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or learning music. Some graduate students, for example, may have an intergenerational motivation but not necessarily an affective one. Dörnyei (2005) and Dörnyei and Ushioda’s (2009) more recent examination of language learning motivations focuses on the L2 Self, including the Ideal L2 Self, Ought to L2 Self, and L2 Learning Experience. Though this framework seems to capture some of the complexity in more traditional L2 learning contexts, it is not as useful for this set of participants since they are members of a metalinguistic community primarily focused on the language as a cultural symbol. The following sections provide some examples of interviewees’ motivations, ideologies, and experiences with the heritage language in their processes of creating meaning. 3.5

Narrative Inquiry, Person-Centered Interviewing, and Heritage Languages Linguistic anthropologists have long been interested in the ways that interviews and their distinctive metacommunicative patterns can complement data collected through other established methods such as participant observation and recordings (cf. Briggs 1986; De Fina and Perrino 2011), as they allow participants to reflect upon and describe their own histories and present. Talmy (2010:128) challenges qualitative applied linguists to engage in “greater reflexivity about the interview methods [they] use in their studies, the status ascribed to interview data, and how those data are analyzed and represented.” Recently, narrative research has highlighted the roles of narrative in identity construction (e.g., Bamberg, De Fina, and Schiffrin 2007; Cohen 2010; De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012; Modan and Shuman 2010; Paltridge and Phakiti 2015); narrative as performance and interactive space (e.g., De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012; Georgakopoulou 2006; Goodwin 2015); and time and space in narrative creation (e.g, De Fina 2003; Perrino 2015). Shaped by the approaches of these scholars and others (e.g., De Fina and Perrino 2011; Kleinman and Kleinman 1991; Levy and Hollan 1998; Wikan 1990; Wortham 2001), I employed different versions of the person-centered interviewing approach (Hollan 2001) to uncover individuals’ diverse and sometimes changing relationships to Yiddish across experiences and contexts. This focus builds upon Kleinman and Kleinman’s (1991:277) emphasis on experience as “the intersubjective medium of social transactions in local moral worlds” and on the layered readings of identity that narrative can provide (Sorsoli 2007). Person-centered interviewing can provide a concrete method to “clarify theoretically and empirically the nature of the relations in various communities— and various kinds of communities—between individual members of the community and their historical and current sociocultural and material contexts” (Levy and Hollan 1998:333).

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The conventional version of person-centered interviewing includes two primary components: (1) a privileging of the interviewee’s experience through an open-ended framework (without, for example, a set of questions the researchers asks every participant), and (2) multiple interviews that allow for participants’ changing reflections over time and space. A condensed version of person-centered interviewing would include the first component but may not include the second due to a variety of factors in ethnographic situations. In this study, I used the condensed version for most participants. I conducted one interview with each of them, at some point during my ethnographic fieldwork. I also had the opportunity to engage in the more conventional and in-depth person-centered interviewing process with one middle-aged heritage learner, Deborah; I conducted five interviews with her over a period of approximately two months. This methodological spectrum allows for a rich, detailed analysis of themes both across multiple participants’ interviews and across multiple interviews for the same participant. Guided by the first component of the person-centered interviewing approach, I began almost all of the interviews with a version of “Tell me about you/yourself/your life.” The participants were therefore able to express their own meanings, perspectives, and understandings about their lives in general and (eventually) their relationships with Yiddish. This approach provided unique and valuable information about motivation to teach and learn the Yiddish language, and complemented other interactional data collected in diverse contexts, thereby providing a broader picture of participants’ lives. As Wikan (1990:17) has noted, “we should follow people across domains to discover what are the meaningful connections they perceive and the distinctions that they draw.” By following people across discursive contexts, one can gain a fuller picture of what participants know, do not know, and are attending to in their interactions with others, which allows for a deeper consideration of intertextuality (see also Bauman 2004) in individuals’ interpretations of meaningful experiences in their lives. The person-centered interviewing approach is by design open-ended. I eventually asked the participants more specific questions that related to my research interests in Yiddish as a heritage language. Furthermore, one must recognize that interviewees are aware to varying degrees of researchers’ interests, foci, life histories, and personal characteristics. In many cases, after encouraging them at the beginning of an interview to respond in an open-ended way I emphasized the fact that they did not have to only focus on Yiddish in their responses, as I anticipated what their expectations might be for the interview. Therefore, their responses (to open-ended and more focused questions) were consistently shaped by an orientation to recipient design, “a multitude

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of respects in which the talk by a party in a conversation is constructed or designed in ways which display an orientation and sensitivity to the particular other(s) who are the co-participants” (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974:272) and a consideration of how their life experiences relate to their perceptions of our academic interests. In this study, the interviews themselves provided a safe interactional space in which metalinguistic community members could explore their connections with their heritage language. They were able to discover if and how aspects of their life stories relate to their engagement with Yiddish, thereby constructing “heritage narratives” they may have never created elsewhere. Person-centered interviewing provided a mode through which individuals could explore the connections between their lived experiences and Yiddish. The method foregrounds the learner’s experience, as opposed to beginning with pre-determined cultural constructs or learner profiles, in an effort to grasp the multi-faceted factors involved in heritage language learning and teaching. This chapter therefore examines the ways that Yiddish may or may not fit into widespread heritage language learning paradigms, through a focus on the variety of personal, emotional, and cultural connections Yiddish learners and teachers have to the language. In this way, it expands the current understandings of heritage language and heritage language learners to include the sometimes disparate personal and cultural meanings attached to learning the language and becoming part of the heritage community.

4

Findings: Age-Specific Experiences and Language Ideologies

The heritage narratives of these Yiddish learners and teachers highlight the ways that age and stage of life is one factor that organizes the Yiddish metalinguistic community. In considering the extent to which learners see their engagement with the language as a mode of integrating into communities, it is important to analyze how much previous experience they had with the Yiddish language. Many of the interviewees highlighted their (lack of) previous experience with both Yiddish language and culture, in addition to Yiddish source languages (including Hebrew and German). In all of the cases analyzed here, learners noted their limited exposure to Yiddish and their subsequent choice to engage with it later in life. Throughout their language learning experiences, students discovered a great deal, which in many cases connected back to situations and contexts they remembered from their pasts. None of these learners had passed or planned to pass the language on to future generations; instead, they primarily saw their engagement with the language as a mode to establish

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an intergenerational link to the past. Learners of all generations held ideologies about the value of the language, something to which they have been continuously socialized during interactions within the Yiddish metalinguistic community. In diverse heritage narratives, it became evident that individuals’ age and relationship to the generation of immigration molded their views about the language and its (at times shifting) role in their lives. 4.1 Older Adult Participants During interviews with older adult learners, many noted their distant, indirect, and frequently receptive exposure to the language in their earlier years, through parents, grandparents, and other relatives. Many of them highlighted their lack of interest in the language and Jewish religion and culture more generally in their youth, and an increased interest in their later years. Interestingly, for some older adults their interest in Yiddish is coupled with a newfound curiosity about Jewishness more generally. This is in contrast to some younger people, who see Yiddish culture as a means of alternative engagement with Jewishness separate from religious life and Jewish establishment institutions. One older adult learner, Mark, emphasized that his parents occasionally used Yiddish with one another and therefore he heard it quite a bit when he was growing up. This was extremely common for many second-generation children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants: The two of them [parents] would on occasion use Yiddish in talking to one another. And not just when they didn’t want the kids to understand … just part of growing up living as first generation as immigrants. They would use that language. And so I used to hear a fair amount of Yiddish it wasn’t talked all the time but I heard a fair amount. I learned Hebrew … so I became pretty fluent in Hebrew and still retain some of that fluency not quite enough. All this- and of course my life continued to be- my language continued to be informed by Yiddish. It’s hard not to I mean as a Jew especially in a big city with a big Jewish population and being active in Jewish thing I kept on getting my language informed in one way or another by Yiddish. And decided I wanted to make a more formal approach to its learning. And so that’s what um caused me last year to make that choice. Mark, December 10, 2010

This learner highlights his previous (primarily receptive and indirect) exposure to Yiddish, in addition to his active use of Hebrew, and then moves to a description of the decision and choice involved in engaging with Yiddish learning later in life.

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Another older adult learner, Ruby, noted that she did not hear very much Yiddish growing up, and that they were not encouraged to learn the language. When she decided to learn Yiddish later in life she also started learning how to read the Hebrew characters, which she had not known how to do previously: My parents were both Jewish but highly assimilated. I heard very little Yiddish growing up. My mother would speak it with her mother but there was no encouragement for us to learn it at all. In my father’s family they did not speak Yiddish, they were Hungarian Jews. There was very little Jewish background in our home … No Hebrew, not a word. Went to Sunday school but it was a joke. No bat mitzvah. Started learning Hebrew when I learned Yiddish. But somehow it clicked I don’t know why. I love writing it I just find it so much fun. I’m getting better. Ruby, January 13, 2011

Here again one can see the very indirect connection this learner had to the Yiddish language, and her later choice to learn it in a more formal setting. For her, Yiddish is something that gives her pleasure and very little stress, and she enjoys the challenge. One ideology about Yiddish that was common among many of the older adult learners was that of Yiddish language as hobby. Below are two examples of these older adult learners’ discussions of their choices to learn Yiddish: I retired in 2000. And one of the things I always wanted to do was to learn Yiddish. I was exposed to it as a child bu- and I find it familiar as I’m learning it that things are kind of falling into place I’m sure better than absolute beginners and my husband speaks German … I get a little outof-class practice. Rita, December 22, 2010

I retired three years ago and was looking around for something to keep my mind active and put some structure in my life. I thought about taking French, Spanish, and then I hit on the idea of Yiddish. Wouldn’t that be fun? So that’s what I did. Esther, December 9, 2010

In both cases, the interviewees note that Yiddish was something they chose to engage with after their retirement. In the first case, the interviewee notes that learning Yiddish was something she “always wanted to do,” demonstrating her sustained affective link with the language. The second interviewee “hit on the

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idea of Yiddish,” expressing her sense of distance from the language and desire to reconnect to it later in life. All the older adult learners noted that Yiddish was a fun, enjoyable way to keep their minds active while learning something to which they felt a mysterious connection. Another older adult, Ruth, sees her engagement with Yiddish as a mode to combat the historical circumstances that have affected the language, relating her experience to that of her parents: My parents traveled on their Yiddish … I don’t want that universality to be lost. Ruth, December 2010

Unlike her parents (only one generation ago), she does not feel that she can use the language in her own travels. By choosing to learn the language she believes she is doing her small part to slow down its demise. For these older adult learners, engaging with Yiddish provides a mode to engage affectively with previous generations and to take an active role in learning about all that the language symbolizes for them both personally and historically. There was a striking meta-age awareness among the older adult learners, which they discussed frequently in relation to their difficulty with learning the language. This focus on the impossibility of learning the language sufficiently is another way that these learners constructed an insurmountable distance from the heritage language. They express a remote regret for a lack of exposure in their youth, and lament that it is now too late to do enough. This also highlights internal hierarchical divisions in the Yiddish metalinguistic community, which hyper-valorizes the language and experience of native speakers. This theme resurfaces in Deborah’s narrative, in which she describes her process of moving up the social hierarchy of the Yiddish metalinguistic community, from going to events to speaking and performing in Yiddish in public to participating in the locally prestigious Leyenkrayz (Yiddish reading circle). In many ways, this phenomenon of older learners disparaging their ability to learn the language could be interpreted as a new version of the critical period hypothesis, in which the older the learners got, the more and more critical they were of their ability to learn languages! More broadly, I believe that this is related to a notion that when something is in danger, members of a community become increasingly “meta” about it. This is what I have found within the Yiddish metalinguistic community (and other “endangered” language communities), in which the more individuals sense that the language is in danger, the more it becomes a topic of conversation. As the older adults increase in age they may feel that they themselves are in “danger,” which is why their age became a

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common topic both among themselves and with me as the interviewer. Focusing on forces beyond one’s control (such as age) is another common trope within these Yiddish heritage narratives. Below are a few examples of these discussions of age as related to language learning. Some of the primary themes are that learning and retaining the language are more difficult because of their age, that learning keeps one young, and that learning the language is much easier for the younger generation. These interviews provide an important complement to other interactional data, in addition to demonstrating dimension (3) of the metalinguistic community model (age and corresponding knowledge are highly salient features). Toward the beginning of an interview with Esther when I asked her if she enjoyed the beginning-level Workmen’s Circle class she was taking, she responded: I really had no Jewish education and I just thought it would be fun, because the language sounded fun to me, to take Yiddish and that’s why I signed up. Oh I love it, we all love it. The problem is that we’re all of a certain age so none of us can remember very much, we learn vocabulary but we can’t retain unfortunately. But we’re getting better and we can speak a little and read little and write a little, so we actually have progressed, we adore our instructor, and none of us are expecting to get Ph.D.’s in the subject of anything, so we just kind of poke along and have a good time of it. We actually have a study group that meets in the summer and we’ll go to each other’s homes and we’ll go through the lesson a little bit, we like it, it’s just fun. We do it for the fun and we enjoy it. Esther, December 9, 2010

Near the end of an interview with Mark, an older adult learner who participated in a Senior Scholars program at a large research university that allowed him to take Yiddish classes there for free, I asked him what he felt he “got out of” and what he thought he was “getting out of” the class. He responded: Well, I feel that I certainly would be better able to interpret, and I mean interpret in a broad sense, interpret any Yiddish expressions which were expressions in anyway in arts, literature and anything, I would be better able to interpret them and put them into necessary framework for their interpretation. I feel I’d be much more faster with that than I was when I started. On the other hand could I seek to have a Yiddish conversation with a person, who really spoke fluent Yiddish and think that I could succeed in that? I don’t think so. I don’t think so. If I were 55 years younger

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when I studied French in college, I studied that for a year, I would probably think I could transfer that knowledge, but it gets tougher—it gets tougher, to transfer that knowledge into being able to carry on a meaningful conversation. Now at my age I feel that, I probably would not be able to make that transfer. Mark, December 10, 2010

In response to my question “Are there other things that you would like me to know about?” toward the end of her interview, Workmen’s Circle student Rita shared the following: I’m not as a old as the older members of the class, but I’m not as young as the younger members of the class, and so I’m part of this huge boomer generation that’s holding on—it’s kind of like we’re in the old age of youth. [Interviewer: That’s a good way of putting it.] And I just think that learning keeps you young. It’s exhilarating to me. Rita, December 22, 2010

And in the interview with Ruby, another Workmen’s Circle student, the trope of age as a barrier to language learning surfaced several times. When I asked her at the beginning of the interview to tell me about her life, she shared elements of her life story and then described her choice to take Yiddish classes after her retirement. She then noted the following: And I—but I have such a hard time retaining the vocabulary, it’s sort of like my brain is Jell-O that’s already set, I’m trying to push in the fruit. Ruby, January 13, 2011

When I asked her later in the interview if she started learning Hebrew characters when she learned Yiddish, she shared her feelings of discouragement in relation to her age: So, I sometimes get a little discouraged and think geez maybe I’m just way too old, but then I think I’m enjoying it and so what—so if I never get proficient the world is not going to come crashing, right. Ruby, January 13, 2011

And toward the end of the interview, she continued discussing the class that she was taking; she and the other women called themselves “third-year beginners” in this class:

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Because we didn’t feel ready to go to the second, we would want to take the first one but it was exactly the same as the one we had, where he has really moved on with us, and so the new people coming in sort of had to catch up which they did very nicely because they are young. They learned as we say they learned in three weeks when it took us a year or more and because—well Rita is in her early 60s I think. And Esty and and I are in our 70s. and I are in our late 70s, we’re both 77. So it’s nice that there is young people that are staying with the class, and we enjoyed that very much, this couple that got married, this younger couple, and then there is a fellow who looks like he is a and he knows Hebrew, so he is in there and Lila Logan she is very nice. So I think Lila is closer to our age maybe. It’s a wonderful group of people, and I really just did enjoy it, as I said, I wish it were more often. Ruby, January 13, 2011

In these interview excerpts, the older adult learners exhibit a heightened awareness of their age in relation to Yiddish language learning ability. In the case of the group of Workmen’s Circle “third-year beginner” women students, however, the community they have created with one another supersedes any difficulties they may have learning the language. This is quite similar to the experiences and choices of Deborah, a middle-aged Yiddish learner whose interviews are discussed in detail later in the chapter. Though some of the younger learners also noted the difficulties they had in learning the language due to a variety of reasons, they did not mention that their age had something to do with it. For example, the undergraduate student Sean noted that “it’s amazing how long it can take to write a single sentence in a foreign language when you are not familiar with it” (December 15, 2010), and Sarah, one of the graduate student learners, noted, “And as I prepare myself to read or listen to things by native speakers, their grammar use is quite intense as native speakers tend to do … And I don’t feel I’m necessarily prepared to take those on” (December 10, 2010). For these younger learners, a meta-age awareness was not present as it was in the older generation; however, they also expressed a distance from the language and a valorization of the language of native speakers. Overall, the older adults’ intensified awareness of their age may be an artifact of their anxieties that they are the older adults but they do not have the knowledge to pass down to generations to come. 4.2 Middle-Aged Participants This expression of affective connections to Yiddish prevalent among older adult learners was also present in interviews with middle-aged teachers and

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learners; however, it was less prevalent among the undergraduate and graduate student interviewees. The following quote from Lauren, a Yiddish teacher, provides examples of these emotional relationships to the language: And it [the intensive Yiddish program] changed my life because for the course of the five days or something so five six days I like rediscovered Yiddish in a very meaningful way and fell in love with it. I fell in love with the literature. Even though I had been exposed to it in different ways all my life, including Yiddish theater and many aspects of Yiddish culturally because my parents- it was my parents’ milieu. I hadn’t really grasped how extraordinarily rich this culture was. And the other- so I got a whole new respect for it as well as a- an awareness of the joy that people get when they start making a little bit of an effort to know more about it … I don’t know if I chose Yiddish as much as it chose me. Lauren, February 18, 2010

This quote from Lauren highlights the processes of choice and discovery involved in engagement with Yiddish. In addition, the issue of agency is especially striking. Using the passive voice, she notes that she “had been exposed” to Yiddish, but then she moves to discuss how important it is for people to make an effort in order to know more about the language. In the second quote, she acknowledges the great power Yiddish has had in drawing her in to learn more. The in-depth discussion of Deborah’s heritage narrative, later in the chapter, also demonstrates a deep affective relationship with the Yiddish language. 4.3 Younger Participants Interestingly, though the younger learners did not discuss affective motivations as much as the older learners did, they did frequently highlight the instrumental aspects of learning the Yiddish language. In this way, they primarily adhered to an ideology of Yiddish as tool. Though they expressed an instrumental motivation for engaging with the language, they also demonstrated an interest in connecting with the past as a way to invigorate one’s personal sense of identity. For example, one of the two graduate student Yiddish learners noted that in order to study Jewish labor unions, learning Yiddish meant that she could “walk the walk,” while the other realized that she “[had] to learn Yiddish” in order to be a Jewish historian: I wasn’t going to be able to poke around without the Yiddish. It just became very clear that I was going to be missing huge pieces of this [Jewish labor union] story without the Yiddish … if you’re gonna talk about

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this all the time you gotta walk the walk and started taking Yiddish with Lauren um did a Yiddish Folks Group fellowship um with some other sorta kids my age—I’m 29—who were interested in Yiddish and wanted to know more about the sort of social cultural world of Yiddish. Lindsay, January 10, 2011

I realized what language were the survivors of the Holocaust speaking and might be narrating their own stories in and it was Yiddish … it was difficult for me to make that transition. Become a Jewish historian and have that background in Eastern Europe. And it makes me a better Jewish historian I think. And I have to learn Yiddish. And so I went that summer to the YIVO program at NYU. And it was my first Yiddish learning experience. And felt completely drowned in Yiddish for that six weeks. It’s intense. So that was how I came to study Yiddish. And I had a colleague in the history department who told me that when I started studying Yiddish it would open up new worlds for me. Sarah, December 10, 2010

In both of these cases, the learners take on a somewhat detached stance from the objects of their study, seeing Yiddish as a means to increased credibility within scholarly circles. However, in both cases, they display an interest in connecting to heritage (either their own or that of another group) through their use of Yiddish in their research. Sarah in particular recognizes Yiddish as the language in which Holocaust survivors would be “narrating their own stories,” which is a motivating factor for choices that eventually make the language a part of her own heritage narrative. Sean, the undergraduate student interviewee, discussed the fact that he had Yiddish-speaking ancestors and in fact a family member who was a famous poet, which provided some motivation for him to learn the language and sheds an interesting light on his status as a “heritage” language learner. He also highlighted his previous exposure to German in high school as a primary motivation for taking Yiddish at the university: Well I’ve taken German in high school, so I know that Yiddish was in large part Germanic in origin. I didn’t know the exact percentages at the time … I figured that Yiddish would actually probably a little bit easier than German … plus you hear Yiddish phrases in Hollywood movies all the time schmuck and whatnot. It’s a great language to curse, so it’s another reason to take Yiddish. Sean, December 15, 2010

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It is unclear why he believed that Yiddish would be easier than German, other than perhaps an implicit assumption that it had fewer formal features or grammar to learn. Also, it is important to note that his previous exposure to Yiddish was not in the home but through English-medium media into which Yiddish was sprinkled. In the case of all three younger learners (and others whom I did not have the opportunity to interview), the class itself was a temporary community, but not one that most of them chose to engage with after the class. Few of them saw this community as one they would seek out after the class was over. Overall, one can notice a common thread among all of the learners of a desire to connect with Yiddish language and heritage, based on intergenerational motivations of some kind. However, there is a generational divide between middle-aged and older adult learners, who primarily had some form of receptive exposure to Yiddish in their younger years and chose to (re)connect with the language later in life due primarily to affective motivations, and younger learners, who had little prior exposure and frequently see Yiddish language learning as a practical element of one’s academic career focused on studying previous Jewish communities.

5

Heritage Narratives and Language Ideologies

Thus far, this chapter has demonstrated some of the ways that “heritage” is itself an ideology to which members may or may not orient, based on their individual experiences, choices, and discoveries over time. Though academics may apply the term to language learning cases like these, some individuals use the term while others do not. For example, in their short bios, some Yiddishkayt Folks-Grupe participants noted the importance of the fellowship in helping them to connect to “their own cultural heritage,” “language that is my heritage,” and “Jewish heritage.” While perhaps some of the learners interviewed here see themselves as having some form of a Yiddish heritage, they also simultaneously feel a great sense of distance from even their own family histories as they relate to the language. This approach-avoidance aspect of the heritage language learning process therefore shapes interactions in the classroom. On the one hand, they feel a great responsibility to learn about their collective past; on the other hand, once they learn more, they realize how much they already do not know. In some cases, this results in a learner’s increased fascination with the language and culture. And in others, a given learner may become disillusioned at how much there is to comprehend, coupled with a constant sense of moral obligation to pass down the language, which may cause them to retreat

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from their “heritage” status. The next section of the chapter provides a holistic picture of one middle-aged learner (Deborah), who was interviewed five times to capture her shifting motivations, ideologies, and actions related to Yiddish over her life cycle.

6

Deborah: A Case Study of a Yiddish Heritage Learner

As a case study for the complex and sometimes shifting connections members of the Yiddish metalinguistic community have to the language, an analysis of five person-centered interviews with Deborah, a Yiddish student in her fifties, is presented here. Deborah’s heritage narrative, describing her personal connection to the language and culture, is complex, multi-faceted, and dynamic. Her relationship with the language and community was informed by experiences both in childhood and adulthood, and deepened over time due to a number of events. In her discussions about her family, cultural and religious background, linguistic background and proficiency, and community belonging (cf. Bamberg, De Fina, and Schiffrin 2007:317), it becomes evident that the language has now become a multi-layered symbol of cultural heritage, community, and acceptance in Deborah’s life. Many of the themes she highlights resonate with those of other interviews discussed earlier in the chapter. In addition to illuminating the interviewee’s life story, the person-centered interviewing process sheds light on me as the interviewer and on the relationship between interviewer and interviewee. My identity as a Yiddish learner and (young) researcher who has been interested in the Los Angeles-based Yiddish community of course had an effect on what Deborah shared and how she shared it. One example of this, which I describe in detail below, is her consistent sensitivity to recipient design during the interviews themselves (see Riessman 2015 and Slembrouck 2015 for discussion of the researcher’s role in narrative construction; see Duranti and Goodwin 1992 for discussion of co-construction and context). Deborah was born in Chicago, grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and has lived in Iowa, North Carolina, and Boston, Massachusetts. She moved to Los Angeles thirty-five years ago to work in the entertainment industry, and has lived here ever since. I conducted five person-centered interviews with Deborah between April and June 2010. Over the course of the interviews we talked about several central issues in her life, including her family, work life, traveling, weight, cultural and religious background, and identity. We had known one another for approximately three years through our involvement in the Los Angeles Yiddish cultural scene, which facilitated an easy interviewing process throughout those months.

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During the person-centered interviewing process, I learned a great deal about Deborah as both an individual and as one instantiation of several cultural constructs. As mentioned above, I had met Deborah within a certain context. But, I did not want that context to define the content or process of the interviews. In utilizing the person-centered approach, I wanted to ensure that Deborah had a genuine opportunity to express and explore the meanings in her own life, in many different contexts and at different times. She therefore discussed many issues that at first may not have seemed relevant or related to my primary research interest of Yiddish as an endangered heritage language. However, what is striking is that through her exploration of these other issues I did in fact learn a great deal about her connection to the Yiddish language and community. I may not have learned much of this had I not used the person-centered interviewing approach, since this allowed her to lead the interactions. For example, I discovered that Deborah’s body image and self-confidence associated with her appearance is in many ways intimately connected to her involvement within the Yiddish-speaking community. As De Fina (2015:352) notes, identity is “literally in the doing, rather than in the thinking.” The narratives Deborah shared highlighted individual and collective identities (De Fina 2015), cultural identities (Koven 2015), and social identities (Van De Mieroop 2015). During the first few interviews I wanted to be sure that she had an opportunity to define the meanings in her own life, and I therefore did not explicitly bring up the topic of Yiddish until the fourth interview. However, as I looked later at the five interviews, I realized that relevant issues began to come up even in the first interview. This chapter highlights the multiple components of Deborah’s connection to Yiddish language, culture, and community through an examination of the following throughout different life stages: family life, cultural and religious background, linguistic background and proficiency, the role of community, and body image. What is especially interesting is that many of these issues are discussed in diverse ways over the course of all of the interviews. Therefore, the discussion of each category will in fact be integrated throughout the various sections. 6.1 Family Life During our first interview, Deborah talked a great deal about her family background, familiarity, childhood, and nostalgia. More specifically, she discussed her father, mother, three brothers, grandmother, and nanny (Nursy). What is especially interesting in this first discussion of her family is the distance she seems to have felt both from Judaism and from the European, Yiddish-speaking culture of her grandmother (who eventually takes on a prevalent character role in Deborah’s life story).

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It was the fifties yknow. It was a very assimilated culture … It was a very Christian town. And um- But my father he had a very strong Jewish identity. But he was a golfer an avid golfer so we didn’t go to synagogue at all. Maybe high holidays when my grandmother was living—my grandmother was an immigrant. And she spoke Yiddish but yknow she died when I was maybe pre-teen. So I have no re- I have no memory of that culture other than the fact that she had an accent and always smelled like onions. Yknow she always was eating these exotic f- herring and onions on glass plates. She kept kosher in our home. She kept her own kosher food. Her food was always shiny yknow it was always slick on the top so I always kinda yknow. So I had three brothers and my mother was a brilliant woman but quit when she got married … April 13, 2010

In the above excerpt, Deborah highlights the broader cultural context in which she grew up, in terms of religion, culture, and time period. This anecdote also involves many senses, including hearing, smell, sight, and touch. It is also interesting to note that she has “no memory of that culture” except for the food that her grandmother ate. These themes of food and lack of memory continue to surface throughout the other interviews as well. The way she describes her grandmother keeping kosher indicates that the rest of her family did not, which is one symbol that demonstrates their level of religiosity. The contrast between her grandmother’s way of life and her family’s also reveals some of the differences between first-generation immigrants’ lives and those of their children and families. Deborah continued to talk about her family, describing in great detail how close she was to one of her brothers (Robert), who passed away at age 53 in 1996. She noted that “we were like identical twins separated by 8 years … if you looked at us from the back we had the same body” (the body being a focus in subsequent interviews as well). She highlighted that he “enabled (her) to have a life” through convincing her father that she should be able to do certain things like take German instead of French in high school or go to parties she would not normally be allowed to go to. Deborah felt extremely lucky to have a brother with whom she had such a close relationship. This also meant that she felt a great and tragic loss when he passed away. I always felt sorry for people that didn’t have a relationship with a brother like that because—it was like throughout my life like when I would screw up like if I screwed up at work … and I just remember I could hardly sleep but I thought well no matter what happens I just have to remember Robert

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loves me yknow. This is the one thing that isn’t going to change no matter how badly I just messed up … This may be very humiliating and embarrassing but I have that person that loves me no matter what and I can count on him and so he was he was really really important to me. April 13, 2010

Deborah then shared the fact that her brother passed away of a brain tumor. She then noted that her husband Murray’s brother also died of a brain tumor and that her husband himself had a brain tumor that he ultimately recovered from. She believes that this shared experience in their pasts was one of the things that brought them together. (She also noted in a later interview that it was interesting that neither of them had been previously married, when they met later in life, and that both of them had taken care of their relatives and in a sense put their lives on hold. This seemed to be another thing that brought them together.) Within this first interview Deborah had an opportunity to talk about her family on her terms, highlighting certain things and eliding others. As I was interested in finding out about how she and Murray met, I asked her about this during our second interview. I had met and interacted with Murray before because he is also part of the Yiddish community. But, I had sometimes wondered if they had met at an event or class or if they had already been together beforehand and then one brought the other to the events. In this way, person-centered interviewing allowed me to gain personal accounts about what had previously been an exclusively public display of their relationship within a certain context, drawing upon Wikan’s (1990) and Briggs’s (1986) emphasis on following people across domains and discursive contexts. Interestingly, her description of how they met also became the first time that she talked in detail about how she had entered the Yiddish cultural community in Los Angeles approximately twelve years ago. We’ve actually probably have been to several events at the same time but we didn’t meet. I know one for sure which was a Yiddish film called The Divan. Did you ever see it? [No.] … They had a fundraiser for her [the filmmaker] and that’s when I met Adam Mosley the first time and Murray was definitely there but I didn’t meet him … I met Lauren Baylor the first year of the Institute the Winter Institute when it was two weeks. It was great the Doubletree in Santa Monica and that was just the greatest. And Leslie—Leslie I still have the phone number Leslie was my teacher. April 27, 2010

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Deborah continues to talk about how she met a “sweet, little” man at the Institute who was once the treasurer of the Los Angeles Yiddish Culture Club. He invited her to come to the Culture Club, and Deborah notes that “it was a little scary yknow going there” since there was a rule about not speaking English. During the second or third year of the Institute, she was asked to be on the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language’s Board of Directors and in the Yiddish play that would be performed at the Institute that year. Judith, a former director of high school theater, was directing the play Mentshn (Men) by Sholem Aleichem. In high school, Deborah had been heavily involved in drama. After studying hard, she could memorize the lines and give the “false impression” that she could speak Yiddish better than she actually could. As a result, Judith invited her to a meeting of the Leyenkrayz (“reading circle”), an exclusive reading group attended by advanced speakers and readers of Yiddish. She noted that in many ways this was “like social promotion,” which highlights internal hierarchical divisions within the community. This ties to the observations of older adult metalinguistic community members, who derided their own language abilities in relation to native speakers and others higher on the internal social ladder. It was at the meetings of the Leyenkrayz that she truly had an opportunity to meet and get to know Murray. Deborah and Murray began talking after the Leyenkrayz meetings and Judith helped them along because he was fairly shy. Deborah describes having wanted Murray to “make his move” for a long time before it actually happened: We were- It was here at the house that we were- and we were doing reading a lot of Yiddish and so and so we were looking up … we were hanging over a Weinreich [a famous Yiddish-English dictionary] yknow naturally and I think I put my hand on his shoulder and it was like yknow just like the slightest contact and he whipped around and kissed me. And it was like woooh Gohhhd because we had been like ohmygod it had been like six weeks maybe of talking and talking and talking and walk me to the car and nothing. I’m going oh god is this guy ever going to make a move?! Yknow so over Weinreich he made his move. April 27, 2010

Here, Deborah shares a “small story” (Georgakopoulou 2007) during the interview that highlights a Yiddish historical figure as centrally relevant to her connection to her (now) husband. Yiddish became a symbol for this new relationship, as demonstrated through the sharing of this narrative during one of the interviews. Deborah also notes that she and Murray have a “point/counterpoint,” for he is Galitsianer (from Austria-Hungary) and she can be considered

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Litvak (from Lithuania or Russia). This distinction has manifested itself historically in different accents, foods, and ways of life. In the present day, this distinction is not as salient, but members of the Yiddish community discuss it when relevant. In relation to the Galitsianer/Litvak distinction for Deborah and Murray, she said, “I think we’re more Litvak … the only place I’ve ever heard is Courland and that’s very Riga [Latvia] … and that’s really the only place that’s been named. I only have one family tree one branch and that’s my mother’s mother.” Here again, Deborah demonstrates a lack of knowledge regarding her cultural background (evidenced in part by her use of the epistemically downgraded “I think”). This partial knowledge about one’s cultural heritage is an ongoing theme throughout Deborah’s interviews, and those of other interviewees. This distance from the experiences of one’s own community is a common trope in these Yiddish heritage narratives. Deborah specifically highlights the fact that their wedding, which occurred somewhat late in both of their lives, was in fact for the Holocaust survivors that are part of the Yiddish community: I don’t know I feel like we had our wedding for- for the survivors. I feel like we had the wedding for Rivke [the then president of the Los Angeles Yiddish Culture Club, a Holocaust survivor]. And we had the wedding so that we could- so that we could have it when we could part of this community. And it would really- the witnessing was really about yknow making this promise in front of this community and choosing this community of Yiddishists [Yiddish activists] and making it yknow it was an incredible Yiddish wedding. The ketubah [marriage contract] was in Yiddish and everything was Yiddish. And it was- it was just uh so so great. April 27, 2010

This community is made up primarily of older adult Holocaust survivors and others originally from Europe. It is quite striking that this community, which served as a witness to her wedding ceremony, is one to which Deborah felt only a marginal connection in her younger years. Furthermore, it is interesting that Deborah consistently interweaves information about her family and her cultural background. Through her description of all that led up to her and Murray getting married, one can get a true sense of her gradual integration within the Los Angeles Yiddish community. Through her “Yiddish marriage” to Murray (using “Yiddish” as an adjective) she was in some sense able to claim a cultural heritage that had seemed foreign and strange to her years before. She recalled in another interview that she had been dating a wonderful non-Jewish guy that she met at Overeaters Anony-

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mous later in life and the negative feelings she had when he would say “Jew.” She didn’t like that he “didn’t give us the ‘ish’” (May 11, 2010). Based upon this, she realized that she was not going to marry him. In this way, one can see that even though Deborah felt some distance from her Jewish background, there were certain instincts she had about the person she wanted to spend her life with (as evidenced by her use of the collective “us” and not simply “me” above). Her narrative practice creates an interweaving of family, cultural heritage, and Yiddish, which is displayed as she recounts the principal reason for becoming connected to Yiddish fourteen years ago: And there was something so magical about the whole Jewish thing was really yknow really powerful. Yknow how I got to the whole Yiddish thing was really when my brother got brain cancer. Because when he died and the year before he died I was so sad that the only thing I could read was Holocaust literature. It was the only thing that was sadder than my life yknow and and and yet it was really kind of the same pain. So I kind of like yknow it’s like s- it’s like um sometimes when I’m really depressed I get my legs waxed because it fucking hurts so much I can’t do it when I’m in a good mood but I’m already in pain. So do whatever do your worst. How much more- how much worse could I feel? … So I just started reading Holocaust—tons of Holocaust biographies and autobiographies and some fiction even and then I started shul [synagogue]-hopping. April 27, 2010

Deborah’s deeply felt tragic loss proves to be the reason for her access to a world that in many respects felt quite new to her. She has built relationships with many of the community members over the years. Over time, this new community has become like a family, supporting her through her wedding, providing opportunities for her to be a support to others, and even noticing when her weight fluctuates. What is interesting is that Deborah provided a different framework for her connection to Yiddish when I asked her during the fourth interview to talk with me about her “relationship with Yiddish.” Following Deborah’s explanations and self-narratives across time and space allowed me to see more complexity and her to revise frameworks of explanation and cause and effect. When I asked her this question, she first talked about her father and grandmother. She recounted, “I remember I think the first Yiddish [I] ever heard was yknow my father saying oy oy shiker iz a goy [oy oy the non-Jew is a drunk], which he used to announce whenever he saw a drunk on the street in Chicago” (May 11, 2010). She then attempts to remember if there was anything else he ever said,

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only recalling a story of his using it as a common language at a hotel during his time in Europe in the 1960’s. But she did not remember any use at home when she was a child. In relation to her grandmother, she said, “I’m sure [she] was fluent … I assume that she was fluent in German too so I don’t really know what her differentiation is and then um so when did I ever hear any? Not much yknow (just words) in English language until I started reading Holocaust literature and started going shul [synagogue]-hopping …” Once she read Holocaust literature in English, she began to be opened up to a world that she could access more directly by learning Yiddish. Her choice to connect with the established Jewish community by going to different synagogues also opened her both to Jewishness more generally and to Yiddish (used by one cantor who had previously been in the Yiddish theater). One can see the uncertainty Deborah expresses about her family’s connection to Yiddish (evidenced through her use of epistemically downgraded items including “I assume” and “I don’t really know”). In many ways, Deborah’s experience is consistent with that found in research focused on “cross-generational language shift within immigrant groups … [which] has been well documented, primarily through the use of large sample surveys and proficiency testing” (Tse 2001:678). Deborah’s distinctive presentations of information related to Yiddish is fascinating, for one can compare her responses to questions focused more explicitly on Yiddish as opposed to those questions related to family more generally, during which the topic of Yiddish emerges more organically. One can therefore appreciate her varied perspectives on the “same” event in an interviewee’s past; the person-centered interviewing process allows for this complexity in an individual’s heritage narrative. 6.2 Cultural and Religious Background As demonstrated in the previous section, Deborah’s descriptions of her grandmother, brother, and husband frequently uncovered a web of information about her cultural heritage and identity. In one interview, for example, she portrayed her grandmother as having blue eyes and having “those real Germanic rolls—strange rolls on top of her head.” Like her use of the word “exotic” when depicting the food her grandmother ate, she here uses the word “strange” to describe the rolls on top of her head (referring to hair buns). Here again, then, one can see the distance Deborah has felt (and may still feel) from her grandmother and the culture that she seems to have embodied. During the fourth interview, Deborah also described the distance she felt from the Jewish religion and culture as she grew up, saying that “she didn’t have a Jewish identity as a kid and not as an adult” (May 11, 2010). This trope

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of distance is consistent with the heritage narratives of other metalinguistic community members, in which they expressed uncertainty and lack of agency during experiences and interactions. As discussed above, she grew up in a Christian town in the 1950s. She primarily had non-Jewish friends. Her negative reactions to Hebrew school and synagogue in many ways embody what the heritage language researcher Lucy Tse (1998a, 1998b) has termed “ethnic ambivalence/evasion (EAE), which occurs primarily in childhood and adolescence, [and] is associated with generally negative feelings toward the ethnic group” (Tse 2000:186). Deborah actively rejected her ethnic/religious heritage, which she discusses in relation to her beginning to take Yiddish classes as an adult: I took a class at U. of J. [University of Judaism, now American Jewish University]. I’m really not sure why but it was very difficult for me ‘cause I didn’t have any Hebrew. And ‘cause I had fought bitterly to avoid going to Hebrew school. I had gotten to- downgrade to just Sabbath school so that I was confirmed at fifteen. That was really a farce. I was very umyknow I was very hostile to the synagogue when I was a teen. Mostly ‘cause I was like the drama major and this was taking away my time from yknow Saturday morning. I never did my homework so I was always in trouble and- and homework always seemed to me to be the same that same- that same chapter the Maccabees … I don’t know it was just so boring I could not bear it. I couldn’t do it. I think that was the first time I thought well maybe I’ll die before tomorrow so why would I why bother yknow. Maybe tomorrow will never come … so I was really hostile to—and that was a conservative synagogue and I was really hostile and I used to hide in the bathroom as we all marched down to services … so I kind of got kicked out. I called them all hypocrites. I had a big scene in the class and stomped out … I don’t know what my problem was except that I was just so alienated and none of my friends really were Jewish. May 11, 2010

She went on to describe that she had spent a lot of time in the church with her nanny Nursy; Deborah wondered why everyone did not just become Unitarians since “everybody hates Jews.” She thought that perhaps she would be okay since she could “pass” and concluded that she truly did not have any “patience for the whole religious issue.” When she discovered the language later in life, she found that this ethnic ambivalence/evasion in her youth made it especially difficult for her to learn the Hebrew characters she would need to read Yiddish. Here again, it is striking to note that Deborah shared informa-

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tion about her previous connection (or lack thereof) to her religious, cultural, and linguistic heritage spontaneously through a discussion of her relationship with Yiddish. It also highlights the complex associations individuals can have with various aspects of their identity and experiences in the past and present. In the second interview, Deborah also describes the fact that in her teens she attempted to reconnect with some aspects of her cultural background, specifically her German heritage. She began to ask her father questions like “Did we have any family in Europe?” and “Did we lose anyone in the Holocaust?” (April 27, 2010). She recalls feeling that World War II and the Holocaust seemed like an extremely long time ago and that she did not understand why her father would still become angry and yell when she would ask these questions. This underscores the notion that there are some stories that cannot be told, in addition to resonating with the experiences of many children of that generation whose family members privileged silence about the events in World War II. He also would not have a German car, which did not make sense to Deborah at the time. Deborah then recalls a period when she “wanted to reclaim [her] German heritage.” Here, she repeats something she mentioned in her first interview when simply describing her grandmother’s appearance, the fact that her grandmother had blue eyes. It was like they are not going to take that away from me. I am German too. My grandmother had blue eyes. We were German first and Jewish second. And just because they say you are Jewish well screw you I am a German I am as much of a German as you are … I was a Yeke I am sure … So I really was a militant Germanophile. And I really thought German was what I- I loved German. I went to all the German movies and German music and German music from the thirties. I was into all this German stuff. And then it’s like- it’s kind of like as soon as I heard Yiddish I went, oh, that’s what I like. It’s not the German—it’s Yiddish. And I kind of realized—and I don’t know whether it’s like—whether I heard my grandmother, because I think a lot of times what people are drawn to are things from their childhood, because they felt safe then. So hearing it or experiencing it now gives you that feeling of safety like that you don’t have anymore when you are an adult … Deborah, April 27, 2010

Throughout this part of the interview and in others, Deborah focuses on her grandmother as a symbol of her cultural heritage but does not actually remember very many specific details about her. Deborah goes on to describe how

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her nephew Joel, the son of her brother Robert, is a “Germanphile,” having married a German girl and living in Germany now. She wonders whether he got this from her or if it was simply “spontaneous Germanation.” She realizes how Yiddish could be a way to connect to her Jewishness without religion, Hebrew, or hypocrisy. Also, in her discussion of her childhood, she notes her feeling of safety due to associations with family, home, and past. She voices the theme of a “naturalized familiarity” (Kroskrity, personal communication, May 4, 2012) with the language; it was (frequently a receptive) part of one’s childhood and therefore indexes a soothing familiarity. In addition, Deborah is uncertain about what exactly drew her to study Yiddish at this stage of her life, though in interviews she describes several motivations. Like the middleaged teacher Lauren, who described that she “was exposed to” Yiddish in her youth, Deborah uses the passive voice to explore “what people are drawn to.” The fact that Yiddish was a background element of Deborah’s childhood but not something she actively engaged in provides the backdrop for her gravitating toward the language later in life and eventually demonstrating a great deal of agency in pursuing it in a vigorous way. However, she also continuously exhibits uncertainty and lack of agency in her descriptions of her engagement with Yiddish, thereby alternating between closeness and distance with her heritage. Deborah’s interest in her past and subsequent revelation that Yiddish and not German was the true symbol of her cultural heritage truly highlight the dynamic and changing meanings language, culture, and family background can have throughout individuals’ lives. The shifting nature of cultural meanings was also highlighted in her second interview (after her description of reading Holocaust literature when her brother passed away), during which Deborah explained her journey of discovery when she went “shul [synagogue]-hopping” later in life. In the fourth interview, she stated her belief that she “decided that [she] wanted to be a Jew” (May 11, 2010). This part of the interview in many ways demonstrates the complex and shifting processes involved in any life decision and the fact that choices do not always proceed in a linear fashion. In her adult life, Deborah realized that she “wanted to be one more Jew, not one less Jew” (April 27, 2010), a trope that she repeated multiple times in multiple interviews. She felt that she had “such a crappy Jewish upbringing other than the fact that we were taught we were better than everybody else.” She finally realized that she was “already like one less Jew” and that she had done this all by herself; she then decided that she would do something about this. While trying out different synagogues, she was exposed to a specific cantor who had previously been in the Yiddish theater. She finally realized that

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really kind of the Yiddish part was really much more and that I could be I could be a secular Jew, that this was a whole rich culture that I could worship instead of having to worship Yahweh or something. And it made me feel- it gave me my Jewish identity … I could be a- and so it was kind of eye-opening. April 27, 2010

In recognizing that she could be simultaneously a Jew and a Communist, a labor activist, a Feminist, and anything else she wanted to be in addition to being Jewish, she had an epiphany about her Jewish identity. She finally began to embrace and relate to her Jewish cultural heritage, and this was directly related to her newfound ability to not be religious but secular. The Yiddish language and community provided a cultural context in which she could feel completely comfortable. Lastly, in her discussion of the languages she has learned (discussed in further detail in the section below), Deborah foregrounded the complex family dynamic regarding immigration and assimilation. She describes having grown up speaking English and remembering that her mother always said, “Don’t be a greenhorn” (May 11, 2010). Her mother’s use of “greenhorn,” a somewhat derogatory term for a (not only Jewish) newly arrived immigrant, demonstrates her interest in shedding any elements of an immigrant identity and making sure her children assimilated quickly into the dominant culture. Deborah also recalls her father being part of several Jewish businessmen clubs and the fact that “we definitely only ran in Jewish circles.” Though she discusses the fact that two of her brothers marrying non-Jews was from her father’s perspective a “terrible, terrible tragedy,” she also remembers that it was not that important if her friends were Jewish. In addition, she recalled in another interview that “being in synagogue made her mom want to jump out of her skin” (April 27, 2010). These varied comments demonstrate a complex ideological picture as she grew up based on her parents’ different ideas of immigration, culture, identity, and Judaism, which in turn affected both Deborah’s cultural identity and her eventual connection to Yiddish language and community. 6.3 Linguistic Background and Proficiency Another significant component of Deborah’s life is her linguistic background and proficiency. Her discussion of the languages she has learned and her abilities in them consistently surfaced in multiple interviews. In the second interview, she said that she has “never been good at languages” (April 27, 2010), and in the fourth interview she noted that she was “not a disciplined student” (May 11, 2010). However, it is striking to note how she ended up in the

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Leyenkrayz with elevated social status. In another interview, she highlighted her “big syntax problems” and the fact that she was still unable to get “the grammatical picture.” In another part of the interview, she also described that it was scary at first to go to the Culture Club meetings since there was the rule about not speaking English. She felt that she was “at a distinct disadvantage.” She specifically discussed having not really learned Hebrew in school, beginning to learn French, dropping it and then returning to it after flunking German, and choosing a Bachelor of Science degree in college primarily so that she would not have to take more language classes. She also described her lack of certain abilities in Yiddish: I still I still have comprehension issues because yknow even though I have a- have a fairly large vocabulary I really have a- I just have never had the breakthrough of um I don’t know reading the sentence and getting the meaning besides translating the words … there’s some breakthrough. I’veI’ve never been good at languages. I flunked German in high school and that’s pretty much tells the tale … I never took Hebrew so between the two flunking German and never studying Hebrew I don’t know why I think I’m- but I love yknow I love it [Yiddish]. April 27, 2010

Deborah’s consistent downplaying of her linguistic abilities was in strong contrast to her choice to learn and continue learning Yiddish in her adult life. Deborah attempts to make sense of her choosing to learn a language later in life when she had so many difficulties learning languages (and in fact avoided them) when she was younger: The fact that I wanted to learn Yiddish is really the folly of- yknow ‘cause I had no aptitude for learning a language … and when I translate into Yiddish I translate English into Yiddish yknow. I tend towards Yiddish word order- English word order … even to even to stubbornly wanting to translate English idioms because I’m s- I’m speaking Yiddish to Englishspeaking people so they would understand what I mean yknow. I certainly don’t know the Polish expressions for these things. May 11, 2010

Deborah demonstrated the ways that her proficiency in English and her lack of proficiency in both German and Hebrew have all served as obstacles during her process of learning Yiddish. In the fourth interview, she also discussed the lack of a strong education in English grammar when she was growing up. She

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highlighted the struggle associated with learning a language later in life when one does not have the opportunity to hear it spoken very often. What is especially significant is that despite these difficulties, Deborah has continued to be committed to learning Yiddish. She learned in multiple classes, traveled to summer Yiddish institutes and festivals, and practiced every other week during the Leyenkrayz. This demonstrates integrativeness in language learning, which Gardner (2001:5) defines as “a genuine interest in learning the second language to come closer to the other language community.” Deborah consistently highlighted her desire to be part of the Los Angeles Yiddishspeaking community. Community belonging became the driving force behind her motivation to continue learning the language, which superseded any prior difficulties she had with language learning in general. 6.4 The Role of Community Based upon the information she shared throughout the interviews, it seems that Deborah’s attraction to, connection with, and increased involvement in the Yiddish-speaking community was a result of several events and experiences throughout her life. As discussed above, she believes her desire to engage in the Yiddish community may have begun in her childhood, to reconnect with feelings of familiarity and safety. This echoes the sentiment she expressed in relation to traveling, for she highlighted then that she frequently travels to places she has been before because “it’s all so new I needed a little familiarity.” The safety she feels when within the Yiddish-speaking community was also foregrounded when, after describing her “Yiddish wedding,” she talked about how difficult it will be to “lose this generation” of Yiddish speakers. It’s really it’s really going to be hard to lose this generation. Yknow I mean I grew up in nursing homes ‘cause my Nursy when I was five and started going to school she got a job supervisor of- of a nursing home so whenever my parents were a- on vacation or out of town I would always skip school and go with Nursy to the nursing home. And feed the old ladies and be thhang out so I loved- I kinda grew up around old people. And I think that that also makes me really comfortable at the Culture Club yknow it made me feel just like that childhood thing. It was kind of like where where I was where I started … so it was kind of a nice thing. And I just hate that yknow you’re supposed to have younger friends so that they outlive you yknow and when you have older friends you just have to keep saying goodbye. It’s- it’s going to very hard. April 27, 2010

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Deborah realizes the complex connections she feels to the members of the Yiddish-speaking community due to her own childhood experiences and wonders “what Yiddish will be like when there are no native speakers.” She does, however, contrast her own experience with Yiddish with Murray’s, saying that “for him it’s also reassuring because it’s the sounds of his parents … I can go there and then I can leave. For him it’s still in his head.” Frequently, she also described in detail her emotional connections to various individuals throughout her life. This too is related in many ways to her experiences now within the Yiddish community. As described above, Deborah felt an intense love for her brother Robert, which after his death ultimately led to her discovering Yiddish. In her discussions of her childhood, she also described the fact that people who loved her, including her parents, brothers, grandmother, and Nursy, constantly surrounded her. She highlighted the fact that Nursy’s caring treatment of, and dedication to, Deborah’s family meant that she would be taken care of from then on: So in my father’s eyes this was all it took … once you served the family it’s like yknow now you are taken care of … now sh- you have proven your value. You have- you have you’ve proven your loyalty. You were there when- and now she’s got it made. Nothing was ever- she would never- she would always have a home. She was in. And I adored her and she adored me. April 13, 2010

The centrality of undying support and love seems to be a defining feature of her role within the Yiddish community as well. It also ties to issues of emotion and affective motivations shared by other metalinguistic community members. In fact, when I described to Deborah some of the themes I was thinking about including in my writing, I mentioned her desire to be a support to others. She confirmed this assessment, stating that she has always wanted to be a support to Yiddish and not just a lover of it, to keep it from dying out. In addition, Deborah experiences a connection to the community because she has the opportunity “to feel young again,” which she also discussed during the fourth interview: And maybe it was that chance to feel young again, because they are so old, I get to be the kid, which is not the norm. Part of the appeal also was that I really wanted to know this generation. I mean I think that having lost my parents made me attracted to them- to that generation … and um maybe it was that chance to feel young again ‘cause they’re soo old. I get

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to be- I get to be the kid which is not yknow the norm … honor them and hear their voices. And it’s just really heartbreaking … May 11, 2010

This desire to feel young may also be related to the issues discussed below, focused on body image and confidence. In fact, her desire to return to childhood comes out in many excerpts. Within a community made up primarily of older adults, Deborah has the opportunity to be recognized for her youth and beauty in ways that may not be possible in other contexts. In fact, during the fifth interview, she discusses feeling invisible in the broader community when she is heavier. The Yiddish community therefore provides a context of acceptance and love for Deborah in her adult life. Lastly, Deborah also recognized her need for a smaller community within the broader context of Los Angeles, which could provide her with a forum for solidarity. I think yknow we’re all it’s this huge community and we need sub-groups. And so I really- I think maybe as um I don’t know television it’s not really my sub-group yknow there’s no culture. It’s only just work. Outside of work I would only participate if I were like in the rat race of like trying to I don’t know the Hollywood rat race which has never appealed to me. So I really feel that this is that- that cultural group that I- that I need to- to uh keep me give me- give me the illusion that I’m living in a smaller community than I am. And- And Murray was a really big part of that … He- he was very nost- he missed Yiddish. His parents were gone. He missed not hearing it and not being able to speak it. May 11, 2010

Here, it is interesting to note that Deborah generalizes to a broader statement about community, whereas frequently other statements were more focused on her specific experience. She is also able to recognize the deep personal relationship Murray has with the language, culture, and people, which also helps to keep her connected to the community. Like for other interviewees, Yiddish becomes a symbol of individual and community solidarity (see Koven 2015). 6.5 Body Image Another component of Deborah’s narrative that relates to acceptance in the Yiddish community is her weight and body image, which has been a dominant force throughout her life. This is a clear example of what one can gain by using a social constructivist approach that examines different episodes across the

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lifespan and the emergence of identity across contexts (see also Heavey 2015 on embodied narratives). The body is one, if not the only, source of continuity in one’s life and provides a clear connection to past moments. At the beginning of our fifth and last interview, I asked her if there was anything she would like to talk about that she had not yet had a chance to discuss. Her response was: I think the one thing I haven’t talked about the most is my weight because it’s played such a huge part of it’s it’s like the glu- the lens that I s- that I’ve seen the whole world through yknow. June 1, 2010

She went on to describe how Nursy would take her to have dinner in the afternoons after school before she would have dinner at home with her family and would also hide food for her in secret hiding places. She saw this as the beginning of her difficult relationship with food: That was just the beginning of really bad patterns of disassociating hunger with eating. And eating for pleasure eating for power and eating for yknow secret- that secret fun and um- having some control over something in a household where I had no control. Being the youngest, fought with the anger- angry father … over-controlling everything. So I kinda see the roots of it yknow it’s a long time ago. June 1, 2010

She also discusses her friendships with other overweight women and the numerous diets she has been on that have worked at first but ultimately failed. For example, in discussing her weight in relation to her wedding, also during the fifth interview, Deborah regretfully expresses the fact that she “didn’t want to be a fat bride but [she] was.” Her problematic relationship with her weight throughout her life proved to be an issue that weaved in and out of her explicit discussions of other issues. She also brought up topics related to selfconfidence during her high school years, describing in detail a very close relationship she had with a theater teacher. She described it as “only good—only good for me … [he] probably did give me more self-esteem.” This dependence on others for confidence seems to have been a common theme for Deborah as she struggled with her weight in those years as well. Another remarkable fact is that the theme of weight frequently arose during her discussions of Yiddish. For example, the fact that her wedding was in front of the group of survivors meant that they could see her increased weight

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on that day. In addition, during the fourth interview, as she described going to the two-week Yiddish Institute, she highlighted a monumental breakthrough related to her weight: The thing that happened to me at that- at the Institute that year was- it was soo luxurious. Every cla- every session they would deliver pitchers of ice water and crystal and these goblets yknow restaurant goblets. It was so nice that I drank all this water and I kinda kicked diet soda. And I kinda started this whole this- this one of my last successful diets which was successful up to about four years ago. So it was about a five year successful yknow. And that was a- a beginning of a huge change. Just everything changed. I mean I lost I lost a hundred and seventy pounds, of which I gained back like a hundred and fifty or a hundred and forty. And I’ve done that so many times this was just the last time. This was just the most I’d ever lost … and my friend used to joke and the more Yiddish I knew the more weight I lost yknow it was like a direct proportion. May 11, 2010

This extremely close correlation between Deborah’s body image and her relationship with Yiddish is striking for several reasons. One striking issue is that here Deborah shares her friend’s reported speech about her own body, when she says, “my friend used to joke and the more Yiddish I knew the more weight I lost.” One’s success in losing weight is not generally connected to one’s language learning success. However, as Hollan (2001) has noted, person-centered ethnography should be attentive to what people say, what people do, and what people embody. One’s physical appearance truly shapes one’s subjectivities; therefore, it is critical to examine this coupled with understandings of other aspects of individuals’ identities. Current conceptualizations of heritage language learning do not include issues such as body image as possible motivating factors. A person-centered approach, however, allows the researcher to gain insight into the connections individuals may make between seemingly disparate aspects of their lives. Deborah also introduced her weight in relation to performing in the play Mentshn soon after entering the Yiddish community: I think because I did the play and of course I got to memorize the lines. And I was I was at my low weight … always taking my temperature my weight temperature. I was at my low weight then very glamorous and people thought I could speak Yiddish kind of better than I could ‘cause I was obviously fluent ‘cause I was acting in Yiddish. April 27, 2010

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In other interviews Deborah described always being comfortable in “a support role,” seen below in her description of her relationship with her high school sweetheart. These two senses of “role,” one on stage and one in life (cf. Goffman 1959), reveal a performative aspect to her preferred position in communities. It is therefore somewhat striking that in the Yiddish play she chose to be one of the performers in front of a large group. When I was going with him it wasn’t so much that I was going to be an actress. I was kind of training to be an actor’s wife … I would be the hostess of the salon and he could be the actor. And I think that’s really kind of that’s the fifties. My fifties upbringing made me want—most comfortable in the support role. Not not the leadership role. I’m really not comfortable in the leadership role I just wanna be like the woman behind the man or behind Rivke or yknow somebody … or Lauren … I like to help and I like to be the strong back and make it all possible but to be the face of the yknow … I think that’s just a leftover of growing up in the fifties … I was audio yknow audio is like support to the video it’s not the star of the television show. April 27, 2010

Here again, theatrical and media roles connect to her conceptions of her character in life, and how they relate to the social structure and hierarchies of those around her. It seems that her comfort in front of this group was due at least in part to her confidence in her appearance at that time. This confidence in both her appearance and her Yiddish ultimately led to her being asked to be in the Leyenkrayz, which she described (as noted above) as “social promotion.” It seems that Deborah perceives an intimate connection between her weight and her relationship with the Yiddish-speaking community. She therefore felt some shame and embarrassment when she had gained most of the weight back before she got married. 6.6 Deborah’s Yiddish Heritage Narrative Over the course of the five interviews with Deborah, I learned a great deal about her life story and the intricate meanings she attaches to various experiences, individuals, and communities. We had an opportunity to talk about her family, school, work, gender, romantic relationships, cultural and linguistic heritage, and several other issues. Deborah described different life stages (including childhood, teen years, and adulthood) and her shifting identity and understandings of herself over the course of those years. For example, she recognizes that she may be attracted to the Yiddish community because it reminds

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of her childhood in various ways and therefore makes her feel safe. Deborah is surrounded by a community that she takes care of and that takes care of her. She also met her husband within this context, which provides an even deeper emotional connection to it. Her discussion of these experiences demonstrates the non-linear and complex conceptualizations one may have of one’s life in relation to a heritage language. In addition, during the interview process itself, one can notice the subtle ways that Deborah perceived my knowledge base and me (see Riessman 2015 and Slembrouck 2015). For example, she frequently used recognitional person reference forms (Enfield and Stivers 2007; Sacks and Schegloff 1979) such as Adam Mosley (the director of a Yiddish cultural organization in Los Angeles), Marion Herbst (a Yiddish teacher and book author), and Molly Picon (a famous Yiddish woman actor). She could also discuss specific aspects of the Jewish and Yiddish community, such as the Galitsianer/Litvak distinction, without needing to explain what this meant. In this way, she was consistently sensitive to recipient design. Her ability to recognize what I, as a fellow member of the Yiddish metalinguistic community, might already know evidenced her subjective understanding of my knowledge base and thus what we might have in common, which shaped the interview process in other ways as well. It will also be interesting to see how our friendship may or may not shift after the interviews. When I went to dinner with her, Murray, and some others after a Sunday afternoon Yiddish cultural event, she began to tell me a personal story and said, “I don’t know why I feel like I want to tell you more personal stories.” I can therefore see how our relationship has shifted and deepened in many ways over the course of the project. Lastly, Deborah’s set of person-centered interviews demonstrates how seemingly disparate experiences can have ripple effects in a variety of domains over the course of one’s life. By allowing Deborah to determine her own interpretations of life events, one can see which issues arose multiple times and how they were each framed. For example, frequently the same issues came up, but in different ways depending on the original question and where the interview was headed at that point. Deeper analysis was available through comparison of narratives across interview episodes.

7

Yiddish Heritage Narratives as a Genre of Distance and Closeness

The person-centered interviewing methodological spectrum highlighted in this chapter sheds light on the complexity of individuals’ lives and identities as they relate to heritage languages (see Koven 2015), and has provided a

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novel framework for conceptualizing heritage language and heritage language learner. As Carreira (2004:8) notes, “[T]he foundations of language teaching and learning must rest on the learner’s personal connections to the HL.” In the case of Deborah and other learners, it becomes evident that there is a complex web of interconnected reasons that might explain one’s connection to the Yiddish metalinguistic community, available through comparison of narratives across interviews and interview episodes. However, surveys or other instruments would not necessarily capture this complexity. The themes that Deborah discussed, including her family, cultural, and religious background; linguistic background and proficiency; and community also resonate with many of those discussed by other interviewees. For example, many of the learners see their engagement with the language as a mode to connect to their own personal heritage and previous generations of Jews more generally. Though Deborah is somewhat unique in her high level of involvement within the Los Angeles Yiddish cultural communities, some of the other interviewees also noted how they have become members of new, accepting communities through their engagement with Yiddish. For example, many of the older adult “third-year beginner” learners who take an evening class at the Workmen’s Circle have become very close friends; they all look forward every week to a post-class cup of soup at a local restaurant. In addition, like Deborah, some of the learners see their interest in Yiddish as an alternative to more religious or synagogue-oriented forms of Jewish engagement. As Sapir (1932:515) emphasizes, “[T]he true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific individuals and, on the subjective side, in the world of meanings which each one of these individuals may unconsciously abstract for himself from his participation in these interactions.” The present analysis demonstrates how much there is to discover when we as researchers venture beyond a simple notion of a heritage language as a “language and culture of ancestry” (Carreira 2004:8). In so doing, we can provide the analytical room for a genre that highlights the constantly changing relationships these individuals have to their heritage language. While these individuals simultaneously experience a sense of distance and closeness to Yiddish through intentional choices and unintentional discoveries, they also recognize that factors outside of their control have greatly affected their access to, authenticity in, and ownership of their heritage. Overall, heritage narratives provide a mode through which participants can create meaningful connections to the heritage language. Examining distinct expressions of the broader heritage narrative genre therefore uncovers these individuals’ intersubjectivity and agency across both time and diverse contexts.

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chapter 4

Trajectories of Treasured Texts: Laments as Narratives Korina Giaxoglou

The present chapter examines lament as a lens onto the intersections between narrative, affect, and culture. Laments form an integral part of mourning rituals, and they are also attested in a range of ordinary contexts associated with work and leisure (Seremetakis 1991) or with the recounting of painful life experiences, more broadly (Amy de la Bretèque 2013). So far, however, little attention has been paid to the discursive forms and norms that make laments amenable to new contexts beyond rituals of mourning. This study seeks to fill this gap by proposing an approach to laments as narrative practices embedded in other social and cultural practices (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012, 2015). This approach is illustrated in the case of a lament performance in the context of ethnographic fieldwork in Inner Mani (South Peloponnese, Greece) and supplemented by relevant findings from the analysis of a corpus of “treasured” lament fragments, included in an unpublished manuscript collection of laments from the 1930s. The analysis reveals regularized patterning in the lament performance at different levels—the acoustic, ethnopoetic, and narrative—and points to the conventionalized use of discourse devices for creating intertextual chains of stances, performances, and texts. Importantly, this multi-level patterning reveals the different social practices in which lament performances are embedded, indexing contexts of telling as well as cueing the degree of affective and temporal distance from the recounted events. Regularized patterning and its associated discourse devices are described, here, as markers of entextualization, i.e., as traces of trajectories of lament, revealing their differential telling and the affective positions they make available to (co)tellers and audiences. The proposed approach to laments invites a crosscontext and multi-level analysis of verbal art performances and texts as narrative practices connecting past, present, and future affectively. It contributes to the understanding of discourse processes of sharing affect and culture through narrative practices.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004393936_008

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Opening: Narratives of Treasure Treasures are, by definition, traces of the past in the present; they are ‘condensations’ of history […]. Until discovered, hidden treasures are like unopened time capsules, putative pieces of the past which have not yet gained the status of data or fact. Stewart 2003:487

The starting point for this study was the recovery of a family “treasure”: back in 1999, my mother insisted on recovering a suitcase from the basement of her parental home. The suitcase contained items that had belonged to her father, who had passed away some fifty years earlier, back in 1949. His widow had safeguarded all his personal belongings and valuables, the remains of his life, until her death in 1999. Yagos Strilakos was born in Yerolimenas—a remote coastal settlement situated at the southern end of the Mani peninsula in Peloponnese in Greece. He studied Greek Philology at the University of Athens before moving to Sparta (South Peloponnese, Greece) to hold a series of posts in secondary education establishments in the area. He had lived through the bloodshed of the Second World War (1940–1944) and the civil strife between leftists and rightists that punctuated the war in Greece (1940–1944 and 1944–1949). Having experienced years of persecutions, arrests, and dismissals on the grounds of his leftist political leanings, he eventually fled Sparta for Athens, the urban center of Greece, leaving his wife and three young children behind. Shortly afterwards, he died of typhoid in Athens. My mother’s persistent call to recover the suitcase containing valuable “findables” was explicitly framed as her late mother’s wish entailing our duty to fulfill it. At the same time, the accompanying stories she recounted about her late father’s professional repute as a philologist revalued these objects from the past as objects of broader public interest, treasurizing his personal belongings. By imbuing his textual-discursive remains with meanings of symbolic and affective value, her stories turned into narratives of treasure, attesting to everyday forms of historicization—that is, ordinary ways of feeling and apprehending the past in the context of a family (see Stewart 2003:482, 2016:86). When eventually the suitcase was recovered from the basement, its opening became an event of witnessing by the entire family, consisting of my mother, my father, my two brothers, and myself. The fragments of a long lost past took material shape in Yagos’s personal items: his shaving set, his identity photocard, documents relating to his teaching posts and his persecutions, personal letters and postcards, books and notes from his academic study, translations of

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ancient Greek works in progress, a personal diary, and a manuscript collection of laments from his native village of Mani that he had started compiling while still a student at the University of Athens. Reading out these recorded stories of revenge killings and death thrust into the present powerful affective voices from the past. As an onlooker to the event of the discovery of the “treasure” and witness of its recovery, I also became participant to its archival materiality, which triggered a creative space for affective memory to be re-articulated and embodied. Laying bare the artefactual traces of my grandfather seemed to echo the cultural practice of Maniat kin women exhuming the dead’s skull and bones (Seremetakis 1991:220). The presence of fragments and the absence of flesh invited reflection on the dead’s residual identity as well as on my own identityin-the-making. Captivated by the worn-out patina of age of these objects and driven by defamiliarization and distance, I immersed myself in reflective nostalgia,1 connecting myself affectively to these “shattered fragments and ellipses of memory” (Boym 2001:49–50). The recovery of the collection of laments raised important questions about the nature and contexts of these textual fragments. Who created these texts, known as mirolóyia (‘laments’),2 where, and how? What meanings were encoded in them? And how had they traveled from the past to the present? These are some of the questions that motivated the study of these “treasured” texts as narratives with trajectories connecting affectively past, present, and future in different social and cultural practices. The present chapter is organized as follows: The first section presents the ethnographic and research context of the study. The second part introduces the Maniat context of culture and the Maniat lament as a speech genre subject to particular conditions of circulatability. The third section provides an analysis of a lament instantiation performed in the context of an ethnographic encounter, supplemented by key findings from the analysis of the lament fragments included in the recovered manuscript collection. Overall, the analysis presents an approach to laments as narratives with trajectories embedded in social practices of embodying, sharing, and authenticating affect and cultural memory.

1 Reflective nostalgia is contrasted to restorative nostalgia, which is concerned more with the restitution of cultural symbols and rituals (Boym 2001:49–50). 2 Mirológi or mirolói in common usage is the Modern Greek term that refers to popular laments and connotes the crying of one’s fate (Seremetakis 1991:3).

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Background to the Study

2.1 Ethnographic Context of Research The collection of laments that became the focus of study includes sixty-four texts labelled as mirolóyia by its compiler, Yagos Strilakos.3 Entries from the compiler’s personal diary as well as his notes on the manuscript texts suggest that the date of its compilation can be situated between 1930–1935, shortly after Yagos had returned to his home village of Yerolimenas after graduating and waiting for his appointment as a teacher. During that period, Greek intellectuals, including writers, artists, and teachers, were showing a strong interest in the collection and publication of vernacular forms with the view to construct a shared language and culture appropriate for a Modern Greek nation, in the context of the broader project of constructing modernity in Europe (Bauman and Briggs 2003; Mackridge 2004). The broader study that this chapter draws on has been based on the analysis of a sample of 22 text-artifacts recorded in this unpublished manuscript collection. The texts are approached as fragments, products of complex histories of discourse, rather than as transparent records of culture that can be straightforwardly branded as “tradition.” The texts are viewed as artifacts which involve the freezing and framing of past and future in “canonical” shapes through the compiler’s practices of selection, extraction, editing, and resetting (Giaxoglou 2009). These practices contribute to the construction of a sense of shared local culture and identity. In order to gain an insight into the social practices associated with the texts included in the collection and collect supplementary data, I also conducted short-term ethnographic fieldwork in Mani (see Figure 4.1). During July 2003 I was based in Aeropolis and from there moved to villages across Inner Mani, either following the suggestions of locals about well-known lamenters or looking for participant-informants who could share with me their understandings of laments. I conducted interviews with ten lamenters in total (eight female and two male), in Aeropolis, Yerolimenas, Porto-Kagio, Lagia, and Kita, who recited or sang laments or just talked to me about aspects of local verbal art. Fieldwork involved the use of contemporary ethnographic practices, and in particular a focus on specific topics for observation, rather than the description of the entire culture in the style of traditional ethnography (Johnstone 2000).

3 The total word count of texts making up the collection is 10,180 words, with a mean of 159 words per text. The texts have been recorded in thirty-four unbound sheets, with a preference for recto-verso writing (in 58.8 % of the sheets).

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figure 4.1 Map of Greece and the Mani peninsula Base map by pavalena/Shutterstock.com; modified by K. Graber

In this study ethnography offered a perspective on language and communication from the point of view of a native ethnographer, by definition, native to the people, the culture, and the feel of the place (Blommaert and Dong 2010). While anthropology has long favored the radical encounter with the exotic “other” far away from one’s home, there has been an equally long tradition of researchers “coming home” and aiming to gain an in-depth understanding of their own culture. Notions of “home” incorporate many meanings, pointing to the dynamic, rather than static, nature of ethnic belonging and cultural identity. As Harris and Rampton (2003) have suggested, it cannot be straightforwardly assumed that “ethnic inheritance provides one with tacit, but distinctive, ingrained dispositions” or that “individuals possess (or belong to) cultures

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that are relatively discrete, homogeneous and static” (the roots approach to ethnicity) (Harris and Rampton 2003:5). Rather, ethnicity is something that individuals can emphasize differently in particular situations according to their needs and purposes (the routes approach to ethnicity). This dynamic, emergent view of ethnic belonging and identity suggests that “coming home” can often be a site of tensions and complex negotiations, presenting the native ethnographer with particular challenges. There is, for instance, a risk that the ethnographer’s proximity to the local culture can hinder observation or that their already-familiar roles may interfere with their role as participant-observer (Stephenson and Greer 1981:123). In my case, such issues were tempered by the fact that I was somewhat akin to a “dormant” insider: partially acculturated to the Maniat culture through short childhood visits to the locale, as well as through exposure to my extended family’s patterns of conduct, I shared to some extent local norms of communication and behavior but hadn’t developed concrete social role-relationships with members of the community. This part-insider, part-outsider status created a position of relative proximity to the community, which allowed me to experience the field subjectively, taking into account my own and the participants’ multiple social identities (Robben 2007:63) while avoiding the imposition of an ethnographic gaze on participants as indistinct bearers of culture. Upon entering the field, I carried over signs of my ethnic “roots” through my association with the kin of Strilakos, which provided me a route into local lamenters and offered a starting point for sharing stories with them. Taking ignorance as my departure point, I was engaged in ethnography as a learning process (Blommaert and Dong 2010). My aim was to gain a contextualized understanding of the “treasured” texts and their natural histories of discourse, which is the focus of the next section. 2.2 Natural Histories of Discourse and Narrative Interest in the natural histories or trajectories of discourse emerged in the study of oral poetics and performance when scholars shifted their attention from the study of how performance is anchored in its context (Bauman 1978, 1986) to the study of how and why discourse is rendered extractable from its context(s) of performance (Silverstein and Urban [eds.] 1996). This shift in focus raised the broader question of how texts are created and how they circulate in different contexts through the interrelated processes of decontextualization, entextualization, and (re)contextualization. The terms entextualization and contextualization have been put forward as appropriate alternatives to conceptualizations of texts and contexts as products, i.e., as bounded, self-contained structures or entities (Silverstein and

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Urban 1996). Entextualization can be described as the process of rendering a stretch of discourse into a coherent and cohesive text, concomitantly extracting stretches of discourse from their setting(s) (decontextualization) and inserting them into new settings (contextualization) again and again (recontextualization) (Bauman and Briggs 1990:73; Foley 1997:371–372). These concepts encourage a move away from reified accounts of discourse in communication by foregrounding a view of discourse as a sociocultural process conditioning and conditioned by social agents. This turn has also contributed to the recognition of narratives “in a trajectory of interactions as temporalized activities but also in networks of practices which they can partake in, represent and reflect on” (Georgakopoulou 2007:10). Approaching narrative as social practice (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2015:2) with a concern for its (re)contextualization(s) opens up the scope of narrative analysis beyond the study of oral narratives of personal experience whose components are embedded in a prototypical structure (Labov 2004; Labov and Waletzky 1997[1967]). Per Labov (2013:5), a fully developed narrative typically “begins with an abstract; an orientation with information on persons, places, times and behaviour involved; the complicating action; an evaluation section, which identifies the point of the narrative; the resolution; and a coda which returns the listener to the present time.” This model of narrative is amenable to the study—as well as the indexing—of largely monologic tellings often elicited in interview contexts, but it has proved less useful for the study of everyday tellings and the study of cross-cultural variation in narrative forms. Approaching narrative as social practice contributes a more complicated understanding of its forms, functions, and meanings in everyday activities as well as in specific contexts of culture (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012:83– 85). Oral styles of “traditional” storytelling, in particular, which involve considerable verbal artistry, constitute a rich site for the investigation of how cultural meanings become linguistically encoded in ways that condition their shareability. Ethnopoetic analyses of narrative styles that have been conducted predominantly in pre-literate cultures have highlighted local styles of verbal artistry by identifying patterning at the prosodic, syntactic and semantic level, often lost in written transcriptions, and have pointed to how types of patterning are linked to culture-specific meanings and local sociolinguistic repertoires (Hymes 1996, 1998, 2004[1981]). This study is guided by the narrative practice approach, while also combining units of analysis from ethnopoetics and the study of narrative as personal experience, in order to offer insight on culturespecific forms and norms of meaning-making. A narrative practice approach, more specifically, entails an analytic focus on “what participants do with narratives and how they position themselves vis-à-

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vis each other in the process,” as well as “how the telling of stories shapes and is shaped by ideologies, social relations, and social agendas in different communities, times and spaces” (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2015:2–3). Importantly, this discourse and sociolinguistic lens onto narrative opens up the study of narrative beyond a single context of performance to storytelling instances across chains of related events that can unfold across time, as well as in different media involving different participants (Shuman 2015). As Shuman (2015:42) notes, “stories travel beyond the people whose experience they describe,” and this calls for the close examination of “the affordances of different media, the transformation and entextualization processes involved in the creation of narratives in specific contexts, and the power struggles to which telling stories contributes” (Shuman 2015:13). The opening account of the recovery of my grandfather’s manuscript collection of laments, hidden among other artefactual traces of his personal life, furnishes an apt illustration of such natural histories of discourse in terms of how the trajectories of stories are embedded in other social practices, as discussed in this chapter. But before we move on, it is important to introduce lament and the kinds of social and cultural practices with which it is typically associated. 2.3 Laments as Sociocultural Practice Laments are often described as crying songs performed predominantly by women in a collective ritual context associated with mourning (Wilce 2009a:2, 21). Ritual occasions of mourning make it possible for grief and pain to be publicly expressed, shared, and transformed and help to sustain communities in the face of loss. Understanding laments, however, also requires a close look at their relationships with social institutions (Ariès 2008[1981]; Seremetakis 1991), discourse bodies (Briggs 1992), and techniques or processes of cultural circulation (Wilce 2009a, 2009b). Briggs’s (1992:338) intricate analysis of Josefina Fernandez’s Warao sana for her stepson Manuel,4 for instance, shows how relations of gender, power, and hierarchy are constructed in and through this female type of discourse, allowing women a certain degree of social and political power they otherwise lack in the public speech events of the community. In addition, Seremetakis (1991) has discussed the emergence of lament as a predominantly female counter-voice to male-dominated institutions, recognizing the technique of antiphony as a key technique of witnessing in Inner Maniat lamenting (Seremetakis 1991:100). For Seremetakis, the acoustic and

4 Sana is the Warao term for the songs composed and sung following the death of a close relative (Briggs 1992:339).

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gestural interplay between the lamenter (soloist) and the group of women who support her in the lament’s performative and emotional structuring (chorus) reproduce the ethic of helping, which is central in practices of agricultural labor. Her gripping ethnographic account demonstrates how the sociocultural practice of lamenting participates in a complex system of social exchange, where performance interlocks with linguistic and other semiotic systems. Briggs’s and Seremetakis’s ethnographic studies have expanded our understanding of lament varieties as “stylizations that performatively embody and express complex social issues connecting largely female gendered discourses on death, morality, and memory to aesthetic and political thematization of loss and pain, resistance and social reproduction, and to ritual performance of emotion” (Feld and Fox 1994:39). Beyond rituals of mourning, however, laments play an important role in people’s everyday life as an expressive vehicle for the articulation of painful experiences. Based on the study of melodized speech among the Yezidis, Amy de la Bretèque (2013) has clarified the sonic and poetic dimensions of the aesthetics of suffering. Melodized speech—which corresponds to what Yezidis refer to as kilame sur (‘words about someone or something’)—is not only performed in funerals or graveyard feasts, but can also be inserted into daily conversations when the topic evokes sad memories (Amy de la Bretèque 2013:198). Arguably, the use of melodization among the Yezidis serves both as a way to regulate distance, so that narration of traumatic events becomes possible, and as a way to enable emotional sharing with others (Amy de la Bretèque 2013:104–107, 198). Ethnographies of lament attest to the practice of lamenting among different communities and complicate our understanding of lamenting as sociocultural practice, which also constitutes a culture-specific semiotic sign (Urban 1988). As such, it can furnish a window onto local socio-emotional structures and agency constituted in and through ritual and discursive practice. Yet, despite the fact that lamentation is acknowledged as a form of personal experience narrative,5 little attention has been paid so far to the narrative dimensions of lamenting. This chapter seeks to fill this gap by extending the scope of the study of lament as sociocultural practice to its study as narrative practice embedded in other social and cultural practices. This approach invites us to consider not 5 “The genres of personal narrative found across speech communities are so plentiful that they alone constitute a staggering diversity of formats, including gossip, instigating stories, prayers, lamentations, reminiscences, agendas, plans, parables, jokes, eye-witness testimonies, confessions, reports, broadcasts, toasts, ballads, and certain forms of poetry” (Ochs and Capps 2001:60).

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only the thematic and rhetorical techniques used for temporally sequencing events and accounting for them, but also the ways in which lament narratives are imbued with “a moral and aesthetic evaluation of actions, emotions, thoughts” (Ochs and Capps 2001:18), creating a social forum for (co)tellers and listeners to take and share a position on specific events, characters, and experience. In addition, looking at laments as narrative practices allows us to address questions of how laments travel as stories and what participants do with these stories in specific contexts. The next section provides some necessary background to the context of culture as it relates to lament practices in the region and discusses conditions for the circulation of laments as a speech genre.

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Laments in Inner Mani

3.1 Mani: Context of Culture By “context of culture,” reference is made to the wide frame that includes a community’s shared knowledge, conventions of conduct, belief systems, language metaphors, speech genres, historical interpretations, and ethical and judicial principles, to be distinguished from the local context or context of situation (Ben-Amos 1993:215–216, cited in De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012:55). An understanding of emergent meaning in local contexts in Mani, as elsewhere, requires some familiarity with key historical, socioeconomic, and cultural facets of the region and its people.6 Mani is situated in the south of Peloponnese, forming the middle of its three highly trident peninsulas shaped by the Taygetus range, which narrows and lowers into the headland of Tainaro, or Kavo-Matapas (Saitas 2001:9). Ancient myths that have survived in modern traditions suggest that the cape of Tainaro was the end of the world where the gate to the underworld, or Ades, was located. Folk demarcations recognize the arid sector of Mani as Laconian, or “Inner,” Mani and distinguish it from the more fertile land covered by Messinean, or “Outer,” Mani. 6 It is often the case for popular and scholarly depictions of the Maniat community to be characterized by a priori delineations of the community in modernist terms that emphasize a static view of the Maniat identity. Nonetheless, as Blommaert (2009) observes, it is not possible to overlook those views or pretend that they have vanished on the basis of our present theorizations. The encapsulation of the wider Maniat context of culture in the present chapter participates in such distilled representations of the community to the extent that at some level groups ascribe to modernist representations of themselves, while at the same time they continuously challenge or negotiate them.

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The fundamental unit of socioeconomic settlement and organization in the Maniat community is the clan and more specifically the patriclan ( yenià), defined by patrilineal lines of blood and fictive kin, conglomerates of which are called fatrià or dhkologià (Alexakis 1980). In order to effectively organize the scarce natural and human resources, the local way of life was based on the coherence of particular clan ties, the power of clans, and the belligerent way of life of the people. As Seremetakis (1991:115) explains, the revenge code served as a strategy to protect the clans’ claims to their land and status and also to act against wideranging offences—defamations; offences against women of the clan, such as abduction, adultery, and bride theft; or even disputes, offences, and crimes relating to property, crops, or mutual agreements—in the absence of judicial administration. The revenge code was symbolically underpinned by the metaphorical equation of homicide with the stealing of blood from a household or clan, necessitating retaliation by the affected kin. The type of revenge to be effected was a matter of careful planning that included considerations of whether other forms of retaliation were more appropriate, for instance exile or the destruction of the clan tower that would implicate loss of status. Managing revenge code strategies was the task of the council of elders ( yerondiki), composed of distinguished male agnates who had to decide on the form of action, the target, and the avenger. Women were expected to continue their daily activities during those clan combats, as their role was to endure fate in the form of labor, suffering, and pain in agricultural and domestic spheres. The revenge code emerged as the key stage where the patriarchal armed clans played out and negotiated their stakes and status, while against that background, mourning practices and lamenting obtained additional meaning as they often served as sites for the reinforcement or challenging of announced forms of retaliation. In cases when the yerondiki decided not to initiate a feud, women’s laments in the mourning ceremony were used as the appropriate speech genre to address verbal attacks to the men for their failure to restitute their clan’s honor (Seremetakis 1991:38–39). Lamenting formed, thus, a speech genre that implicated participating women in the co-construction and reception of jural discourse and cultural truth (Seremetakis 1991:100). After 1870, supra-local justice ensuing from the gradual integration of local power to the state system, the expansion of the monetary economy, the wider reach of education to rural areas, and the expansion of agricultural activity (in particular the cultivation of the olive) created new conditions for the region and its people. Banditry and local strifes were suppressed, local autonomy decreased, and a surplus of laborers migrated to urban centers in search of work. As a result, clan coherence suffered and the old distinctions started to

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lose their social function, only to be strengthened in local memory (Saitas 2001:28). In the course of the rapid modernization of Greece, which unfolded in non-coeval temporalities for different communities and ways of life, revenge code ethics and practices of mourning came to be substantially suppressed and became relegated to the realms of “tradition” and “folklore” that belonged to the past rather than the present (Bauman and Briggs 2003). Nonetheless, similarly to other times in history, laments kept echoing the past in dialogue with the present, invoking past contexts at the same time as creating new ones for the performance of laments in both ritual and everyday contexts. 3.2 Dimensions of Maniat Lament Performance In Inner Mani, laments refer primarily to the improvised singing of the leading lamenter, part of a multi-voiced performance that includes stylized sobbing, screaming, gestures, chorus refrains, and improvised prose monologues occasioned in the context of local wakes (klàma) within mourning ceremonies (Seremetakis 1991:99). Laments are composed in the trochaic octameter7 (locally known as ochtasyllabo) and revolve around the life (or killing) of the deceased, expressing “the pain of the survivor in the throes of mourning and the pain that the deceased bear during the course of their lives” (Seremetakis 1991:115). Death is embedded in everyday life in ritualized forms, such as dreaming and appearances, emphasizing the permeation between ritual and ordinary life in the Maniat community (Seremetakis 1991:47). Such interpenetration is also characteristic of the Maniat lament (mirolói): improvised by a lamenter in the context of a death ceremony, it often becomes reshaped into collective oral history for sharing as “culture.” Old laments continue to be orally performed long after the death ceremony, and in the process they can become subject to alterations, often reflecting clan allegiances and enmities (Kassis 1980). The acoustic signification in Maniat ritual wailing, locally known as kláma, has been described in terms of a tripartite structure: sob/discourse/sob, moving antiphonically from the nonlinguistic (sob) to linguistic media (Seremetakis 1991:116–117). The acoustic techniques of the non-linguistic expression of pain enable the chorus to confirm, resonate, and memorialize the juridical authenticity of the soloist’s performance. The sob in the kláma is central to the stylized weeping as an affect intensifier and, along with heavy breathing, breathlessness, and syllabic prolongation, it also constitutes a device for the lamenter to

7 In the trochaic meter, one stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed one. A line of trochaic octameter consists of eight such trochees.

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shift between discourse units. While the acoustic signification in Maniat ritual wailing relies on the structuring and signification of the stylized sob, the aesthetic-acoustic structure of the lament in the social domains outside the ritual presents notable differences that indicate a different style in the encoding of pain appropriate to the social context in which it is instantiated. According to Seremetakis (1991), the two types of lament stylizations differ in that ordinary laments are not performed with “proper pain,” given that the lamenter lacks the support of other lamenters and audience as well as visual contact with the materiality of the corpse of the deceased. Maniat laments used to be sung commonly as accompaniments to agricultural activities and exchanged as shared substances among Maniat women in the “least bracketed and elaborated” contexts (Besnier 1990), such as the public spaces of households locally called the rougha (see Seremetakis 1991:105). Laments were also performed in the private space of the inside of the home. A Maniat woman confided to me, for example, that when she lost her mother she used to lament on her own at home, making sure that the windows were sealed as she did not want others to hear her and judge her crying. A more recent context for the reconstruction of laments includes the folkloristic and ethnographic encounter: Seremetakis (1991:105) reports on how her informants’ engagement in procedures of historical reconstruction, while listening to her fieldwork recordings, revealed the extent to which “the mirolói as discourse, the kláma as social event, and the chorus as a body of record keepers were all linked into a coherent medium for the dissemination and circulation of songs beyond the space and time of death.” It is argued, here, that a narrative lens onto such practices of circulation can shed light on the discourse processes driving the sharing and uptake of laments and clarify the normative shapes they can take as part of performance and text chains. This is all the more important given the general constraints on the circulation of laments. 3.3 Conditions for the Circulation of Laments Lament genres offer little scope for replication and wide circulation, especially when compared to myths (Urban 1996). The main reason for this observed differentiation between the two speech genres in terms of circulatability is the association of laments with the miasma (‘pollution impurity’) of death, which assigns mortuary rites their mystical character on the one hand, at the same time as restricting them to specific contexts. In addition, laments tend to involve highly personalized content that draws its meaning from its association with local contexts, thus further restricting wider circulation. Urban acknowledges, though, that not all laments circulate in the same way; some seem to travel better than others (Urban 1996:40–41). For example, among

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the Yezidis, a small group in the northern region of Iraq,8 it has been noted that certain types of laments are allowed to be recited outside the ritual (Arakelova 1999). These laments are called sujét laments, i.e., mourning songs with a plot, or threnodies of the female cycle which are composed on the death of a prominent person especially if he (she) died under specific circumstances (Arakelova 1999:135). Greek laments called Songs of the Underworld and Charos (Alexiou 2002[1974]:124–125; Saunier 1979), which often recount stories of heroic figures, also circulate as folk songs outside ritual ceremonies. These songs revolve around typical figures, which they enregister as emblems of local culture (Agha 2007). As discussed in the preceding section, in Inner Mani, laments circulate as collective oral history both of the community and of specific families, creating a narrative tradition whose impact extends beyond the ritual (Seremetakis 1991:105). The circulation and persistence of laments in Maniat life is not, however, always acknowledged by locals themselves, due to issues of shame attached to cultural practices which are thought to belong to the past. For example, at the start of my fieldwork in Mani, when I approached a local acquaintance and asked him to bring me in touch with lamenters, he told me in a categorical manner that the practice of lamenting has been discontinued (“den yparhoun pia tetoia pragmata, den asxolountai me tetoia pragmata pia” [there are no such things anymore; people are not concerned with such things anymore]). On the same day, the owner of the local bookshop in Aeropolis and local publisher confirmed that laments are still being practiced—even if by few lamenters—and suggested the names of a couple of them I could consult. Similar examples of conflicting statements about the current state of lament practice abound in my fieldwork data, indexing the co-existence of two contrasting linguistic ideologies about the value of laments as cultural products associated with shame or pride (cf. Wilce 2009a:118–138). The circulation and replication of these ideologies potentially serve as a guide or template for the reproduction of a certain cultural order (Wilce 2009a:128). Importantly, such ideologies entail the social distribution and regimentation of mourning and lamenting speech genres as inappropriate altogether or as appropriate in only certain forms and contexts. The above examples highlight that limitations to discourse reproduction and circulation are not inherent to speech genre, but subject to cultural and contextual factors that determine the appropriate or inappropriate conditions of telling and sharing. 8 The Yezidis are known for their unique religious rites, which are considerably different from Islamic rites.

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Forms and Norms of Circulable Laments

Aspects of speech genres’ regimentation can be clarified when we consider laments as circulable cultural products, relying on narrative affordances and revealing different entitlements and modes of participation (Shuman 2005). The ensuing discussion of a lament performance from my fieldwork, supplemented by key findings from the analysis of texts from the “treasured” manuscript collection, should help illustrate this point more clearly. 4.1 Ethnographic Vignette: A Breakthrough into Performance On the fourth day of my stay in Mani, I found myself in Kita having spent the morning going door-to-door, asking local women whether I could consult them about the local tradition of lamenting. In one of these encounters, a woman suggested to me that I should return to the area around seven in the evening, when elder women habitually gather in a nearby shady and cool yard. Following her advice, I found myself later that day among the septuagenarian Ioulia, Marigo alongside one male neighbour, a couple of children playing on the side, and the informant who had led me there. As soon as I was introduced by the female informant as kin affiliated to Mani through my grandfather’s roots in nearby Yerolimenas, Ioulia and Marigo welcomed me to the company and we started to exchange news and updates relating to my extended family. Having settled into the conversation, I then invited Ioulia and Marigo to tell me more about their lamenting practice and repertoires. Both initially denied remembering any laments and, in what appeared to be an attempt to shortcut any further discussion on the topic, asserted that “locals don’t tell laments anymore” (“δε λένε πια μοιρολόγια”). I then explained to them how I had inherited a collection of laments from my grandfather that had sparked my interest in laments. By offering part of my family “treasures,” I sought to establish a context of social exchange, where the contribution of lament stories from the past would render the discussion of mourning practices more relevant for everyone present. I started to read out laments from the collection so that Ioulia and Marigo would comment. Both readily classified these stories as “old laments” and either commented on parts of the background story that motivated it or challenged the accuracy of parts of it. It was at that stage that I asked them whether they could remember any similar old laments that I could record to mini-disc as an illustration of their tempo and rhythm. Everyone turned to Marigo, demonstrating respect for her lamenting skills, and called on her to perform a lament for me, reiterating how far her words and lament would travel. Marigo initially appeared reluctant to get involved in a performance, so she

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kept insisting that she could not remember any laments and kept asking herself and others, “What am I (supposed to) say?” (“ε, τι να πω;”). Then she shouted, “You got me into trouble, you fat women!” (“φακλάνες, με μπλέξατε …”) and broke through into lament performance (Hymes 1975), providing no opening contextualizing framing for the lament. The old lament that Marigo chose to perform in the context of the ethnographic encounter reports Paraski’s witnessing of her father’s killing. It is locally known as the lament of Yorgatzas (του Γιωργαντζά), who is identified in the telling as the person responsible for the reported killing. The lament points to a chain of revenge that relates to the restitution of a female’s honor from the clan of Yorgatzas. None of my informants appeared concerned about the historical events that motivated the composition of the lament, but my search in other published collections provided additional background to the story. For the Maniat women present, the lament encapsulated all the historical and social events that needed to be recollected and passed around without the need for further “historicizing” information. 4.2

Traces of Lament Trajectories: Ethnopoetic and Narrative Patterning in and beyond Performance The performance of Marigo is made up of twelve lines, punctuated by a lengthy pause for repair in line 7 (marked by brackets in the text below), where there is a shift to direct speech. The repair involves the addition of a formulaic line including two reporting verbs (line 8: “and I told him and I said”), which functions as a frame to the opening of direct speech (line 9). Text 1. The lament of Yorgatzas (l. 1–12)9 1 Μέσα ήμου κι έψηνα ψωμί 2 με τη μικρή μου αδερφή 3 κι αγροίκησα μια ντουφεκιά 4 κι αμέσως το κατάλαβα 5 εκεί στ’αλώνι π’εδιάηκα 6 απάντεσα τον Γιωργατζά [7 ευγιό ζου βρε παλλικαρά] 8 και τού πα και του μίλησα 9 ευγιό ζου βρε παλλικαρά

[One day] I was in, bread baking with my little sister and I heard a rifle shot and there and then [the pain] I got on my way to the fields I run into Yorgatzas well done you and what a brave son and [then] I told him and I said well done you and what a brave son

9 In the text, the ethnopoetic patterning is marked by indentation and narrative patterning by double line breaks. The translation is my own.

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10 εσείς την εδικηώσατε 11 τη βέργα τη συρματερή 12 ντην πόρνη ζας τη φανερή

You’ve taken your revenge for her that thin and lean and tall a harlot known to us all.

Despite the apparent fragmentary nature of the text and the repair noted above, the reconstructed lament reveals an overall coherent ethnopoetic and narrative organization. The lament is performed on a speech-song continuum in a creaky voice; in articulatory terms, “creaky voice” involves the production of sounds with the glottal chords vibrating at a lower than normal rate (Urban 1988:387). The performance is characterized by the flatness of the musical tone as well as of the intonational contour of the tokens, irrespective of the words uttered, with a noticeable downward intonational fall at the end of each single pulse unit or octametrical musical line. In addition, breath pauses mark the end of longer units. In the performance of the lament of Yorgatzas, such pauses are patterned, occurring at the end of two lines and, in the case of the concluding section, at the end of three lines, where the lament comes to an end rather abruptly. The examination of the corpus of laments suggests that patterning in twos or threes, depending on the narrative function of the unit, makes up the ethnopoetic structure of the lament and forms the compositional basis for organizing micro-events or shifts in action (Giaxoglou 2008). These patterned sets of lines can coincide with or make up larger narrative units that can be described using the Labovian narrative labels.10 Narrative development in this speech genre unfolds through shifts in action, which are marked off by a set of overt discourse markers. In the case of the lament of Yorgatzas, such markers include adverbs of place (line 1: μέσα, ‘inside’; line 5: εκεί, ‘there’), conjunctions (line 3: κι, ‘and’), verbs of saying (line 9: και του’πα και του μιλησα, ‘and [then] I told him and I said’), or tense switches from past continuous to simple past (line 1: ήμου, ‘was’ → line 3: αγροίκησα, ‘I heard’). The lament of Yorgatzas offers a typical example of ethnopoetic and narrative organization in that it presents almost all the narrative parts expected in a fully-fledged oral narrative of personal experience: an abstract, in this case the name of the revenge killer, which serves as a prompt to the story; an orientation (lines 1–2) that provides information about the setting of the story; a complicating action (lines 3–6) where the main action is reported, in this case

10

Despite the fact that the labels we choose for these narrative units can vary, their boundaries are ascertained by longer pauses and breathing that key the entry of the lamenter to the next sequence of improvisation.

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the witnessing of the killing at a distance and the encounter with the killer on the lamenter’s way to the victim’s side; a resolution (lines 8–9) bringing the action to a close by acknowledging that the killer has fulfilled the revenge exigency to restore the honor of a female member from his clan; and an evaluation (lines 10–12) where the lamenter presents the point of the story by first praising the avenged woman’s beauty (line 11: “thin, lean, and tall”), before moving on to undermine her as “a well-known harlot” (line 12). There is no explicit coda: Marigo returns to the present time by stepping out of the performance frame, switching from a “creaky voice” and the mode of speech-song continuum back to conversational mode. Marigo’s stylization is a representation of ritual wailing, which serves as a metapragmatic semiotic act that functions less at the denotational and more at the interactional level. The revealed patterning encodes communicable aspects of context that set this stylization apart from prototypical ritual laments not only in terms of the sound shapes associated with crying and sadness but also in terms of the functions that such performances serve. In terms of its acoustic structure, this form of “ordinary” lament employs linguistic rather than nonlinguistic techniques for the encoding of pain, embedding affective expression in a regularized ethnopoetic and narrative patterning punctuated by evaluative comments and “icons of crying” (Urban 1988), such as the monotone musical tone, falling intonation, creaky voice, and ingressive breathing that signal sadness and grief. Taken together, these techniques constitute a strategy for efficaciously performing lament beyond ritual contexts. At the same time, these techniques also index the context of their performance. In this case, more specifically, these techniques index an ethnographic interview context, largely monologic, which involves an orientation to lament as a narrative practice embedded in practices of cultural performance. This orientation is marked by the use of double-voicing. In their examination of oral narrative as a genre, Jane Hill and Ofelia Zepeda (1992) have shown “how doublevoiced utterances in a personal narrative provide the opportunity for a speaker to split into many presences, as it were, and so diffuse responsibility among them” (Hill and Irvine 1992:16). The lament narrative is constructed in the first person and it is based on the appropriation of Paraski’s pain. This discourse device enables the teller to split into two: (i) the person who bears the pain and is responsible for assigning blame for the revenge killing, encoded in the first-person voice of Paraski, and (ii) the person who bears witness to the pain, in this case Marigo, by recapitulating the past and carrying the social event feelingfully into the present, inviting further entextualizations. Importantly, the call for entextualization is motivated by the call for distributing a particular stance on the events and those involved them, namely that the reported

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revenge killing does not ultimately fulfill its aim of restituting the honor of the clan. By assigning blame not to the killer, whose act is morally dictated by the revenge code, but to the female for being a harlot, the lamenter makes explicit in the concluding evaluation whose blame (and how) is to be registered in public discourse. Furthermore, in this lament instantiation, double-voicing encodes specific entitlement claims which involve what Shuman (2015:43) has described as “speaking others’ words or telling others’ stories […] [as] a way of claiming authority—the authority to represent, for example, or the authority that comes from insider knowledge.” As Sacks (1992:246) has suggested, the entitlement to tell another’s story is also linked with the way affect is articulated: “first-hand, second-hand, and third-hand experiences are narrated differently, received differently, and play out differently in terms of the ‘distributional character of experience.’” In the telling of the lament for Yorgatzas, Marigo plays out another woman’s pain as a proxy for her own and other Maniat women’s life experiences of pain. The mode of narration in the first person allows her to draw in her listeners while regulating her own and her listeners’ proximity to personal suffering in a way that renders emotion intelligible, coherent, and hence communicable in this specific elicited context. In her breakthrough to performance Marigo assumes responsibility to her present and imagined audience for a display of verbal skill in lamenting (Bauman 1986, 2004), as well as for a display of affect, echoing local norms of emotionality that lend authority and authenticity to her telling. The example suggests that the more the lament performance is distanced from the events that prompted it, the more the expression of affect becomes regularized linguistically, narratively, and prosodically, thus enabling the exchange of laments as sung or spoken stories within a chain where tellers can invoke affect and distribute local stances and positions to events and characters. These stories constitute sites for the formation and negotiation of cultural identities in multi-voiced productions which, as Koven (2015:388) has shown, result from “participants’ coordinated recognition of, performance of, and alignments toward multiple images of selves and others, across here-andnow narrating and there-and-then narrated events.” In performances of “old laments”—particularly in folkloristic or ethnographic encounters—tellers also engage in the metapragmatic cueing of certain co-patternings as valuable indexes of cultural formations subject to communicative processes of circulation (Agha 2007). Their use of double-voicing is, thus, part of a metanarrative strategy that frames the lament as a cultural product that can represent the local worldview of pain.

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The next section supplements this discussion with findings from the analysis of the corpus of old lament fragments from the 1930s included in the “treasurized” manuscript collection.11 4.3

Traces of Lament Trajectories: Framing Devices as Markers of Entextualization In their written form in folklore collections, laments present a prototypical patterning that indexes a high degree of crystallization. The degree of crystallization is mostly evident in the opening lines or oral poetic formulae and narrative development. In performance-oriented research (Bauman 1978; Foley 1997:359) introductory formulae are defined in oral-poetic terms as “a group of words regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea” (Parry 1930:80, cited in Beaton 1980:37). They have been described as framing devices that serve to index the genre which the teller is producing or invoking for specific reasons (Bauman 1978; Foley 1997:359). It has been widely acknowledged that “formulaic elements occur more coherently in the laments recorded by folklorists” (Herzfeld 1986:250), which makes the manuscript collection of laments under focus a unique context for their study. Across the sample studied, the most common opening line is a formulaic opening that denotes the day and part of the day when the reported death (or killing) is said to have occurred. The formula has been found to initiate approximately one third of the lament fragments in the manuscript collection (36%). A similar frequency of occurrence is noted in the case of one of the most well-known published collections of laments, considered to be an authoritative anthology (32%) (Koutsilieris 1997). The formula is shaped within the constraints of the octameter and consists of the indefinite article accompanying a proper noun that denotes a day of the week or month and optionally an adverbial of time. Half of the times (50 %) the formula occurs in the sample, the day and time of day are set to a Monday morning.12 11

12

In the manuscript collection, as well as in comparable published collections, the textartifacts generically labelled as miroloyia are lament fragments, which compilers metadiscursively frame as authentic “copies” of lament songs, linking them directly to the improvisations of individual mourners in the unique instance of a mourning ritual (see Giaxoglou 2008). The formula also appears in a range of other forms in the text-artifacts as laid down by Strilakos encoding other days of the week as temporal frames for the recounted events, such as Ki-ria-ki (‘Sunday’) or Sa-va-to (‘Saturday’). The three syllables making up these words place these choices in a paradigmatic relation to the choice of the weekday name De-fte-ra (‘Monday’).

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Μία (indefinite article) Δευτέρα (proper name denoting a day of week) το πρωί (adverbial of time) Trans.: One Monday morning References to time invoked in this type of formula are highly conventionalized. This is foregrounded in the following example, taken from the lament for Michaleas, where the formula is made up of the merging of two weekday names into a single name: Μνια Τεταρτοπαρασκευή (‘One Wednesdayfriday’). Such formulae may suggest the lamenter’s concern for the metrical requirements of distich (i.e., a group of two lines) or mark the degree of detachment of the text from its local context and temporal anchoring. Furthermore, these conventionalized temporal frames serve to initiate larger sections, typically recounting a set of ordinary activities just before the onset of narrative action. These sections tend to be articulated in the imperfective aspect (see boldfaced verbs in the example below). In the case of a female protagonist, such activities take place indoors and often refer to eating and drinking, sleeping, milling, or just standing by the window, while in the case of a male protagonist ordinary activities refer to outdoor activities, such as working in the field, sitting in the council, or being away from the village. Μια Δευτέρα το πρωί One Monday morning εκάθοντα στο μαγαζί they were sitting in the shop και κάνασι γεροντική and holding the elders’ council στου Μπαλασίδα την αυλή at Balasida’s yard. [taken from the lament for Perotis and Lefatzis] In narrative terms (Labov 1997:402, 2004:37–39), sections that describe a common state-of-affairs by establishing the time, place, and participants and the ordinary activities in which they are engaged are called orientation sections and serve not only to provide background information, but also to contextualize and perspectivize the telling (see Georgakopoulou 1997:58). Analysis of the texts in which the device “one Monday morning” is found suggests that the device has a narrative function of contextualizing the lament telling as a temporally ordered sequence of events that indexes a relative distance from the time when the events took place. In addition, the coupling of markers of time with markers of space where everyday activities typically take place allows the synthesis of time and space within the taleworld into a chronotope, which “makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins … [functions] as the primary means for materializing time in space” (Bakhtin 1981:250, cited in Georgakopoulou 2007:13).

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The identification of the narrative function of such framing devices is reinforced by another relevant finding, namely that the majority of texts initiated by such devices present a fully-fledged narrative structure along the lines of the model of narrative put forward by Labov and Waletzky (1997[1967]).13 In other words, in these lament fragments the most reportable event of killing is recounted in a narrative sequencing of events that starts with an orientation section providing information on the time, place, and protagonist(s). It is then followed by complicating action episodes that culminate in the reporting of the witnessing of the killing, and it comes to a close by means of an evaluation where blame is assigned for the killing and, in some cases, a coda where warnings for revenge are issued. In many respects, the start “one Monday morning” resembles the initiating formula often associated with Western fairy tales, “once upon a time” or “there was once …” The latter has been found to be one of the additions that the Brothers Grimm (1981[1816]) made in the process of shaping their anthology of folktales. Briggs (1993) describes it as an index of metadiscursive practices, i.e., methods used in locating, extracting, editing, and interpreting discourses, that marks the insertion of folk tales into their written collections. In the unpublished manuscript collection, though, there is no evidence of similar interventions as part of the compiler’s practices of authenticating the recorded texts; rather, it seems that tellers use them to explicitly frame their telling as an “old lament.” In this respect such fixed expressions can be referred to as markers of entextualization, given that they do not encode denotational meaning but rather tell us something about the context of telling and its relation to past and future performances. These fixed expressions function as metanarrative cues to the type of lament performed and the participation framework involved: listeners are not expected to be immersed in the emotional world of pain and loss, but rather to share in the meanings encoded in communicable and circulable representations of pain. Such formulae constitute strategies for minimizing the intertextual gap (see Foley 1997:372) between an idealized generic model of laments and the actual text enacted, thus appealing to the texts’ durability. As such, this type of framing device serves as an index of a high degree of lament crystallization and affirms the replicability of certain types of Maniat laments as laments that make for better culture “in its classic sense of sharing and transmission across the gen-

13

Two lament fragments deviate from this pattern; these are labelled as “Anonymous” and appear to be tellings lacking in skill, as evidenced by the lack of a distinctive label and the abundance of oral-poetic formulae to the detriment of event progression.

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erations” (Urban 1996:42). Such replicability enables the fixing of lament texts in folklore collections as “old” or “traditional” laments in practices of culturemaking for supra-local purposes.

5

Conclusion

The analysis of a selection of ethnographic data and a “treasured” set of lament texts foregrounded the value of studying performances of “old” laments along with lament records as traces of the natural histories of local lament verbal art (Silverstein and Urban 1996). This approach sheds light on lament as narrative practice embedded in other social and cultural practices, such as folkloristic and ethnographic encounters and everyday activities. The linguistic techniques employed for creating a crystallized version of lament, in performance or in writing, include regularized acoustic and discourse patterns, double-voicing, and framing devices, which make a performance recognizable as an instantiation of that particular speech genre. These techniques constitute a linguistic representation of non-linguistic techniques (e.g., sobbing, crying, gestures), which are integral to lament performances as part of mourning rituals, and which make possible the (re)contextualization of laments in other activities. At the same time, these techniques serve as markers of entextualization or traces of the lament’s trajectories, linking each instantiation to a chain of tellings, thus authenticating it. Such techniques, and doublevoicing in particular, enforce a detachment from the events that occasioned the pain and indicate to the audience that the lament performed stands for a culture-specific, circulable form of metanarration. The view of lament as narrative practice presented in this chapter brings to the fore the pervasiveness of lament in local culture. The Inner Maniat lament is drawn upon for the embodying affect in normative ways, as well as for distributing narrative formats and positions in and through which local history and cultural identities are reconstructed and shared affectively. This study suggests the importance of looking more closely at the complex, multi-layered narrativity involved in verbal art and its traces in recorded versions in relation to text trajectories and the negotiation of cultural identities and “tradition.” This line of analysis can be extended by investigating how narrative figures and participants’ alignments toward them “travel” beyond particular storytelling events (Koven 2015). The discussion also opens up insight into local forms and norms of layering and regulating affect and regulation in narrative practice, which can be a useful lens onto the articulation and sharing of traumatic and painful experience, more broadly.

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Even though laments in Mani, as elsewhere, may have largely lost the force emanating from their integral implication in patriarchal systems of social organization based on the code of revenge, they continue to hold onto their power as narratives through which tellers participate in encapsulations of experience, reverberating local lifeworlds that have emerged from pain. Despite the selective representation and crystallization of such stories in folklore collections that largely erase part of their meaning and power, lament fragments continue to furnish opportunities for bearing witness to voices of pain and for affectively connecting past, present, and future.

Acknowledgements This research was partially supported by the Greek State Scholarship Foundation and the fieldwork by a Sargeaunt Travel Award from King’s College London. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Alexandra Georgakopoulou for her insight and expertise and thank the editors of this volume, the anonymous reviewers, and Tereza Spilioti for their engaged feedback on previous versions of this paper. Any errors are my own. Special thanks go to my informants, especially Marigo, for the treasured words and worlds shared in the field and my mother, Yanna, for giving me permission to recontextualize part of our family history.

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part 3 Constructing Discursive Authority

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Introduction to Part 3 In Parts 1 and 2, we saw how narrative conventions help mediate between self and society, providing frameworks for articulating the self in an intelligible, meaningful way, and for negotiating heritage and belonging within larger collectivities. As we have seen hinted at throughout the preceding chapters, not all modes of storytelling—or storytellers themselves—are equally authoritative. Some storytellers are better positioned than others, for instance, to claim the right to authentically perform a traditional Maniat lament, or to claim Yiddish as a heritage language. The individuals telling “their” stories have been doing so within overlapping social groups of differing scale: families, patriarchies, ethnicities, subcultures, youth groups, religious communities, national and sub-national communities—all of which draw on different forms of institutional authority. In this final section of the book, we examine more squarely how institutions are implicated in storytelling as narrative practice. Part 3 examines the role of social institutions in constructing discursive authority, namely the patriarchy, medicine, and news. Some such institutions are more “traditional,” as understood by the storytellers and audiences who draw on them for authority. For instance, Zapotec speakers have cordoned off “pure Zapotec” for the traditional storytelling described by Elizabeth Falconi in chapter 5. Other storytelling practices are more concretely and formally institutionalized, such as the Buryat–Russian news storytelling examined by Kathryn Graber in chapter 7. Journalists ensconced in culturally authoritative news institutions struggle to uphold standards of linguistic purism, seeing themselves as bastions of a literary standard that is constantly under threat of “contamination” by Russian. Like traditional Zapotec storytelling, news storytelling in Buryat is supposed to be done in a purist code, but in practice it comes up against a competing language ideology that figures a publicly dominant language, Russian, as the language of science, technology, and medical expertise. The taken-for-granted institutional authority of Russian within the domain of Western medicine wins out over a journalist’s efforts to construct a Buryat neologism. The peloton practices of Mapuche healers described by Jennifer Guzmán in chapter 6 occupy a middle ground in this respect: the healers are respected as traditional practitioners as opposed to or alongside Western medical practitioners, but they meet clients in offices and incorporate some other bureaucratic forms into their relationships. Authority appears in some cases to be a matter of restriction. In chapter 5, we see how the institution of the patriarchy restricts authoritative tellership to a narrow segment of Zapotec society, namely older men. In the bilingual

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Zapotec–Spanish community that Falconi describes, Zapotec stories are supposed to be told in the Zapotec language, according to a longstanding assumption that cultural content and linguistic format should coincide. But Falconi shows how the demographic characteristics of age and gender in fact trump these expectations of code. Despite an explicit metapragmatic rule requiring the use of Zapotec (“Tell it in Zapotec!”), audiences find the same stories told in Spanish authoritative when told by senior men, subtly rendering the Zapotec language incidental to notions of cultural continuity. At the same time, the personal authority of individual healers, journalists, or elders, even when rooted in powerful institutions, is constrained by the pragmatic dynamics of the emergent social interaction. We see this especially in Falconi’s discussion of the storytelling performances of one elder Zapotec storyteller and the diverse uses to which his stories are put across social contexts. In some contexts, the stories themselves take center stage and are tailored to fit the dynamics of relevant participants, while in others, past storytelling events are invoked to facilitate the construction of the elder’s preferred persona as a highly skilled teller with deep knowledge of local traditions. Similarly, native-language journalists in Buryatia, taken to be highly skilled and authoritative sources of pure Buryat, find their work constrained by the knowledge and expectations of their audiences. While a journalist may feel it imperative to produce “pure Buryat,” this demand is superseded in practice by the fact that viewers and interviewees only know some domains of language, including medical and technical terms, in Russian. In other cases, authority is not a matter of restriction but of repetition. Guzmán shows how a young patient, Daniel, subtly undermines his own account of his illness by agreeing repeatedly with a healer’s assessments. In the opening to her chapter, Guzmán describes the journey of a mother, father, and son in which they traverse multiple domains of medical expertise in search of a diagnosis for the inexplicable catalog of symptoms that have been plaguing their son, including: a primary care physician’s office, a Mapuche shaman, and finally the Mapuche Wellness Center. In Guzmán’s focal examination of this final setting, we see the progression of Daniel’s unusual sessions with his healer, Señora Lorena. Without asking questions of any kind, she discursively constructs Daniel’s illness, “weaving the multiple, disparate, complicated aspects of sickness” (Guzmán, this volume) into a coherent and authoritative narrative that points to a definitive course of action laid out for the patient and his family. The authority and power of Señora Lorena’s account builds gradually, from initial open-ended suggestions towards firm assertions of the causal factors involved in Daniel’s illness, which are repeated across and within sessions until her version of events is ultimately “ratified by the patient family” (Guzmán, this

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volume). She overcomes their doubts and in one case Daniel’s outright rejection of her diagnosis, claiming the “epistemic privilege” (Guzmán, this volume) granted to her as an expert in the realm of Mapuche illness and healing that trumps the patient’s own self-knowledge. On the surface, news stories and medical diagnoses are narrative genres that speakers hold apart from traditional storytelling. They draw on cultural and linguistic material that is supposed to be from “everyday life” rather than the spiritual or fantastical elements common to myths and much folklore, and they are institutionalized as a separate domain of narrative practice. Yet hyperinstitutional narrative genres like news reports are also important sites for the authoritative reproduction of nationalist ideologies that become known as “common sense.” Jan Blommaert and Jef Verschueren (1998), for instance, have excavated the role of language in European nationalist ideologies from news reports and editorials. Like Anderson, Blommaert and Verschueren look not to the explicit narration of events, but rather to the “implicit frame of reference, the supposedly common world of beliefs in which the reports … are anchored” and which the reporters and editorialists “expect their readers to share with them” (1998:191). In this volume, Kathryn Graber extends this line of inquiry by showing how assumptions about the ranking and appropriate use of different languages for different purposes are marshaled and reinforced in the process of making a bilingual news story about syphilis in Siberia. While the immediate concerns of the journalists and their interviewees are to produce a “good story” and avoid shame on camera, the ethno-national politics and history of their position within the Russian Federation always pervade the scene, informing their categories of understanding and what they take to constitute shameful behavior.

Work Cited Blommaert, Jan, and Jef Verschueren. 1998. “The Role of Language in European Nationalist Ideologies.” In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds. Pp. 189–210. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

chapter 5

Telling Traditions: The Dynamics of Zapotec Storytelling Elizabeth A. Falconi

1

Ethnographic Context of Research

The data and analysis here are based on research, begun in 2008 and continuing to the present, with members of a multilingual transborder community formed by migration between the village of San Juan Guelavía, Oaxaca, Mexico and Los Angeles, California. San Juan Guelavía, Oaxaca is a rural municipality in the most ethnically and linguistically diverse state in Mexico, where a large portion of the population is indigenous (see de Angulo 1925; Barabas and Bartolomé 1986; Dennis 1987; Nader 1990; Stephen 2005).1 Guelavians are ethnically Zapotec, meaning that they are descendants of the prehispanic Zapotec Empire that dominated the central valleys of Oaxaca, and they speak a Zapotecan language known as San Juan Guelavía Zapotec (SJGZ), or among speakers of the variety simply “didxza” [‘our words,’ or alternatively, ‘words of the clouds’]. While my research participants recognized themselves as Zapotec, amid the extraordinary sociolinguistic diversity of present-day Oaxaca (which has sixteen officially recognized ethno-linguistic groups and incredible diversity within each of these groups) their sense of shared belonging is closely tied to their natal village, their kin, and SJGZ, rather than a sense of pan-regional ethnic identity. Most community members are multilingual, speaking SJGZ, Spanish, English, and other local varieties of Zapotec with varying degrees of fluency. The village is located in the Tlacolula Valley between Oaxaca City and the city of Tlacolula de Matamorros, and is organized around a communal form of municipal government that follows the traditional regional system of usos y costumbres [uses and customs] (see Cohen 2004). Community members 1 The Mexican states of Oaxaca and Chiapas have the highest indigenous populations in the country, and Oaxaca is by far the most diverse, with 16 recognized ethno-linguistic groups, of which Zapotec is only one (see INEGI at inegi.org.mx). Linguists argue that the number of mutually unintelligible languages in the region is much larger; for example, estimates of the number of distinct Zapotecan languages range between 20 and 60 (see Sicoli 2007; sil.org).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004393936_010

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figure 5.1 The state of Oaxaca is located in southern Mexico, west of Chiapas. Base map by Alfonso de Tomas/Shutterstock.com; modified by K. Graber

are required to perform appointed offices and duties called servicio [service], which can range from a temporary job cleaning and decorating the church, or repairing local roads, to a term of service on the school committee, or an official post in the municipal government. Government positions are only open to adult, married men. Periods of service generally last between one and three years, and the more intensive the obligation the greater the social prestige one gains from it. Local men move their way up through the hierarchy of servicio, the pinnacle of which is being elected to serve as Presidente Municipal [municipal president], the head of the cabildo [local governing body]. The honor associated with municipal office endures for the remainder of one’s life. Many people living locally farm and raise domesticated animals, combined with small-scale mercantile activities (e.g., selling market goods, cleaning, laundry) to produce enough food and earn enough cash to live on, while others depend on a variety of professional pursuits such as construction, tailoring, baking, taxi driving, auto mechanics, and the like. Those able to obtain higher education often pursue careers in law, engineering, accounting, medicine and teaching. To augment local subsistence activities, Guelavians have historically migrated to a wide variety of locations within Mexico and increasingly to the United States, in order to pursue educational and wage-labor opportuni-

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ties. The three most common destinations for those who choose to leave the Tlacolula Valley are Mexico City, Ensenada, and Los Angeles. Many people I worked with had spent time in more than one of these places over the course of their lifetimes, and all of these places were mentioned frequently in conversations I recorded in my corpus, both by people who have lived there and by their family members. According to the 2010 census Guelavía was home to 3,047 residents, but this number is constantly in flux to the widespread pattern of domestic and international migration among community members (INEGI). Although there are no accurate figures available, it is reasonable to estimate that 1,500–2,000 Guelavian men, women, and children are living in and around the city of Los Angeles, CA, in addition to other long established communities in Mexico City and Ensenada.2 The increasing pervasiveness of international migration to the United States has produced a “culture of migration” (Cohen 2004; see also Stephen 2007; Wood 2008), meaning that migration has become an ingrained part of the repertoire of practices that shape daily life within the Guelavian community. Unlike other migrant populations separated by vast distances and oceans, frequent movement between Oaxaca and Los Angeles is possible (and in fact easy for those with legal permission like myself), due to geographic proximity, but impractical and dangerous because of political, legal, financial, and social obstacles. The ubiquity of migration and the long-term separation of Guelavians within Mexico from their kin in the United States shapes Guelavians’ talk about themselves and others, which often evinces a preoccupation with the maintenance of cultural continuity amid disjuncture and transformation. A pattern of language shift away from the use of San Juan Guelavía Zapotec among Guelavian youth, the decrease in subsistence farming, and the disappearance of other practices associated with the traditional lifeways of the community (e.g., salt extraction, basket weaving) are often attributed to these ongoing processes of social change. As I will discuss towards the end of this chapter, this context of flux leads many community members, including the storyteller at the heart of this chapter, to focus explicit attention on the maintenance of community and familial bonds across time and space. The data analyzed here were collected over the course of two years of ethnographic research in San Juan Guelavía, Oaxaca, and Los Angeles, California, between 2008–2009, shorter visits in subsequent years, and ongoing communications I maintain with several research participants. This chapter forms part

2 Most Guelavian migrants in Mexico and the U.S. work in the service industry.

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of an ongoing investigation into the relationship between language, migration, and community, based on which I have suggested that the circulation of semiotic forms, shared patterns of narration, and reflexive forms of talk constitute a powerful medium of connectivity amid geographic dispersal and sociocultural transformation (see Falconi 2011). Throughout my research, many people were critical of my penchant for recording ordinary conversations on mundane topics, characterized by the use of zapoteco revuelto [Zapotec mixed with Spanish lexemes], a widespread but devalued variety. I was often encouraged to attend events where I would be exposed to more valued speech genres associated with the use of didxzac [good/legitimate Zapotec], an elevated register of SJGZ characterized by repetition, euphemism, and in certain ritual contexts the use of reverential kin terms (cf. Hill and Hill 1986; Kroskrity 1993, 2009, 2012). It was as a result of this continuous encouragement that I came to hear and record a small number of story performances by local tellers, including *Isidro,3 a long-time research participant, and friend, whose storytelling and narrative practices are the focus of this chapter.

2

Narrating in Diaspora

While some scholars suggest that migration erodes communities, creating “deterritorialized populations” (Appadurai 1996; cf. Giddens 1990), I have found that Guelavians living in Oaxaca, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and elsewhere create community largely through language practices, and particularly through narration. I build on the perspective that “shared understandings of social space and practice establish continuity beyond individual encounters and are woven into the broader social context of life” (Wortham and Rhodes 2015:162; see also Hanks 1990). Such practices are especially significant in the face of distinct processes of racialization operating in Mexico and United States that mark community members as indigenous and Latin@, generating tremendous pressure for Guelavians to assimilate to dominant cultural and linguistic practices (see Relaño Pastor and De Fina 2005). For highly dispersed populations shared forms of narration and discursive patterns can be a powerful means of instantiating and maintaining a coherent community. As Wortham and Rhodes (2015:164) describe, when narrating events or telling stories of various sorts, “narrators also position themselves

3 The asterisk denotes a pseudonym.

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interactionally with respect to social types and with respect to other participants in the event of speaking,” drawing on communicative styles and shared knowledge that point beyond the interaction itself. I suggest that the connections created by the performance and circulation of stories and other discursive forms comprise the foundation of what I have theorized as “narrated community.” Much work on narrative focuses on the analysis of face-to-face interactions among physically co-present individuals. I expand the scope of this scholarship by demonstrating how narrative works to mediate relationships between Guelavians separated by time and space, providing the foundation for the (re)creation and maintenance of community across borders.

3

Storytelling and Moral Socialization

In this chapter I trace the storytelling practices of Isidro, an elder Guelavian male who is bilingual in San Juan Guelavía Zapotec and Spanish, and has lived in the village of San Juan Guelavía for the majority of his life, though many of his children have migrated within Mexico and to the United States. Through the analysis of storytelling episodes across two distinct social contexts I demonstrate how Isidrio moves fluidly between formal stories and personal narratives, interweaving performances with reflexive talk about prior storytelling events, and the present moment of interaction. These interludes serve to reinforce participants’ understanding of storytelling episodes as significant, reportable experiences. Likewise, storytelling participants’ explicit talk about unfolding stories and how they should be told serve to frame story performances as distinct from the ongoing stream of talk in which they are embedded. Through my analysis of the participant dynamics that shape Isidro’s storytelling performances I demonstrate how he strategically uses his repertoire of stories and personal narratives to construct and reaffirm his persona as a knowledgeable, venerated elder with moral authority over his kin and community. Stories and storytelling are an important tool of socialization in many communities, and are often seen as possessing potent (re)productive power (see Basso 1984; Gonzales 2012; Kroskrity 1993, 2009). Across the ethnographic record scholars have described the role of stories and folktales, or “oral literature” (Bauman 1986), as a practice connected with the maintenance of cultural traditions, the teaching of moral frameworks, and the acquisition of cultural and communicative competence more broadly (see Briggs 1988; Heath 1984; Hymes 1981; Mannheim and Van Vleet 1998; Urban 1984). For example, Basso (1984) depicts Western Apache views of storytelling as a form of “stalking,” used to pursue errant community members with messages of moral righteousness

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and culturally appropriate conduct with the goal of catalyzing personal transformation. Similarly, Kroskrity (2009, 2012) describes the crucial role that stories play in perpetuating productive agricultural cycles and community maintenance among the Arizona Tewa. In other work on this topic I have discussed the dynamics of storytelling in Guelavía amid language shift and local efforts to promote language revitalization, examining the role of traditional heritage language practices in contemporary social life (see Falconi 2013). Because storytelling as a genre is linked by Guelavians to processes of cultural reproduction, practices of regimentation in and around storytelling events are shaped by a pervasive preoccupation with cultural continuity amid widespread sociocultural transformation. These concerns are reflected in the excerpts from Isidro’s stories and narratives considered here, particularly in those moments when he calls attention to his own expertise and his social role as a wise elder, in an effort to influence the behavior and/or moral outlook of his interlocutors. Among scholars of language use in social life, a great deal of attention has been paid to the linguistic and contextual dimensions that distinguish formal storytelling as a genre from the personal experiential narratives that are embedded within ordinary daily conversation (see Bauman and Briggs 1990, 1992; Ochs and Capps 1996, 2001). For example, like other genres of oral performance formal storytelling is often thought of as a practiced art form, one that is bracketed by formulaic openings and closings (e.g., “Once upon a time” and “They lived happily ever after, the end”), organized around predetermined plot structures, with fixed protagonists and antagonists. Such stories are defined by their iterability, meaning they can be reproduced indefinitely by different tellers across time and space and still retain their resemblance to previous tellings. In contrast, personal narratives are often defined by their spontaneous emergence within conversation, they frequently recount the mundane events that comprise daily life, and they are thus seen by scholars as an integral part of how humans render their lived experiences coherent and recognizable to others in social life (Ochs 2004; Ochs and Capps 1996, 2001). Given the sharply divergent ways in which these forms of talk have been categorized within scholarly literature, the study of these expressive genres has often been carried out separately (see volume introduction for details). Instead, I analyze talk in and around storytelling events, as well as talk about stories across social contexts, in order to demonstrate “the interrelationships linking the expressive forms individuals may employ in representing their lives to others” (Bauman 2004:83; see also Haviland 2005). Guelavians’ reflexive talk about storytelling, or metapragmatic discourse, has “an inherently ‘framing,’ or ‘regimenting,’ or ‘stipulative’ character” (Silver.

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stein 1993[1981]:33; see also Verschueren 2000). Such talk comprises “the story of how stories should be told” (Kroskrity 2012:130) and reveals a great deal about how speakers conceptualize the link between storytelling and other domains of social life. Close attention to the ways that speakers create interdiscursive links between unfolding speech events and past events can reveal how “discursive productions may employ life experience as an expressive resource, using it to shape and present the social self in dialogue with others” (Bauman 2004:83). Drawing on these insights, I explore the links that Isidro makes between past and present storytelling events, between fictional stories and personal experiential narratives, and between fictional storyworlds and the real world of storytelling events. In so doing Isidro constructs an authoritative tradition of telling that he has a legitimate claim to, and casts himself as a central figure in the narrated worlds he conjures.

4

Guelavian Storytelling

Within the Guelavian community prestigious speech genres, including storytelling and ritual speech, are closely associated with elder males who are typified as particularly skillful speakers of didxzac and deeply knowledgeable about local traditions. Men like Isidro, who served as alcalde [official in charge of property divisions and land rights] in the municipal government, and was later named as mayordomo [festival steward] for the village’s annual patron saint festival celebrating San Juan Bautista [St. John the Baptist], are prototypical of this social category. Storytelling within the community is characterized by a generation-based participant structure in which older adult men tell stories to younger listeners, and reflects the shift away from San Juan Guelavía Zapotec (SJGZ) towards Spanish in parent-child and adult-novice interactions throughout the community. In other work on this topic I have discussed a nascent language revitalization program that aims to invert this paradigm by involving youth in the theatrical performance of local myths and stories in SJGZ, in the hopes of countering this pattern of shift (see Falconi 2013). Women are not recognized by Guelavians as storytellers, though they frequently tell stories in the course of ordinary conversations that contain many of the same elements as formalized storytelling performances (e.g., references to supernatural events, interactions with animals and non-human entities). These tales are not generally framed as bounded, repeatable speech events, but as impromptu tales, or personal narratives, specific to the speaker and the immediate context. However, these narratives often share a great deal in common

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with traditional stories in terms of plot themes and events. I offer an example of one such spontaneous narrative below in order to demonstrate the difficulty in objectively distinguishing the kinds of formalized stories performed by storytellers like Isidro from the more ordinary types of narratives that emerge in the ongoing stream of conversation. The narrative shown below was told to myself (EF) and my colleague, Rebecca Howes-Mischel (RHM) by *Julieta (J), in her home in Los Angeles one evening after we had all eaten dinner together. In it she recollects her childhood experiences with her uncle *Tío Salomón, who was purportedly able to conjure magical illusions for the entertainment of his nieces and nephews: Example 1, recorded 6/11/2009, Los Angeles4 J:

Pues no se que es lo que estudiaban antes que yo la verdad no puedo explicar ni puedo decir cual es porque yo—uno de mis tíos así también era antes este sabía esas palabras pues … pero el lo que hacía (hace) por ejemplo antes nosotros estábamos chamacos entonces chamacos pues y luego para entretenernos nos decía “Vengan (veras) vengan a ver que que cosa voy a hacer” y como usan sombrero ya ves que allí usan sombrero y ponía su sombrero allí y decía “Van a ver” dice “ahorita van a ver” dice “como se pelean unos gallos” dice y nada mas levantaba su sombrero y están unos gallos allí peleando [así todo

RHM: EF: J:

[((laughing)) [((laughing)) Pues pues nos gustaba pues ver así ((clears throat)) pero un ratito no más y ya ponía su sombrero y ya se desaparecían los -

Well I don’t know what it is that they studied before that I the truth is I can’t explain nor can I say what it is because I—one of my uncles was also like that before uhm he knew those words well … but what he did (does) for example before we were little kids then little kids well and so to entertain us he would say “Come here (really) come here to see what what thing I am going to do” and how they use hats you have see that [in San Juan Guelavía the men] use hats and he put his hat there and he said “You all will see” he says “now you will see” he says “how some roosters fight” he says and he just lifted his hat and there are some roosters there fighting [like that everything [((laughing)) [((laughing)) Well well we liked well to see like that ((clears throat)) but it was only for an instant and then he put down his hat and then they disappeared the -

4 Throughout this chapter, in all transcript examples, talk is shown in the original language spoken in the left-hand column, and is translated into English in the right-hand column. Spanish is shown in italicized text, Zapotec is underlined, mixed forms are both italicized and underlined, and English is in plain text.

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RHM: J:

- Wow! Pero era su palabra o no se como era … Eera no se y como si si porque se nos figuraba eso pues … Si nos (hipnotizaba) o algo o o a que pues porque se podíamos y no se … O no se y una vez y entonces así nos hacía pues y nos gustaba decíamos que así … como éramos chamacos nos peleábamos así y todos éramos así, traviesos y una vez que nos dice tanto estábamos con el que “Quiero que nos saque el gallito, quiero que nos saque el gallito” y estábamos y ya en una de esas que agarra el y todo y que levanta su sombrero dice “Orale pues” dice “sientense allí alrededor” dice “y ahorita voy a sacar si” y que pone su sombrero, y cuando le levantó su sombrero una viborota estaba allí … Y así, así enrollado y parado su cabeza, y todos gritabamos [pues así todo

EF: RHM: J:

[((laughing)) [Mhmm “Ay! Ay!” ((laughing)) y todo pues y pues nos gritamos y nos espantamos y nosotros ya todos sentados allí y todos unos sobre el otro así de como pararnos nos espantamos!

- Wow! But it was his word or I don’t now how it was … It w-was I don’t know how if if because he created this illusion for us … If he (hypnotized) us or something or or that well because we could and I don’t know … Or I don’t know once and then like that he would make us well and we liked [it] we said that like that … as we were little kids we fought like that and all of us were like that, naughty and one time he said to us we were with him so much “I want you to bring out the rooster for us, I want you to bring out the rooster for us” and we were there and then [one of these times] that he grabs it and everything and he lifts his hat he says “Ok well” he says “sit around there” he says “and I will bring it out right now yes” and he puts his hat, and when he lifted his hat a huge viper was there … And like that, like that curled up and its head standing up, and we screamed [well like that and everything [((laughing)) [Mhmm “Ah! Ah!” ((laughing)) and everything well and well we screamed and we were scared and we then all seated there and all of us on top of each other [trying to] stand up we got scared!

Following the conclusion of her tale Julieta explained further that in the past many locals were well versed in the study of magic, but she was uncertain of how to classify it, saying “la magia blanca o magia negra no se” [whether white magic or black magic I don’t know]. This excerpt demonstrates a few key points that I will build on in my discussion of Isidro’s stories below. Firstly, the lines that might conventionally divide “real life” narratives and fictional tales are drawn somewhat differently within the Guelavian community. The story Julieta tells about her uncle is fantastical, reflecting a view that magic exists and can have real and unpredictable effects on the world around us, a theme that emerges in many formal stories as well. This leads to the second point, which is that it is not the content of stories per se that differentiates them from experiential narratives, but rather how they are deployed in social interaction. What sets Julieta’s narrative apart from the formal stories that were told to me is how

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it was presented to me, and how it was told. She did not introduce this story at all, and it did not have a name. She began telling it spontaneously in the middle of a discussion about the kinds of spiritual practices that Guelavians engaged in in the past. In contrast, the story performances that I observed were formally introduced with story titles, opening and closing formulas, and the interactive contexts within which they unfolded were framed as storytelling sessions. They were structured similarly to fables, largely featuring generic characters, and they took place in equally generic contexts, not in the time or place we were inhabiting (with the notable exception of stories I was told about the history of San Juan Guelavía itself, and how the community came to be). However, as I discuss below, during the course of storytelling events there was a great deal of movement between formal, focal stories and personal anecdotal narratives like Julieta’s shown above. I came to see that in Isidro’s performances his narrative anecdotes about previous storytelling experiences formed an integral part of storytelling events, serving to connect present and past tellings. This interdiscursive linking enabled him to construct a persona imbued with discursive and moral authority, deserving of the respect of kin and community.

5

Isidro’s Stories

On a few separate occasions I was invited to visit the homes of elder males explicitly to hear and record didxiin [anecdotes/stories] told in didxza [Zapotec]. My first experience hearing a formal story performance was at the home of *Carmela, who had invited me to come and hear her father Isidro’s stories. Isidro, a widower in his late seventies, was the patriarch of his family, comprised of his seven children, twenty-one grandchildren, and growing crop of greatgrandchildren. He was widely respected within the Guelavian community for his service as a member of the municipal council, and for his knowledge of local history and customs. He was frequently called upon by family members to deliver words of benediction on celebratory occasions, which required the use of the reverential register of SJGZ. Within his family he was recognized for his skillful use of SJGZ and storytelling prowess, and all of his children remembered growing up hearing his stories. For all of these reasons Carmela considered him to be an ideal research subject for me, a scholar interested in local linguistic and cultural practices. During this first session I recorded a long stretch of interaction and story performances that spanned over two hours. In the analysis below I present excerpts from different points during this recorded period, highlighting those moments when Isidro shifted from the performance of focal stories to the nar-

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ration of personal experiences that contextualized the story-in-progress. As Isidro began his first story, excerpted below, he and I (EF) were seated on the patio while Carmela bustled about preparing a meal for us. Isidro began to preface his story in Spanish, referencing a past story performance that took place when he was visiting his grandsons who live in Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico: Example 2, recorded 4/19/2008, San Juan Guelavía I:

C: EF: I:

Los los niños ese niet-los nietecitos que tengo allá en Veracruz le conte un dice le conté un cuento que se llama En español o en idioma? Como lo quiere usted? Pues como usted quiere contar Bueno principio le le estoy explicando en español pues

The the boys the grand-the grandsons that I have there in Veracruz I told him a he says I told him a story that is called In Spanish or in Zapotec? How do you want it? Well how you want to tell it Fine first I am explaining to you you in Spanish well

I have highlighted in boldface text the moment when Carmelita interrupted to ask me: “En español o en idioma? Como lo quiere usted?” [In Spanish or in Zapotec? How do you want it?]. The “it” in her question referred to the story around which our interaction was organized. In asking me what language I preferred to hear the story in she recalled our previous conversation when she invited me to hear her father tell stories in idioma [Zapotec], and pointed to my role as a researcher interested in learning the local variety of Zapotec. She also confirmed that I was the principal audience member to whom the story was directed. Carmela did not position herself as part of the audience for the story, but was walking within earshot of Isidro on her way to the kitchen when she interjected. I responded that he should tell the story in whatever way he chose, and so he returned to his story preamble, which he spoke in Spanish, “Bueno principio le estoy explicando en español pues” [Fine first I am explaining to you in Spanish well].5 By drawing attention to the formal features of Isidro’s tale (in this case the language in which it was being told) and the participant structure of the interaction, Carmela framed his story as distinct from the surrounding ordinary talk, during which speakers’ language choices and participant roles were rarely if ever commented on explicitly (see Goffman 1974). Isidro subsequently built on this framing by elaborating on his previous storytelling experience with

5 For a more extensive discussion of the role of language choice in Guelavian storytelling see Falconi 2013.

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his grandsons in Veracruz, calling further explicit attention to his story performances as significant, reportable events. He explained that his grandson *Eduardo was very grateful to Isidro for having told him the story, Grigorillo, because it helped him to win a prize in school. The plot of the story centers on the theme of sibling rivalry between Grigorillo, the industrious and righteous youngest brother (who is his father’s favorite), and his two older brothers who are plagued by jealousy and sloth. In the following excerpt Isidro reports Eduardo’s account of the interactions leading up to this triumph. He begins with Eduardo’s description of the school assignment, which was to collect a story from “the ancestors.” He explained that nearly all of the students searched through storybooks to select their tales, storybooks of the variety that parents often read to their children at night, containing tales about rabbits, ducks, and the like. When the teacher told the students to line up and hand in their stories, Eduardo hung back at the end of the line, afraid to hand in his story. The teacher, however, was impressed by the uniqueness of the story, commenting that he had never seen it in any book. Eduardo explained that it was not from a book, but was told to him by his grandfather, whereupon the teacher announced to the class that Eduardo had been awarded first prize for his submission. As he narrated this series of events Isidro integrated telling parts of the story of Grigorillo (see boldfaced text below), intermixing his voice as storyteller with his retrospective account of past personal experiences: Example 3, recorded 4/19/2008, San Juan Guelavía I:

Y entonces este y un día dice cuando fui otra vez no? dice me dijo “Mire abuelito” dice “Sirvió mu:cho la este la leyenda que usted” el el me dice que es leyenda vaya pero yo aquí le digo que es un cuento … “El maestro de nosotros … pidió … que escribieramos cuento un un una historia o un cuento si de los anteriores, entonces to:do mis compañeros” dice este “lo hicieron pero copiendo en el libro” porque ya ve usted que hay libros que traía cuentitos de esos de los patitos de con-del conejito de todo eso pero es escrito pues, y luego el hizo su su su leyenda, del cuento que se llama grego-gre-gregorio se llamó el chamaquito, pero le decían Gregorillo, Grigorillo, eran tres hermanos, y entonces este de los tres hermanos el mayor, el segundo, y el es el tercero, era, mas pequeño de ellos,

And so uhm and one day he says when I went another time right? He says he said to me “Look grandpa” he says “The legend was ve:ry helpful that you” he says to me that it is a legend well but I here say that it is a story … “Our teacher … asked … that we write a story a a a history or a story yes of the ancestors, so a:ll of my classmates” he says uhm “did it but copying from a book” because you have seen that there are books that had little stories of those of the little ducks of with of the little rabbit of all of that but it’s written well, … and then he did his his his legend, from the story called Grego-Gre-Gregorio is the name of the young boy, but they called him Grigorillo, Grigorillo, there were three brothers, and so well of the three

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falconi pero to:odo lo que el decía le obedecía su papa, y todo sale bien dice, toditito la palabra que le (delegida) su papa, todo todo se cumple pues, en eso se enoja los hermanos, se enojaban con el, y este, así le contaba yo es es l-es larga la historia pues, y luego dice cuando yo termine to:do eso dice “lo escribí y pidió el maestro” … y que van corriendo “estuvimos en fila” dice “y no quería yo este introducirme de mis compañeros, me quede casi, casi penultimo de los compañeros cuando aceptó el maestro todo todo “A donde sacaron ese cuento?” “Pues en tal ((pointing with hand)) libro” y otro dice que “mi papa me contó esto que viene de tal libro” “Ah bueno” “Y cuando me tocó”” dice … dice “Y tu Eduardo?” porque se llama Eduardo “Y tu Eduardo? Tu leyenda?” aquí esta el maestro comenzó a leerlo dice que un hubo un hubo un día dice que “Había tres hermanos, su papa y su mama, pero todo lo que decía este Grigorillo todo este se cumple. A veces cuando su papa dice ‘Mire, mire hijo’ dice ((sucks teeth)) ‘creo que nosotros’ dice ‘ya, paramos de trabajar’ dice ‘porque la lluvia no parece, el viento se seca la tierra’ bueno luego dice Grigorillo ‘No papa no se vaya de de este- como se dice—no se vaya usted desanimar’ dice ‘Usted trabaje usted Dios ya sabe’ dice, vera vera usted dice ‘Hoy no va a llover pero mañana si’ y cumplido dice, luego el otro día ya comenzó a llover y alguna otra cosa que pregunta su papa el ‘Como hacemos Grigorillo?’ ‘Pues así así papa’ dice, y todo eso obedecia su papa ya sabía su papa de que de que lo que decía pues es efectivo …” … entonces dice el maestro dice “Ahora *Eduardo” dice “A donde sacastes ese cuento? Este si que nunca le he visto en ningún libro” “No maestro” dice “Yo lo no lo copie en el libro, eso lo contó mi abuelito … Vive este en Oaxaca, pero de vez en cuando viene a visita:rnos y cuenta y nos nos hace cuenta las leyendas que el sabía” “Y sabe más?” “Si” dice “Miren hermanos” dice “miren alumnos, este Eduardo sacó el primer lugar, de su cuento de su leyenda el va a quedar en primer lugar” y ganó una beca … igual me hizo la nietecita

brothers the oldest, the second, and he is the third, he wa:s smaller than them, but e:verything that he said his father obeyed, and everything went well he said, every single word that he declared his Dad, in everything everything he complied, well, with this the brothers got angry, they became angry with him, and well, that is how I told it [to him] it’s it’s long the story well, and later he says when I finished all of it he says “I wrote it down and the teacher asked for it” … and they go running “we were in line” he says “and I didn’t want to uhm show myself from my classmates, I stayed almost, almost second to last of the classmates when the teacher accepted all all “Where did you get this story” “Well in such-andsuch ((pointing with hand)) book” and another said that “my father told me this that comes from such-and-such book” “Oh good” “And when it was my turn”” he says he says “And you Eduardo?” because his name is Eduardo “And you Eduardo? Your legend?” here is the teacher he began to read it, it says that one there was one there was one day it says that “There were three brothers, their father and their mother, but everything that this Grigorillo said everything well came to pass. Sometimes when his father said ‘Look, look son’ he says ((sucks teeth)) ‘I think that we’ he says ‘will stop working now’ he says ‘because the rain is not coming, the wind is drying out the land’ fine well later Grigorillo says ‘No Dad don’t go from from’ well—how do you say ‘don’t get disheartened’ he says ‘you work you, God knows already’ he says … ‘Today it won’t rain but tomorrow it will’ and it came to pass it says, later the next day it began to rain and whenever there was another thing his father would ask ‘What should we do Grigorillo?’ ‘Well, like this, like this Dad’ he says, and everything his father obeyed his father knew then that that what he said was effective …” … and so the teacher says he says “Now Eduardo” he says “Where did you get this story? This one I have never seen in any

telling traditions: the dynamics of zapotec storytelling de Pilar, la Carolina, dice “Cuentame usted una leyenda abuelito” dice “Si” le dije que le cuento …

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book,” “No teacher” he says “I did not copy it in the book, this my grandpa told me … He lives uhm in Oaxaca, but sometimes he comes to visit us and he tells and he makes tells us us legends that he knew” “And does he know more?” “Yes” he says “Look brothers” he says “look students, this Eduardo won first place, for his story for his legend he will be in first place” and he won a scholarship … the same thing happened to me with the granddaughter of Pilar, Carolina, she says “Tell me a legend grandfather” she says “Yes” I said to her and I told her …

There are several points of interest in this narrative segment. Firstly, it functions as a kind of meta-story, which is both about the importance of traditional storytelling, and about Isidro as a storyteller. Isidro’s use of this meta-story as a preamble to the story he would later tell me worked to establish his discursive authority in several ways. The narrative serves to highlight his own status as a master teller, with privileged knowledge about traditional stories that his novice grandson lacks. He invokes a model of expert-novice interaction, in which the entire reported narrative is framed as Eduardo’s expression of gratitude for the gift of the story that Isidro had bestowed upon him. While listening to this anecdote I got the distinct impression that Eduardo acted rightly, that this was the proper way to honor the knowledge and wisdom of one’s elders. In his narrative Isidro skillfully crafted the action sequence leading up to the granting of the award so as to heighten suspense. In his report Eduardo describes waiting in line to hand in his story, worried as he watched his classmates hand in assignments that they copied out of books. The detailed description of this process also allowed Isidro to characterize the stories of the other children as inferior to his own, which he accomplished by repeating that the children found their stories in “tal libro” [such-and-such book], emphasizing their ordinary and generic qualities. When the teacher finally accepted Eduardo’s story and called attention to the fact that he had never seen it in any book, Eduardo nervously responded, “Yo lo no lo copie en el libro, eso lo contó mi abuelito” [I did not copy it in the book, this my grandpa told me]. When the teacher responded by awarding Eduardo a prize, the logic of the sequence was laid bare: the traditional oral origin of Isidro’s story was honored in contrast with the ordinariness of the storybook tales that all of the other children handed in. His deployment of this anecdote affirms the insight that “[i]n narrating we do not replay an intact experience so much as bring experience into social and psychological focus” (Ochs 2004:276).

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In addition, Isidro’s status as a venerated grandfather hailing from Oaxaca, widely known in Mexico to be a bastion of indigenous cultural and linguistic traditions, bolstered the authenticity of the story still further. In Isidro’s metastory Oaxaca becomes a chronotope, a point “where time and space intersect and fuse” (Bakhtin 1981:7), and he and his story are cast as belonging to an era prior to the moment in the classroom. As Ochs suggests, “when tellers recount narratives of human experience, they tend to become enveloped in a temporal frame of reference that resonates with their experience, memory, anticipation, and imagination” (2004:273). In the above excerpt Isidro aligns himself with the vision of oral tradition that is valorized through the teacher’s awarding of the scholarship prize, highlighting those elements of both his persona and storytelling style that bolster his legitimacy as an elder, knowledgeable about folk traditions. He embeds this story about a past storytelling event into the present of the unfolding storytelling event, creating a “coeval alignment” (Perrino 2011:101), a relationship of likeness, between them (see also Silverstein 2005). Perrino (2011:101) suggests that such coeval alignments between past and present events tend to occur with greater frequency as events are retold: “This distribution of coeval alignment may thus indicate something very general about this phenomenon … that it tends to presuppose (and at times helps create) a degree of interpersonal connectedness.” In the case of the interaction in which Isidro, Carmela, and I were participating, the retelling of this past story-event served to provide a specific kind of background context, tailored to me as primary audience member. As I had little familiarity with Isidro’s role as a storyteller within his family, or with the way his stories were viewed or received by others, this retelling brought his discursive past into relevance in the present moment, enabling him to reflexively manage unfolding interactional dynamics (cf. Perrino 2011). In describing the discursive circulation of the story from oral narrative passed down to his grandson, to a prize-winning submission in a student essay contest, Isidro enhanced his own status as teller, along with the authenticity of his stories. He mentioned later on in his narrative that Eduardo’s teacher was eager to know his name, to meet him in person, and to hear more of his wonderful stories. Isidro’s use of reported speech, in this case direct quotation, exemplifies “spoken mediation” defined as “the relaying of spoken messages through an intermediary” (Bauman 2004:129). He used Eduardo’s report of the events surrounding the awarding of the story-prize to voice praise spoken on his own behalf, praise that he clearly wished me to hear, but could not say outright about himself without the risk of appearing self-aggrandizing. The form of spoken mediation evident in his narrative is particularly illuminating for teasing apart the complexities of discursive power and authority, as Isidro, the mas-

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ter teller, drew on the evaluation of a high-status Spanish speaker, in this case a schoolteacher, to authenticate his story as exemplary of indigenous storytelling traditions. These dynamics are complicated still further when one considers to whom this story was being told—to myself, an American anthropologist, of Latin American heritage, and a fluent Spanish speaker whom he knew was interested in learning his native language, and about the cultural practices and traditions of his community. As mentioned above, the entire reported sequence shown in Example 3 was only one facet of the multilayered speech event in which Isidro, Carmela, and I were participating. It was organized as an embedded preamble to the actual focal story he performed for me that afternoon, detailing the adventures of a princess and a hunter. Over the course of the two-hour recording his own voice as storyteller was interwoven with myriad other voices, such as the voice of his grandson Eduardo, Eduardo’s teacher, and school classmates, all incorporated through the use of reported speech (see Bakhtin 1981; Hill 1995; Irvine 1996; Silverstein 1993[1981]; Urban 1984; Vološinov 1978[1929]). The multilayered voice structure of Isidro’s storytelling session is reminiscent of Jane Hill’s (1995) analysis of the narration of a research participant whom she dubbed Don Gabriel. In telling the story of his son’s murder, Don Gabriel builds up an extremely intricate “voice system” in which his own voice as narrator is interwoven with reported speech of twenty other voices, representing others who appear in his tale. Hill (1995:108) argues that this voice system is the “site of consciousness and subjectivity in discourse … the field for dialogue and for conflict” through which he negotiates not only the multiple voices of other characters, but his own “self laminations” (1995:116) which are organized relative to a moral center. Similarly, in Example 3, Isidro moves between the reported voices of others, and several laminations of his own voice, including: (1) his reported voice from past interactions, (2) his voice as storyteller, (3) his voice as narrator of past experiences, and (4) his present voice with whom Carmela and I were interacting. Drawing on all of these voices he crafted a moral world in which he played the central role of respected storyteller and venerated elder. When Isidro finally began telling me the story that he had been leading up to, the transition happened quickly and abruptly, marked only by a brief clarification of the language in which he would tell the story, and a check to make sure my recorder was ready. Both of these asides were an indication that the focal performance was about to commence. In the excerpt shown below I include this opening sequence, and an extended portion of the end of story he told me, entitled “Una Princesa y Un Cazador” [A Princess and a Hunter], to exemplify his storytelling style. The story recounted the adventures of a princess

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who was banished to the wilderness by her father the king to be devoured by wild animals, because, for reasons unknown, she had displeased him. She was discovered and rescued by a hunter and his three supernaturally gifted dogs, Tirabrazos [Arm-ripper], Rompecadena [Hip-breaker], and Rompefierro [Ironbreaker], who slayed the wolves who would have eaten her. Eventually the princess returns home, where an imposter claiming to be her rescuer attempts, unsuccessfully, to win her hand in marriage. In the portion shown below, the hunter is declared to be her true savior and marries her himself, whereupon the rival attempts to murder both of them on the day of the wedding. Ultimately, he is foiled and run off, and the hunter is named the heir of the kingdom: Example 4, recorded 4/19/2008, San Juan Guelavía I:

En Zapoteco esta bien, ya esta listo la la grabadora? Bueno. Guu tiby guu tiby bniety guupë este tiby llingambë bueno lliin tiby varón chiy tiby lliindxaap rey, le decían princesa … ((several minutes later towards the very end of the story)) “Que gue nab te ruren yaan bënquë bëny cazador quënqui ban defender laabi cun dexicuu” nab chiy ruu guellib dexicuubë, chon beecuu chiy ruu su chon xplad de beecuu cun xplad princes chiy ziiyza bzuub xplad princes teiquintë. Ax guk bod xtendeb chiy nizeequi gudilrxë maner guelduux tuby guëchguib laani almoad te chiy gat novi chuu guëichguibqui. “Buen,” ax nab prices “con cuidad, quët cuenzi gaatu” nab baany revis-chiyruu banbë revisar ax bëdia guëchguibqui. Chiyru nab bueno chiy ax na bënqui “or niba cayot palom” rnideb bocadito [de novios] chiy icuab tenedor laanruu novi te gati novi per dxaapqui princesqui banbë defender novi. “Laabën rcaaza laabën banbë defender nare.” Buen, ax biaan rey conformë irate bana rey conformë chiy raipi rey laab “An liu a no chial llindxaapa an liu inëdxa irate ni napa hasta mi trono a yaniu logar xtena.” Pues colorin colorado, ya se acabó el cuento.6

In Zapotec that’s fine, is that that recorder ready? Ok. There was a there was a person who had uhm a son well child a man, and then a daughter of a king, they called her princess … ((several minutes later towards the very end of the story)) “Get out, because this man is going to stay here, the hunter is the one who defended [the princess] with his dogs” he said and later he went for his dogs, three dogs, and so they served three plates to the dogs and the princess’s plate so that they could all eat. And they had a wedding for them the one who had fled found a way to conceal a nail inside of their pillow, so that when the princess-bride lay down the nail would stab her. “Well,” said the hunter to the princess “be careful, don’t lie down quickly” and then he searched the pillow and found a nail. Later [his enemy] said “at the moment that they are eating the dove,” what we call the little bite [of wedding cake], then he would hide a fork inside the the huntergroom’s bite, so that he would die, but the princess-bride saved him. “It is him, him that I love, he, he is the one who defended me.” Well, and so the king accepted all of this and he said to [the hunter-groom]

6 The phrase used here is a version of the formulaic closing rhyme, “Colorin colorade, este cuento

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“Now you now that you are my daughter’s husband, now to you I give all that I have, including my throne I will leave to you.” *Well my friend, this story is at an end.

This excerpt demonstrates the transition between the talk preceding and immediately following the telling of the story, during which Isidro shifts from his ordinary speaking voice, into the voice of teller, and then back again (see boldfaced text above). As we agreed that he would tell the story in Zapotec, this switch in voice is also marked by a shift from Spanish, the language in which he was talking to me, to Zapotec, the language in which he performed the story (opening and closing shown in boldfaced text above). The conclusion of the story was marked by Isidro’s shift back to Spanish and his use of the conventional Spanish story-closing formula “colorin colorado.” Isidro explained to me afterwards that he chose to tell me the same story he had recently told his great-granddaughter Carolina, which features a female protagonist, the princess. In contrast, the story he reported telling to Eduardo, and which I observed him telling another grandson, entitled “Grigorillo,” detailed the adventures of three brothers. This is an example of audience/protagonist parallelism, meaning that the traits of the story’s protagonist often matched those of the primary audience member(s). I observed the use of this technique by another Guelavian storyteller I encountered during my research (see Falconi 2013), and other scholars have pointed to similar phenomena. For example, Kirin Narayan (1989) observed the use of this form of parallelism in the Hindu folk narratives of *Swamiji, a spiritual guru with whom she worked for many years, when telling tales to his disciples. As she explains: The settings of these stories are occasionally named, or compared to familiar places. The allusions shift depending on the listeners present and the places they are likely to know … Other comparisons appear to be strategies to make the stories more vivid to listeners. The familiar settings of these stories are a teaching device which underlines that their morals are not floating in some faraway realm but are directly relevant to the here and now. The mundane settings in which listeners’ lives unfold become illuminated by the stories [serving as a] bridge between narrative space and the here and now of teller and listeners … The stories are,

se ha acabado,” often invoked to end storytelling sessions in Spanish and does not have a literal English translation.

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in fact, sprinkled with artifacts of the modern world … Yet the underlying themes of the stories are not transformed: they stand on a continuum with the Hindu past. Narayan 1989:237–239

In addition to the use of parallelism, Isidro’s choice of language within his story performances also played a role in enabling him to connect to his audience members, namely his grandchildren (and the occasional anthropologist), most of whom are Spanish-dominant. According to Isidro the other story events referenced in the examples above were performed in Spanish, as neither Eduardo nor Carolina was sufficiently competent to understand them in Zapotec. According to many Guelavians I worked with such stories were told in Zapotec for generations, and thus the use of Spanish in these reported tellings constitutes a break with local discursive tradition that is bound up with patterns of language shift among Guelavian youth. However, by making the choice to tell these stories in Spanish tellers like Isidro can connect with their audience more directly, enabling them to blur boundaries; boundaries between fiction and reality, audience and protagonist, as well as between the traditional past and the present circumstances in which these stories are performed. His style of telling resonates with Basso’s description of “stalking with stories” (1984), the method by which tellers actively engage their audience in a storyworld that they can relate to, and within which they are more receptive to the messages tellers want to communicate. Isidro’s use of Zapotec when telling me the story of the princess and the hunter can be viewed in this light, as an effort to accommodate my interests in his native language, whereas his use of Spanish with his grandchildren fit with their linguistic competence and expectations. His dexterous use of language varieties resonates with the assertion that “in certain multilingual situations, the choice of language or languages can be seen as an affective display” (Webster 2010:44; see also Irvine 1990). As the storytelling session progressed Isidro described another context in which his great-granddaughter Carolina has asked him to tell her stories for a school assignment, much like Eduardo’s. It is important to note here that Carolina lives in Guelavía like Isidro. After telling her the tale of the princess and the hunter he proceeded to tell her the origin story of their community, San Juan Guelavía, which he reports in the example below: Example 5, recorded 4/19/2008, San Juan Guelavía F:

Y luego le conté todo este la fundación de este pueblito … Cuando se fundó en que año

And later I told her uhm the foundation of this little town … When they founded it in

telling traditions: the dynamics of zapotec storytelling en que, bueno yo no lo ví pero me platicaban pues … Si fue como en mil quiñentos en mil quiñentos oche:nta por allí fue que se … Fundó este pueblo pues

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what year in what, well I didn’t see it but they told me about it well … Yes it was in fifteen-hundred, in fifteen-hundred-ei:ghty around there it was that they … Founded this town well

By sharing this story about the history of the town to his granddaughter who lives locally, Isidro established his command over a body of local lore and tradition, both to her, and presumably to her teacher, to whom she later submitted a written version of the story. Similarly, by sharing this tale with me, a foreign scholar expressly interested in local history and tradition, he established himself as an authoritative source of knowledge about the past. As he began the story he explained that “yo no lo vi pero así me platicaban” [I didn’t see it but they told me about it]. This evidential phrase served to locate the source of Isidro’s knowledge in the experiences of other elders who preceded him, and linked his story to theirs. He then proceeded to tell the locally accepted origin story of the community. The tale revolves around the repeated disappearances of a statue of St. John the Baptist, each time at midnight, from the neighboring town of Macuilxochitl, and its miraculous reappearance in the small settlement that would ultimately become San Juan Guelavía. In the excerpt below Isidro describes the response of the residents of Macuil, after the statue moved for the second time, and the reaction of the small band of settlers: Example 6, recorded 4/19/2008, San Juan Guelavía F:

“La ultima por la ultima vez vamos a llevar” y lo llevaron y los los que se quedaron a a rezaban imploraban a Dios que el regrese, y regresó solo pero así pura media noche. Por eso en idoma se le llama gueel via, gueel via, porque gueel es media noche, via es se fue, gueel via, por eso se llamo este pueblo Gueel-via

EF: F:

Ah Si y en es en idioma gueel via, pero ahora agregaron en español Guel-a-vía

EF: F:

O:h Si eso es lo que sucedió pues … Por eso se llama este pueblo Guelavía … Pero en idioma es gueel via Aha

EF:

“The last time, for the last time we are going to take [the statue back]” and they took it and those those that stayed to to prayed implored God that the statue return, and it returned on its own like that only at midnight. For this reason in Zapotec they call it gueel via, gueel via, because guel is midnight, via means went away, gueel via, for this reason they called this town Gueel-via Ah Yes and in it is in Zapotec gueel via, but now they have put it together in Spanish Guel-a-vía O:oh Yes that is what happened well … For that reason this town is called Guelavía … But in Zapotec it is gueel via Aha

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falconi Se fue a medianoche … Si y siempre se quedó se quedó el el señor San Juan aquí es nuestro patron y luego el este la palabra que dijeron “gueel via” se quedó también Guelavía

[It] went away at midnight … Yes and always he stayed he stayed the the man Saint John here is our patron saint and later he uhm the word that they said “gueel via” stayed as well Guelavía

As shown above, at the story’s conclusion Isidro explained how the tale became enshrined in the town’s moniker, carefully parsing out the morphemes of the word Guelavía [gueel-via] and explaining the Zapotec etymology, which can be roughly glossed as ‘midnight flight.’ As the statue was of St. John the Baptist, the town became known as San Juan Guelavía, or “St. John fled at midnight,” a succinct summary of its origin story. In sharing this tale with me during this storytelling session Isidro affirmed his local historical knowledge, as well as his linguistic expertise, clearly positioning himself in the role of teacher, and me as his student. In subsequent interactions with him and his family members in other social contexts I was able to observe how Isidro dexterously adapted his assertions of authority and status to the particular dynamics of the situation. Much like the stories of the guru Swamiji studied by Narayan, Isidro was able to draw on the same pool of stories and anecdotes with different interlocutors across contexts, while tailoring them in such a way as to fit the particular occasion. Thus, he could tell the same story to his ten-year-old granddaughter, and me, a foreign scholar, while creating a discursive environment uniquely tailored to each of us. I encountered another striking example of this ability on the occasion of Isidro’s seventy-eighth birthday, nearly a year later.

6

Transborder Stories

I had just returned to Guelavía from Los Angeles, where I had begun to do fieldwork among Guelavians living there, in order to attend a wedding and to observe and participate in the celebration of the festival honoring San Juan Bautista, the aforementioned Patron Saint of Guelavía. My return trip coincided with Isidro’s birthday, and I was invited both to participate in the celebration and to videotape it so that I could bring the video back to Los Angeles to share with his family there. Many Guelavians I worked with made such requests of me, both because of the ease with which I am able to travel between locations across the U.S.–Mexico border, and because making such requests forms part of a well-established pattern of circular exchange between kin and community members living apart.

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Carmela, Isidro’s daughter, hosted a small party, attended by about twenty family members. As we sat around the table talking and joking, Isidro began to tell the tale of Grigorillo again, to another one of his grandsons, *Wilber, who lived next door with his fiancée. Just as he had begun to tell his story to Wilber, and others within earshot, the phone rang. It was Wilber’s mother and father, Julieta (see Example 1) and *Hernan, calling from Los Angeles where they were living to wish Isidro Feliz Cumpleaños [Happy Birthday]. He responded as follows: Example 7, recorded 1/18/2009, San Juan Guelavía I:

Aquí estamos conviviendo, me me están felicitando ((laugh)) (1) pero bonito no crees, aquí les estoy contando un cuento, pe:ro encantado están así de del este Grigorillo, porque le estoy contando … contando que el hijo de Paco, se llama Eduardo, quien sabe si lo conoces, Eduardo, entonces le conte el cuento cuando yo iba por allá y cuando ma-cuando su maestro de (todos) los muchachos que saben un cuento que (te) cuentan al maestro (…) pero que sea (…) todos los que contaron pero eran de libros, era lo que aprendieron de libro, y luego …

Here we are spending time together, they they are congratulating me ((laugh)) (1) but beautifully do you believe it, here I am telling them a story, h:ow fascinated they are that one of of uhm Grigorillo because I am telling it … telling that the son of Paco, his name is Eduardo, who knows if you know him, Eduardo, so I told him the story when I went over there and when te-when his teacher of (all) the boys who know a story that (you) tell the teacher (…) but that it be (…) all of them that they told but they were from books, they were what they had learned from books, and later …

In his report of the evening’s festivities Isidro used the phrase “Aquí estamos conviviendo” [Here we are spending time together] to describe the gathering of family members on his behalf. The term convivir [live together] was used frequently within the Guelavian community on celebratory and ritual occasions that brought people together, both to describe this shared togetherness and to comment on its importance for maintaining social ties at the familial and community level. Isidro’s explicit attention to the family gathering in process, and his own role as the festejado [celebrated one], keyed a particular framework for interpreting subsequent interactions (see Goffman 1974). Following his mention of the story of Grigorillo that he had begun to tell again, Isidro launched into the very same meta-story shown in Example 3, focusing once again on the inferior submissions of Eduardo’s classmates, which came out of storybooks. He seemed on the verge of turning to the merits of his own cuentos, when the topic abruptly shifted on the other end of the line. In retelling this meta-story in a new context, Isidro confirmed its importance to the overarching narrative he wanted to tell about himself as both a storyteller

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and an elder, as well as how he should be regarded by his family and community. In this sense, his story-prize anecdote constituted a “narrative set-piece” (Bauman 2004:84) that he drew on regularly, and which functioned as a cohering tie between his stories, first-person narrations, and other communicative practices. Among other things, this meta-story paints a laudatory picture of Isidro and accords with the “Looking Good Principle” (see Bauman 2004; Ochs, Smith, and Taylor 1989) that has been described by other scholars as a major goal of first-person narration. However, on his birthday, Isidro had a larger goal beyond mere self-aggrandizement in mind, which became clear a few minutes later on in this same telephone conversation. He began to lecture his daughter Julieta and her husband on the importance of this type of gathering, and the sharing of knowledge, for the maintenance of family ties, and the honoring of tradition: Example 8, recorded 1/18/2009, San Juan Guelavía I:

Entonces le digo pues Julieta, les digo pues con el mire, si se puede? Julieta? Aquí les digo pues este ahorita estamos aquí reunidos, Dios me dió esta vida, y sigo si Dios me permite, pero ustedes sig-pero ustedes también siguen comportando como ahorita, tu también te digo a ti y a tu hermana Odi este que siguen conviviendo y que siguen con este respeto, si si yo me despido de este mundo, pero ((voice quavers)) no vayan a tener problemas nunca nunca ustedes

And so I say well Julieta, I say to you all well with him look, yes can you? Julieta? Here I say to you all well uhm right now we are here together, God gave me this life, and I continue if God permits me, but you all cont-but you all also continue behaving like you do now, you also I say to you and to your sister Odi uhm that you continue spending time together and that you continue with this respect, if if I bid farewell to this world, but ((voice quavers)) you will not have problems, never never you all

Through the invocation of the story-prize anecdote in Example 7, in tandem with the description of his rapt audience members hanging on his every word, Isidro laid the groundwork for this speech. His grandson Wilber bolstered his authoritative clout, by delivering a speech thanking him for all he had done as “la cabeza de ésta familia” [the head of the family], describing Isidro as the family’s source of knowledge and understanding about the world. Thus, Isidro was well-positioned to deliver the above sermon on the value of conviviendo and respeto within the family. In fact, this was the second iteration of this speech delivered during the course of the party, the first having been addressed to the party attendants, and this second one repeated for the sake of his absent progeny living in Los Angeles. Much like the meta-story described above, this speech is an instance of spoken mediation, but in this case one that Isidro explicitly intended to circulate

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beyond the utterance, to be repeated in other places, contexts, and times. He made this clear by saying at the end of his speech to Julieta, “te digo a ti y a tu hermana *Odi” [I say to you and to your sister Odi], as Odi was not on the phone, and he wanted to ensure she got the message. In fact, he mentioned later on that the video that I was filming should be viewed as an archive of his words, that the family could return to in the future to remind themselves of this crucially important message. Thus, his speech, and the re-invocation of the story-prize meta-story, became embroiled in Isidro’s efforts to encourage connection, co-living, and a respect for the bonds of family. In the context of his phone conversation to Julieta these messages were doubly potent, serving additionally as a reminder of the special forms of communication, and the concerted efforts to maintain familial bonds across temporal and geographic distances, required in communities that stretch across borders.

7

Conclusions

In the above discussion, I demonstrated how story performances are implicated in and tied to the larger communicative economies in which they are circulated. Through these processes of circulation stories accrue layers of meaning as they are taken up and put to various uses by tellers, addressees, ratified and non-ratified over-hearers, and as in the example above, at times even by absentee parties. Explicit attention to these processes of circulation provides insight into the particular discursive strategies used by storytellers and the various kinds of social work they can perform. Stories are rarely, if ever, performed in isolation, but are rather embedded within interactive and social contexts that shape how they are told, and the processes by which they are made meaningful to tellers and listeners. Isidro’s storytelling practices, examined in the examples above, are exemplary in this regard, particularly because they illustrate the fluidity with which speakers can and do move between different verbal genres within the frame of a single speech event. His weaving together of personal narratives of past experiences with the performance of practiced stories demonstrates how these two genres of talk work together symbiotically. By linking the storyworlds he conjures to his own lived experiences, Isidro constructs contextually specific frameworks of interpretation shaped by his relationships and interactive histories with his listeners. Thus, his stories can be used to share his knowledge and experience with children and grandchildren, to teach a foreign anthropologist about the cultural and linguistic traditions of his natal community, and to affirm his status as a knowledgeable and respected elder with the moral

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authority to instruct his progeny on how best to live their lives. The complex dynamics bound up with the telling of stories are more fully appreciable when they are not analytically separated from other quotidian conversational forms, such as personal narratives. Indeed, the interdiscursive links connecting Isidro’s stories to his narratives about storytelling experiences are so dense that they cannot be understood separately. Analytical approaches that recognize the blurry boundaries between discursive forms can more fully account for the dynamic relationship between lived experience and verbal expression.

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Kroskrity, Paul V. 2012. Telling Stories in the Face of Danger: Language Renewal in Native American Communities. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Mannheim, Bruce, and Krista Van Fleet. 1998. “The Dialogics of Southern Quechua Narrative.” American Anthropologist 100(2):326–346. Nader, Laura. 1990. Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Narayan, Kirin. 1989. Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ochs, Elinor. 2004. “Narrative Lessons.” In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Alessandro Duranti, ed. Pp. 269–289. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. 1996. “Narrating the Self.” Annual Review of Anthropology 25(1):19–43. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ochs, Elinor, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor. 1989. “Detective Stories at Dinnertime: Problem Solving Through Co-Narration.” In Cultural Dynamics 2(2):238–257. Perrino, Sabina. 2011. “Chronotopes of Story and Storytelling Event in Interviews.” Language in Society 40(1):91–103. Relaño Pastor, Ana María, and Anna De Fina. 2005. “Contesting Social Place: Narratives of Language Conflict.” In Dislocations/Relocations: Narratives of Displacement. Mike Baynhem and Anna De Fina, eds. Pp. 36–60. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing. Sicoli, Mark. 2007. A Linguistic Ethnography of Tone and Voice in a Zapotec Region. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Silverstein, Michael. 1993[1981]. “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function.” In Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. John Lucy, ed. Pp. 33–58. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, Michael. 2005. “Axes of Evals: Token Versus Type Interdiscursivity.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):6–22. Stephen, Lynn. 2005. Zapotec Women: Gender, Class and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stephen, Lynn. 2007. Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California and Oregon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Urban, Greg. 1984. “Speech about Speech in Speech about Action.” Journal of American Folklore 97(385):310–328. Verschueren, Jef. 2000. “Notes on the Role of Metapragmatic Awareness in Language Use.” Pragmatics 10(4):439–456. Vološinov, Valentin Nikolaevich. 1978[1929]. “Reported Speech.” In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Michigan Slavic Contributions Series, 8. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, eds. Pp. 176–196. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications.

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chapter 6

Etiological Storytelling and the Interdiscursive Trajectory of a Diagnostic Odyssey Jennifer R. Guzmán

Unfolding meaning becomes a personal and social creation, wherein, unlike a hand fan unfurling in a pre-determined array, significance is built through and experienced in temporal bursts of sense-making, often in coordination with others, often left hanging in realms of ambiguity. Ochs 2012:152

∵ It was a rainy Spring day when Señora Marta and her husband, Don Ernesto, first traveled to a city in Southern Chile to consult with a lawentuchefe (‘herbal healer’) concerning the health of their son, Daniel. The trip required three bus rides from their home in the rural foothills of the Andes, where they farmed under the shadow of an active volcano. The last bus took them downtown in the regional capital city, where the lawentuchefe, Señora Lorena, attended patients at the Mapuche Wellness Center. Daniel’s parents earned a modest income, mostly from Ernesto’s seasonal wage labor and the sale of Marta’s garden produce, but they were prepared to spend from their small savings if it meant they could find treatment and reach a better understanding about what was ailing their 12-year-old son, who had been suffering from what Marta described as “un sintoma medio raro” (‘a quite strange symptom’) for about six months. This chapter traces the emergence of a dynamic story about Daniel’s illness as it was negotiated among the several people who were involved in Daniel’s treatment while he was under the care of Señora Lorena over the course of three months in late 2009. The trajectory of this dynamic story over time exemplifies how “personal experience may be rendered … as an enigmatic life episode” (Ochs 2004:269), partially understood and not completely resolved. Analysis of the case serves to explore several issues that lie at the heart of ethnographic and anthropological approaches to narrative, including the theorization of narrative genres and the role of storytelling in cultural reproduction. The

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analysis presented here is also situated at the intersection of narrative studies with medical anthropology, building on research that examines the storytelling practices and interactional processes that people use across diverse cultural settings to manage medical uncertainty. In order to address these issues, I draw on several contemporary strands of narrative scholarship, including work on small stories, interdiscursivity across chained events, and the construction of cultural identities. The arc of this chapter follows the natural history of a particular story, the story of Daniel’s illness over the course of multiple consultations. Early on it becomes clear that a major goal of the storytelling process is to clarify a diagnosis and identify the etiology (i.e., cause) of Daniel’s ailment. As a result, these issues resurface over and over in the talk among Daniel, his parents, and lawentuchefe Lorena, with differing candidate diagnoses and etiological explanations being proffered, tested interactionally, affirmed, rejected, considered, and abandoned. I argue that the unresolved nature of this dynamic story about Daniel’s illness at the end of the research period reflected not only the unresolved nature of the illness itself but also the partial success of interactional resistance Daniel exerted against being emplotted in a particular storyline and characterized as a particular kind of figure. Discussion of this interactional storytelling process across multiple consultations illuminates the importance of attending to interdiscursivity and the construction of cultural identities in order to understand why it is that some narrative explanations for illness gain momentum and others do not. Discussion addresses the ways that the generic framework of the Mapuche diagnostic practice of pelotun casts each of the participants (patient, caregiver, healer) into roles that shape their access to tellership and, for Daniel, his characterization as an ethnically marked or unmarked subject. These latter considerations answer a call in narrative studies to consider the “subjectivities that the telling of stories affords or constrains within a reflexive view of the relevant context and the social activity performed” (Georgakopoulou 2007:60). This chapter is based on an analysis of videorecordings of five visits that Daniel’s family made to see Señora Lorena and of audiorecordings of interviews I conducted with Señora Marta on the days of the first and last recorded visits. My interview protocol1 closely modeled the eight-question Explanatory Model 1 The primary aim of my interview was to elicit parents’ explanatory model of the illness that had occasioned their visit to the healthcare practitioner. The eight questions utilize simple vocabulary and grammatical structure to ensure that they are readily understandable. 1. What do you think has caused your problems? 2. Why do you think it started when it did?

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Interview that Arthur Kleinman and colleagues (1978) originally proposed as a clinical tool for medical providers to elicit patients’ views on their own illness. My interpretations are informed by my longitudinal fieldwork at the Mapuche Wellness Center and other healthcare settings in the region, as well as my interviews and informal conversations with Señora Lorena and other Mapuche healers. The data were collected as part of a larger ethnographic project concerning the healthcare of Mapuche children.

1

Features of Narrative as Talk-In-Interaction

This study adopts a view of storytelling and narrative as particular kinds of talk-in-interaction (Georgakopoulou 2007; Goodwin 2015), an approach that emphasizes narrative processes and narrative practices over narrative texts. This is a departure from earlier Labovian approaches that focused on singleauthored narratives that were often told in response to elicitation and subsequently analyzed for their structural features. The main premises of the narrative as talk-in-interaction approach include that narrative (1) is embedded in the process of accomplishing other tasks—it is “enmeshed in local business;” (2) is sequentially managed from turn to turn and over time as it unfolds in realtime; (3) is emergent in its meaning, which is constantly being checked and repaired as participants attend to one another’s ongoing participation; and (4) is “irreducibly situational and locally occasioned” (Georgakopoulou 2007:4). The meaning and structure of narratives are integrally tied to the contexts of their telling. This recent current in narrative theory has afforded acknowledgement and exploration of the sorts of narratives that emerge in such ordinary circumstances as dinnertable conversations. Some scholars have referred to stories that emerge in ordinary conversation as “small stories” (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008; Georgakopoulou 2007), an idea directly in opposition to the idea of grand narratives. In their groundbreaking study of everyday narratives of personal experience, Ochs and Capps (2001) make a compelling argument showing that the sharing of stories among intimates is one of our most crucial

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

What do you think your sickness does to you? How severe is your sickness? Will it have a long or short course? What kind of treatment do you think you should receive? What are the most important results you hope to receive from this treatment? What are the chief problems your sickness has caused for you? What do you fear most about your sickness?

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human resources for making sense of our lives. In the book, they also lay out a framework for the study of everyday narratives of personal experience, drawing attention in particular to how these stories differ from canonical narratives. They discuss these differences in terms of the qualities of tellership, tellability, embeddedness, linearity, and moral stance. While canonical narratives are characterized by controlled tellership, high tellability, low embeddedness in surrounding discourse, linear and chronological temporal structuring, and a constant moral stance, everyday narratives of personal experience show a far greater range of variability in these characteristics. Tellership may be shared, rather than monopolized, and may be contested over the course of a story’s telling, with telling rights passing from one person to another. The topics of everyday narratives may concern quotidian events, decisions, and happenings, issues that warrant a telling (i.e., tellability) not because they are monumental but because they address something unexpected or problematic in an individual’s life. The boundaries of everyday narratives of personal experience are often unclear due to their embeddness in larger stretches of discourse and in larger activities to which participants are primarily oriented. This embeddedness can impact how detachable a story is, how easily it can be decontextualized from its original telling and how amenable it is to recontextualization in different circumstances. Everyday narratives may be structured with an open or closed temporal and causal order—with narrated events retold in orderings that do or do not mirror chronological time. Endings may be absent, and causality may be unclear or unresolved. Finally, tellers may display a constant and certain moral stance over the course of a telling, or their stance may be fluid, shifting, or ambivalent concerning characters and actions in the storyworld.

2

The Narrative Construction of Cultural Identities

Approaches to identity in the fields of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics coincide on the premise that aspects of cultural identity (e.g., gender, ethnicity, racialized group membership) are emergent, dynamic, and achieved through semiotic displays and their uptake by others. According to this view, the social construction of cultural identities is empirically observable, a process that leaves traces that are evident both to interactional participants and analysts alike. Storytellers and story recipients constantly draw on their own habitus to “summon up, perform, and evaluate recognizable ‘cultural identities’ ” (Koven 2015:388) in their characterization of people in stories. One way this is made possible is through the recognition of certain ways of speaking (e.g., dialects, codes, registers) that are tied to “locally recognizable figures of person-

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hood” (Koven 2015:391) by indexically ordered language ideologies (Silverstein 2003). Most often, locally recognizable figures come in sets, where some will be more marked than others (Bucholtz and Hall 2004), for example when dominant and marginalized ways of speaking respectively index unmarked and racialized identities. Research exploring how individuals are characterized across chains of linked narratives (Wortham and Rhodes 2015) suggests that interdiscursivity can also play an important role in the construction of cultural identities. A study of a series of stories told by a man from the Mt. Pleasant district of Washington D.C. (Modan and Shuman 2010), for example, reveals how the man’s earlier stories functioned as an orientation for subsequent stories, where qualities of the protagonist in one story were later reinvoked in new stories. This process of reinvoking a particular stance and attitude concretized a “coherent character” (92) and “afford[ed] the creation of a larger than individual overdetermined subject” (93). This character was recognizable by enduring and fixed dispositions that recurred across differing stories, casting him in similar ways, even as the circumstances of the stories varied. In contrast to chains of stories where storytellers have a great deal of control over the ways they characterize themselves as narrative protagonists, storytelling contexts that are characterized by power differentials can lead to very different results. An example of this comes from E. Summerson Carr’s (2011) research with drugdependent women who were going through a rehabilitation program. The women’s lack of control over tellership and over the characterizations of themselves that emerged in therapists’ and others’ stories about them continuously cast them in the undesirable subject position of “addict.” Across chains of narrative events, deictic reference is an additional resource that can be marshalled to invoke characterizations from earlier stories and circulate them anew. Finally, the invocation of narrative prototypes (Bruner 2010), readily recognizable stories that are familiar to members of a given community of practice, can facilitate the framing of persons and actions as exemplars of a well-known type.

3

Storytelling in Medical Care

In the field of medical anthropology, early scholarship on illness narratives was mostly concerned with gathering narratives from patients about their illness experiences. As a result, narratives were often collected using processes of elicitation (Kleinman 1980; Kleinman, Eisenberg, and Good 1978), either by a clinician or a curious ethnographer, in the context of a research interview or medical interview. Collected stories typically featured a single teller and were shaped

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by researcher/clinican interests in understanding patients’ explanatory models of illness. Some notable examples of this thread of inquiry include Labov and Fanshel’s (1977) book-length analysis of the stories told by one patient during a single psychotherapy session. Charmaz (1997) explored self-understanding, emotion, and the management of daily life in narratives told by people with serious chronic illnesses. A more recent study using this model (Shohet 2007) identified two distinct narrative genres that anorexic women told. “Full recovery” and “struggling to recover” narratives relied on different sets of discursive/grammatical features and were characterized by women’s coherent versus shifting moral stances toward the disease. Literature on diagnostic odysseys focuses on retrospective stories told by the sick about their journeys to reach a satisfactory diagnosis. These kinds of narratives tend to emerge when patients suffer symptoms that are not easily diagnosed. Patients find themselves seeking help from multiple healthcare providers or through extensive medical testing. Diagnostic odysseys are common with certain harder-to-diagnose diseases (Garro 1994) or in cases, like obligatory genetic screening for newborns, where caregivers may be alerted to genetic anomalies but physicians are unable to discern whether these conditions will manifest in future health problems. The uncertainty that is created by these circumstances, as well as by false positive results, causes considerable anguish to parents (Timmermans and Buchbinder 2012) and is reflected in the stories they tell about their young children. In some cases where medical conditions are particularly intractable, dominant narrative explanations may emerge within a given community of practice of clinical specialists. This was observed in an ethnographic study of a pediatric pain clinic at a teaching hospital, where clinicians relied on a narrative trope of “sticky brains” in explanation for why certain kinds of children (smart ones) seemed more prone to suffer from intractable pain (Buchbinder 2015). Timmermans and Buchbinder’s (2012) work represents just one study in a growing body of research that documents the range of interactional and storytelling practices that clinicians, patients, and family members use to manage the inevitably uncertain nature of health and disease. A study of stories told by a woman with agoraphobia (Capps and Ochs 1995) in the course of ordinary and research interview activities found that her stories not only represented panic episodes but discursively constructed the experience of panic. Studies of medical discourse in children’s healthcare in the United States have found that families of color who have children suffering from life-threatening illnesses struggle to have their stories of their children’s suffering taken seriously in clinical settings, and that clinicians are prone to viewing parents of color through lenses of racialized ideologies and stigmatizing cultural narratives (Mattingly

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2010). Research conducted in oncology wards in both Spain (Clemente 2015) and France (Sarradon-Eck 2015) found cultural norms that favored nondisclosure of bad news to certain kinds of patients, limiting the scope of stories they might hear and the interactional opportunities that might be available to them for talking about worst-case scenarios and end-of-life decisions. A common thread across much of the literature concerning medical discourse and uncertainty is the salience of unequal power relations and unequal knowledge states across participants and in relation to the roles they occupy relative to one another: patient, parent, caregiver, clinician, son, or daughter. Finally, research among the Warao people of Venezuela during a cholera outbreak (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2003) found that narratives that were told early in the epidemic exhibited features of discontinuity, uncertainty, and lack of closure. Narratives told later in the course of the epidemic contained traces of various dominant and marginalized explanations for the epidemic and why it had impacted the native community so disproportionately.

4

Ethnographic Context of Research

The Araucanía Region of southern Chile is characterized by medical plurality. Chilean biomedicine, which I also refer to as conventional medicine, is the predominant resource for medical care and is widely available (with some exceptions in remote rural areas) in private and public clinics and hospitals. Mapuche medicine, the ethnomedical system of the native Mapuche, is also widely used, though it is neither recognized nor regulated by the state. These two medical systems are commonly utilized together and in combination with a range of other health resources that include folk medicine and spiritual healing practices that are tied to Catholic or Evangelical Christianity. Research in the region suggests it is common practice for Mapuche people to consult with multiple practitioners and combine treatments from different healing traditions (Torri and LaPlante 2013). The Mapuche Wellness Center, where the data for this chapter were collected, was a joint effort between a small group of Mapuche entrepreneurs and Mapuche healers who wanted to create a space where urban residents could access Mapuche medicine. Healers at the center treated a mixed clientele of Mapuche and non-native people. Design of the Mapuche Wellness Center reflected the owners’ and healers’ sensitivity to dual concerns with conveying Mapuche cultural authenticity and signalling medical authority. The space was organized like a conventional medical practice, with a reception area and two consultation rooms, but was decorated with iconic elements of Mapuche cul-

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figure 6.1 Approximate area where many Mapuche live across Chile and Argentina Base map by pavalena/Shutterstock.com; modified by K. Graber

ture, including a kultrun (ceremonial drum) and a large poncho. Behind the reception desk, shelves were lined with herbal tinctures that were produced at the local Mapuche pharmacy and that were available for sale. A similar mingling of indigenous and non-indigenous cultural signs was evident in the dress of the Wellness Center staff. The receptionist and co-owner, a young Mapuche woman, wore the fashionable jeans and sweaters that were preferred by young Chileans, while healers at the Wellness Center dressed in ethnically marked ways. The lawentuchefe wore a küpam, a black swath of fabric wrapped around the body like a dress, layered sweaters, and a diaphanous floral headscarf, while the machi (shaman) wore a poncho and the heavy silver necklaces and bracelets that are characteristic of machi. Spanish was the default language in the healing center, though healers switched to Mapudungun, the Mapuche language, whenever clients used the language. Mapuche healing services can be expensive compared to conventional medical services because they are not covered by private or public health insurance systems. As a result, patients who consult a healer have to pay for consultations and remedies “out of pocket,” often on a strictly cash basis. At the time of the research, practitioners at the Mapuche Wellness Center charged between $ 10

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and $16 U.S. for a consultation.2 Their herbal remedies and talismanic contras cost between $5 and $10 U.S. each, and healers generally prescribed multiple remedies for a single patient. Given that these remedies were understood to work more slowly than pharmaceuticals, requiring weeks or months for an effective cure, patients generally spent substantial sums in the pursuit of wellness under a Mapuche healer’s care. The diagnostic process of Mapuche medicine is accomplished through an activity called pelotun, ‘the event of seeing clearly’ (Smeets 2008).3 Canonical pelotun involve a healer orally recounting a set of ailments, discomforts, and otherwise life-disrupting problems (a pronouncement) to a patient or the patient’s caregiver(s) while the healer examines some aspect of the patient’s body (e.g., the radial pulse), or a vital object that contains the patient’s essence (e.g., a urine sample, unwashed clothing, or a national identification card). The pronouncements that emerge in the context of pelotun follow a strictly regimented genre structure, though their content can be thematically broad and eclectic. At the Mapuche Wellness Center, pronouncements during the pelotun portion of visits typically lasted several minutes and were followed by a healer’s recommendations and the sale of remedies to the patient. Healers sold some some herbal remedies they prepared themselves and some that were produced by the Mapuche pharmacy. Visits ended with payment to the healer for herbal remedies and scheduling for subsequent visits. The pronouncements that healers make in pelotun are wide-ranging. Over the course of a single pelotun, a healer may refer to or describe dozens of symptoms as well as referring to discrete events such as a fall or an operation. At the same time, pronouncements seem to be closely calibrated to observable age, gender, ethnicity, and class-related elements of clients’ identities. Pronouncements often attested to older patients’ joint pain or fatigue, to anxiety on the part of working professionals, and to young women’s problems with reproductive health. Healers use jargon and draw on models of illness that originate from biomedicine, Chilean folk medicine4 and Mapuche medical knowledge. On the whole, the pelotun pronouncement affords interactional circumstances

2 Acute care consultations in private biomedical practices in the city cost roughly the same, but insured individuals generally pay only a nominal co-pay. 3 Some sources indicate that the practice is also referred as pewütun (‘divination’) (Citarella et al. 2000; Zúñiga 2006). 4 Chilean folk medicine or popular medicine is a humoral system with roots in Spanish colonial medicine, as is common throughout Latin America (Foster 1987). Chilean folk illnesses include ailments such as mal de ojo (‘evil eye’), susto (‘fright’), empacho (a digestive illness), and sobreparto (ailments related to menstruation and childbirth).

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for healers to dynamically engage with clients’ concerns while also responding to clients’ desire for a novel, meaningful explanation for their problems. In this sense, they exemplify what Garro (2003:7) describes as “socially and structurally grounded processes through which individuals learn about, orient towards, and traffic in interpretive plausibilities.” The ideal outcome of pelotun is a compelling story about the history of an illness. Healers are the primary tellers of these stories, but their accounts are also ratified and subtly modified over the course of the telling by verbal and other embodied responses from patients and family members. Successful pelotun afford the co-telling of a story where, ostensibly, there is a convergence and alignment of all the participants’ knowledge about the illness, a story that is told “with” one another (Ochs and Capps 2001).

5

Discursive Expectations

As was true of many clients visiting the Mapuche Wellness Center, a primary reason Señora Marta and her husband, Don Ernesto sought help with the lawentuchefe was to receive an interpretation of their son’s sickness that they could compare against those they had already received from other healing practitioners. In my interview with Marta immediately before their first consultation Lorena, I asked what brought them to see her. Marta responded, “Acá también hay una persona con harto conocimiento. Entonces esa es mi razon por la cual vine a visitar a la Señora Lorena.” (‘Here as well is a person with a lot of knowledge. That is my reason for coming to visit Señora Lorena.’) She went on to describe the symptoms and events that were associated with her son’s sickness before concluding, “Eso fue lo que nos trajo hasta aquí. Y queremos saber que le van a decir. A la espera de eso.” (‘That is what brought us here. And we want to know what they are going to say. [We are] waiting for that.’) When I asked specifically what she and her husband expected from the healer, Marta referred to both outcome and interpretation, “Espero que la señora me de resultados buenos. Poder ayudar a mi hijo. Que se mejore. Eso. Estoy con las ansias de ella qué me va a decir. Ojalá que me diga algo positivo. Eso espero de ella.” (‘I hope that the señora will give me good results. To be able to help my son. That he get better. That. I am anxious for what she is going to tell me. Hopefully she will tell me something positive. That’s what I hope from her.’) Notably, Marta’s expectations center on a desire to hear the healer’s pronouncement about her son’s illness. Qualifying Lorena as “a person with a lot of knowledge,” Marta emphasizes a desire to hear what the healer has to say.

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The Onset of Trouble and the Beginning of a Diagnostic Odyssey

My first introduction to the story of Daniel’s illness came on the day of his parent’s first visit to the healer. Immediately before their consultation, Marta shared with me that she and Ernesto had been seeking an explanation about Daniel’s ailment for quite some time. In explaining their reason for the visit, she discussed what she had observed and been told about Daniel’s illness. It started with Daniel’s complaining of sharp pains in his side, and one day after breakfast, he became fatigued and started to perspire. Suddenly, Marta told me, he ran out of the house “como un loco se puede decir” (‘like a crazy person so to speak’). He fainted, and his parents had to revive him. After the episode, Daniel’s pains continued, and to his parents’ great concern, “hablaba cosas que no (sería) hablar por la naturaleza” (‘[he] talked about things that would not be spoken naturally’). A physician at the local primary care center suggested that Daniel’s sharp pains might be “el principio de vesícula” (‘the beginning of gall bladder’), a vernacular term for gallstones, but nothing had been detected with laboratory tests. Ernesto and Marta were not convinced by the doctor’s diagnostic hypothesis, which offered no meaningful explanation for the more extraordinary aspects of their son’s illness, so they sought the help of a machi, who provided them with an alternative explanation about Daniel’s illness. Marta recounted the machi’s explanation for Daniel’s ailment: “Se topó con algun espíritu malo que andaba suelto. Y él, como era un niño, está muy indefenso. Entonces lo atacó por su lado.” (‘[Daniel] encountered some malevolent spirit that was loose. And he, because he was a boy, he is very defenseless. So it attacked him on his side.’) This account that Marta retold of the machi’s diagnostic pronouncement invoked a locally recognizable narrative prototype (Bruner 2010) that is a cornerstone of Mapuche cosmological and medical knowledge. According to Mapuche cosmology, many kinds of benign and malevolent spirits inhabit the natural world, influencing the lives and social relations of people in a variety of ways. Encounters with spirits or violations of Mapuche codes of conduct can lead to serious and complicated illnesses. According to the machi’s pronouncement, in Daniel’s case the etiologically significant event was a chance encounter with an espiritu malo (‘malevolent spirit’) that was able to successfully attack the youth because children are constitutionally vulnerable. This story that Marta recounted about Daniel’s illness and the family’s process of seeking help provided me with an interpretive frame for understanding the sequence of events that had led to the family’s first visit to consult with the lawentuchefe at the Mapuche Wellness Center. Having already inquired with a medical doctor and with a machi about the nature of Daniel’s ailment,

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the family was concerned to find a definitive story that could explain what was wrong and, armed with this knowledge, do whatever was necessary to help Daniel heal. Ironically, the organization of pelotun precluded Daniel’s parents from telling lawentuchefe Lorena this same story when they met with her.

7

Incipient Storytelling about Daniel’s Illness and the Introduction of Competing Explanations

Immediately following my first interview with Marta, she and Ernesto had their first consultation with Lorena. In it, they received an initial pronouncement from Lorena about Daniel’s ailments. The parents’ participation in the consultation observed pelotun generic norms that clients should occupy the role of recipient addressees of a healer’s pronouncement, but they also took advantage of interactional apertures immediately before and after the pronouncement to convey information about themselves and about the competing explanations they had received about Daniel’s ailment. Before Lorena’s pelotun, as Marta was searching for an appropriate vital object for Lorena to use, Ernesto initiated a code switch from Spanish to Mapudungun to advise the healer, “Mapuche inchein ñaña. Inchein mapuche ñaña” (‘Mapuche we are, Madam. We are Mapuche, Madam’).5 Lorena aligned to the code switch and responded to Ernesto’s disclosure with an explanation for her relatively uncommon practice of diagnosing by palpating a patient’s radial pulse rather than inspecting a urine sample, something Ernesto and Marta had brought with them. Once Marta had produced a photograph of Daniel that could be used to perform the pelotun, Lorena began a pronouncement in which she described a complex set of discomforts that she attributed to empacho, a common childhood digestive ailment with origins in Spanish colonial models of illness, and atreg kutran (‘cold illness’), a form of Mapuche kutran (‘Mapuche illness’) that results from excessive exposure to cold. She continued on, positing that Daniel had another enfermedad natural ‘natural illness’ (i.e., not caused by witchcraft) that could be treated with herbal remedies. With respect to the latter illness, Lorena observed that Daniel felt dispirited and weak, that his defenses were low, that he got colds and other sicknesses because he was absorbiendo todo

5 To distinguish between Mapudungun and Spanish, quoted speech in the former is underlined in original texts as well as in glosses.

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(‘absorbing everything’). The underdetermination of the unnamed illness and the vagueness of its symptoms framed the healer’s pronouncement as tentative and open-ended, a matter for further investigation. Moving both to close the pelotun and to solicit feedback from her clients, Lorena addressed Ernesto, “Eso le encuentro yo en este momento. No sé si eso lo que siente su niño, chachay” (‘That is what I find in this moment. I don’t know if that is what your boy feels, sir’). The Mapudungun address term at the end of the utterance, chachay, acknowledged and reiterated the healer and her clients’ shared identity as Mapuche. In response, Marta and Ernesto confirmed in Mapudungun that Lorena’s account was accurate. Then, over several turns in which both Mapudungun and Spanish were used, the three participants reiterated that Daniel was having problems with inflammation and with weakness. In this exchange, the healer’s identification of several discomforts was confirmed by aligning comments from Marta and Ernesto, resulting in an overall validation of the healer’s pronouncement. While the healer began writing down Daniel’s case in her recordbook, Ernesto posed a question, “Ngelay trafentun entonces” (‘There isn’t trafentun then?’). In response to this first mention of trafentun illness, Lorena affirmed that yes, Daniel had trafentun and that she had coincidentally brought an herbal remedy that day that was appropriate for its cure. Shortly after, Ernesto posed another candidate diagnosis in nearly parallel grammatical form, “Vesícula ngelay entonces?” (‘Gall bladder it’s not then?’). In response to this proffer of a second candidate diagnosis, Lorena vacillated, admitting this was a possibility and saying that she would have to see when they brought the boy for a consultation in person. Given the story that Marta told me during her interview about the first steps they had taken in their diagnostic journey to identify what was ailing Daniel, Ernesto’s questions to Lorena about trafentun and vesícula are recognizable as an effort to solicit an opinion that would either corroborate or cast doubt on one or both of these candidate diagnoses that the family had already received. The mention of these two competing explanations was important to the trajectory of Daniel’s care. Did he require treatement with the physician or with a Mapuche healer? And their mention was important because it presented Lorena with new narrative possibilities in Daniel’s diagnostic journey, and these could be ignored or taken up and considered, elaborated or dismissed in future interactions. The introduction of the two illness categories of vesícula and trafentun was also important to the characterization of Daniel in the storyworld of the pronouncement as a certain kind of ethnic figure. In Chile, indexically ordered language ideologies (Silverstein 2003) link the unmarked code of Spanish to the

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correspondingly unmarked ethnicity of being Chilean, while use of Mapudungun is strongly tied to a racialized and ethnically marked Mapuche identity. Layered in with these identities are insidious connotations of Chilean modernity and Mapuche backwardness (Merino and Quilaqueo 2003; Stuchlik 1974). Thus, in Daniel’s absence, his parents’ actions of visiting Mapuche healers, self-identifying as Mapuche, and use of the we-code of Mapudungun with the healer had opened up the narrative possibility of a Mapuche illness diagnosis and cast Daniel in an ethnically marked subject position. The diagnostic categories of vesícula and trafentun are indexical not only due to code (Spanish/Mapudungun) but also due to their semantic meanings. Vesícula, a vernacular term for gallstones, references a quintessentially biomedical health problem that is associated with poor diet, sedentarism, and obesity, problems that have reached epidemic proportions in Chile. In contrast, trafentun is a Mapuche kutran, an ailment recognized and treated only in Mapuche medicine. Trafentun, also referred to as topantun (Citarella et al. 2000; Oyarce 1989), means ‘an encounter.’ The former term is formed with the Mapudungun verbal root traf- and the latter derived from the Spanish verb toparse (‘to run into’ or ‘to meet by chance’). Notably, the terms are polysemous, referring both to the triggering event of a sudden encounter with a malevolent spirit and the illness resulting from it. Trafentun is a form of wekufe kutran, the set of all illnesses caused by malevolent spirits. And though signs of wekufe kutran can vary, Luca Citarella and colleagues (2000) note that, apart from the sorts of trafentun encounters that the machi told Daniel’s family the youth had experienced, sufferers can also experience perimontun (‘visions’), pewma (‘dreams’), and ñiwiñ (‘disorientation or confusion’). Over the course of subsequent consultations with Lorena, the possibility that Daniel was suffering from vesícula failed to gain traction, while the possibility that he was suffering from a supernatural trafentun illness gained plausibility through an interdiscursive (Silverstein 2005; Wortham and Rhodes 2015) process of allusion and repetition. Yet, by the end of three months under Lorena’s care, this latter explanation did not appear to be enthusiastically embraced by Daniel. The following sections trace how this process unfolded.

8

The Emergence of Memoria Symptoms

A week after his parents visited Señora Lorena on his behalf, Daniel attended a consultation with the healer in the company of his mother. On this occasion, Lorena palpated Daniel’s radial pulse to conduct pelotun. Among numer-

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ous other symptoms, Lorena posited that Daniel suffered from memory problems and that he found it difficult to concentrate (Excerpt 1). Excerpt 1. 01 Healer Y tambien, And also, 02

(1.5)

03 Healer La memoria. De repente te afecta. Memory. On occasion it affects you. 04

(1.0)

05 Healer Como que te cuesta concentrarte. Like it’s hard for you to concentrate. 06

(0.6)

07 Healer Ultimamente. Recently. 08 Patient ((nods slightly)) 09 Healer Y a veces, te duele el pecho también. And sometimes, your chest hurts too. During the course of Lorena’s description of the textually contiguous and cognitively related symptoms of memory and concentration problems, Daniel withheld any sign of alignment through two gaps in the talk when it would have been appropriate to respond (lines 4 and 6) and signaled only a weak acknowledgement with a slight nod (line 8) at the third such transition-relevance place (Schegloff 2007). At this juncture, Lorena did not expand at greater length on these symptoms, but their mention and Daniel’s minimal acknowledgement of them were meaningful because they established these issues of memory and concentration problems as part of the complex portrait that Lorena was painting of Daniel’s state. In a third consultation concerning Daniel’s health, Lorena did not conduct pelotun because Daniel did not attend. The ostensible purpose of the visit

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was for Marta to pick up freshly prepared herbal remedies for Daniel. During this exchange, Marta and Lorena casually discussed Daniel’s health and his response to the herbal treatment. Among other things, Lorena reiterated that Daniel’s memory was affected by the illnesses he was suffering. Aligning with this assessment, Marta recounted that Daniel had recently misplaced the family’s cellular phone, an occurrence that the healer framed as congruent with her assessment of the youth’s general state.

9

Symptoms, Signs, and the Resurfacing of a Trafentun Diagnosis

The strongest and most elaborated assertions concerning Daniel’s impaired memory occurred in his family’s fourth consultation with Lorena, when Daniel returned to the Mapuche Wellness Center for a follow-up visit. On this occasion, the import of a memoria (memory) problem became clear when the healer explicitly framed it as a symptom of trafentun (Excerpt 2). The claim came midway through the pelotun pronouncement. At the beginning of Excerpt 2, Lorena was palpating Daniel’s pulse and had already commented on several other symptoms that Daniel continued to experience, despite his improvement with the herbal treatment. Excerpt 2.

01 HEALER ((looks up from patient’s wrist to mother)) También tenía ciertamente un trafentun. Also he certainly had a trafentun. 02 MOTHER ((nods))

212 03 HEALER Y eso le ha ido mal. And that has gone badly for him. 04 MOTHER Myah. Okay.

05 HEALER ((leans toward and shifts gaze to patient)) A veces s- sintiai mie:do. Sometimes [you] feel fear. 06 PATIENT ((nods)) 07 HEALER A veces como que se te olvida. Sometimes [it’s] like you forget.

08 PATIENT Sí. Yes.

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09 HEALER Y de repe:nte, le pasa así. Pero And suddenly, it happens to him thus. But 10

((shakes head)) ahora, no es seguido. De repente todavía te sentí now, it’s not frequent. Suddenly still you feel

11

miedo. fear.

12 MOTHER Sí. Se asusta harto. Yes. He gets frightened a lot. In this sequence, Lorena, Marta, and Daniel all contributed to a portrayal of Daniel as forgetful and fearful. First, before mentioning the relevant symptoms, the healer reintroduced the idea that Daniel was suffering from trafentun, addressing the youth’s mother, Lorena said, “Also he certainly had a trafentun” (line 1). This identification of the supernatural illness category that had come up at the first appointment, six weeks earlier, framed Lorena’s subsequent description of memory and fear symptoms as related to and, in fact, evidence for the diagnostic story she was telling. Also notable about Lorena’s framing of Daniel’s experiences of the trafentun symptoms of fear and forgetfulness are the ways that she underdetermined the timeframe of reference for their purported occurrence. The healer’s use of imperfect verbal form tenía (‘[he] had’) in line 1 and present perfect form “ha ido” (‘has gone’) in line 3 emplot the trafentun as having begun in the past yet having consequences extending into the present. Episodes of forgetfulness and fear, potential evidence that Daniel is suffering from trafentun, were temporally framed as occurring “a veces” (‘sometimes’) in lines 5 and 7 and “de repente” (‘suddenly’) in lines 9 and 10. Even further muddying the temporal frame within which Daniel is being asked to recall episodes of forgetfulness or fear, the healer says that presently the episodes are “not frequent” (line 11). In response, Marta, rather than Daniel, confirmed the healer’s assertion (line 12).

10

Contesting an Etiological Explanation

Later in the same visit in which Daniel and his mother confirmed Lorena’s observations about fear and forgetfulness, Lorena and Daniel disagreed over a separate assertion Lorena made (Excerpt 3). The healer asserted that Daniel

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had dreamed that he was offered food and that he ate it. In response to this assertion, Daniel issued an unmitigated rejection. This direct contradiction of the healer’s proffered story led to an exchange in which Lorena defended her assertion and bolstered her claim by reiterating that Daniel was suffering from forgetfulness, and this inhibited his ability to remember his dream. Excerpt 3.

01 HEALER ((shifts gaze from mother to patient)) Has tenido sueños ( ). Te dan comida. Comí You’ve had dreams ( ). They give you food. You eat 02

comida en el sueño. food in the dream.

03

(0.5)

04 PATIENT No.

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05 HEALER No te has dado cuenta. You haven’t realized. 06 PATIENT No. ((shakes head))

07 PATIENT ((looking away)) HEALER ((looks down toward patient’s wrist)) Aquí sale que ( ) asustado que- porqueHere [it] comes out ( ) frightened that- because08

te dan comida (.) comida así (.) (como) normal (.) they give you food (.) food like (.) (like) normal (.)

09

en tus sueños. in your dreams.

10

(1.0)

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11 PATIENT ((Still looking away)) Sí. Yes. 12 HEALER Si. No debes acordarte. ( ) así memoria hijo. Yes. You must not remember. ( ) memory's that way, son. 13

Soñai así ( ) Comí comida así: (.) como You dream like ( ) You eat food that way (.) like

14

normal. Como que: (.) eh- esta(ba) así en normal. Like as if (.) uh- you were in

15

la vida directa. (En/es) un sueño. direct life. (In/It’s) a dream.

In this exchange, Lorena asserted that Daniel had dreamed about accepting food that was offered to him. Following on her assertion that he was suffering from trafentun, it is possible to interpret this dream sequence as the etiologically significant instance of trafentun encounter itself. Mapuche cosmology holds that oneiric events, though they are experienced by the am (‘soul’) of a person rather than the whole person, are real experiences and a common site of encounter and communication between human beings and supernatural forces, both malignant and benign (Bonelli 2012; Degarrod 1989). In addition, the fact that Daniel purportedly accepted food in the dream underscores the likelihood that it was the cause of his illness. One of the most common perceived causes of illness is poisoned food or drink. Given these ideologies concerning the dream world and the transmission of illness, Lorena’s reporting of Daniel’s dream sequence comes into focus as the description of

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an etiological episode and its framing as the kind of “trouble” (Burke 1969) or “unexpected event” (Ochs and Capps 2001) that is needed to launch any narrative. This is the unexpected event that has disrupted the normal course of Daniel’s life and made necessary the therapeutic actions with which the youth and his family, together with Lorena, were gearing their efforts toward healing. When Daniel pushed back against Lorena’s assertion by denying that such a dream had taken place (lines 4, 6), Lorena challenged her patient’s epistemic privilege over this particular autobiographical knowledge. Lorena’s assertions at this juncture that Daniel was unaware of the dream (line 5) or that he was unable to remember it (line 12) gained explanatory strength and authority from anaphoric reference to earlier mentions of Daniel’s lack of concentration and his forgetfulness, both in this consultation and back across earlier consultations. These multiple, repeated renderings of Daniel as forgetful across the interdiscursive “chain of linked narratives” (Wortham and Rhodes 2015) in sequential consultations had built up a sedimentation of evidence such that Lorena was able to treat Daniel’s forgetfulness as an already recognized and ratified fact. Daniel’s inhabitation of the sick role may also have attenuated his reliability as a witness of his own illness experience. Mapuche illness ideologies hold that the sick have a diminished state of che (‘personhood’), overtaken as they are by the illness from which they are suffering. Thus subjective accounts of illness are treated as inherently specious, and the sick as untrustworthy judges of their own experience. Moreover, Daniel’s youth and his limited competence in Mapudungun both militated against his full participation in the activities surrounding his treatment. At the same time that Daniel’s talk was treated as unreliable, he was framed as communicating in another, unintentional but less deniable way through his pulse. Lorena indexed the authority of her account by leveraging Daniel’s “narrative embodiedness” (Heavey 2015). She drew attention to the source of her knowledge directly in Daniel’s body, glancing down at his wrist in her hands as she said “aquí sale que” (‘here [it] comes out’) in line 7. This is a common phrase in Chilean Spanish that is used synonymously with “aquí dice que” (‘here it says’) as a way to preface the reading aloud of a written text. The analogy in this case was that Lorena was reading the true story of an oneiric trafentun encounter straight from her patient’s body. In this way, Daniel’s epistemic privilege as the first-hand “knower” of his own dream experience was challenged as the healer “read” his body. Though discussion about the dream encounter was brief, it proved consequential for the trajectory of Daniel’s care, narratively grounding the idea of trafentun in his unfolding diagnostic odyssey.

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The Unfinished Story

At the conclusion of the research period, Daniel was still under Lorena’s care. It was the end of the calendar and academic year, so Daniel was about to return home from boarding school for the summer, where his parents hoped he would reach full recovery. The last visit I recorded regarding Daniel’s health was one where just Señora Marta went to the office to pick up freshly prepared remedies from Señora Lorena. In my interview with her that day, I asked Señora Marta about her son’s progress under Señora Lorena’s care.6 She expressed satisfaction that Daniel’s health was improving (Excerpt 4). Excerpt 4. 01 JRG

Le pregunto en general, ¿Cómo va la recuperación I ask you, in general, how is the recuperation

02

de su hijo? ¿De su hija? ¿Cómo están ellos? of your son going? Of your daughter? How are they?

03 Marta

Bien. Mas que nada mi hijo se ha recuperado bastante. Well. More than anything my son has recuperated quite a bit.

04

( ) se gasta un poquito pero vale la pena. ( ) one spends a bit, but it is worth it.

05 JRG

¿En qué lo nota mejor? In what [way] do you notice he is better?

06 Marta

Porque tiene mejor carácter. Ya noBecause his character is better. Already he doesn’t-

07

no anda asustado. Porque él doesn’t go around frightened. Because he

08

se asustaba. Como le dije la otra vez. used to get frightened. Like I told you last time.

6 I asked about the health of Daniel as well as Señora Marta’s adult daughter, who was also under Señora Lorena’s care.

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09

Ahora ya conversa. Juega. Estudia. Come. Así Now he converses. He plays. He studies. He eats. So

10

que ya se recupera. already he is getting better.

11 JRG

¿Como que ya tiene mas ánimo para todo? Like he has more enthusiasm for everything now?

12 Marta

Claro. Tiene más ánimo. De repente se cae Right. He has more enthusiasm. Sometimes he falls

13

un poquito pero nunca tanto como fue de principio. a little but never so much as he did at the beginning.

14

Así que se ha recuperado bastante. So he has gotten a lot better.

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In comparing Marta’s comments to me about Daniel’s illness from her first visit to the Mapuche Wellness Center with those she made during our last conversation, several things are notable. First, the symptom of side pain, which had been a main concern of the family’s early on, was not mentioned. Instead, Marta emphasized changes in Daniel’s psychosocial well-being, noting, above all, that his character was better. Whereas before he displayed concerning social behaviors, running out of the house “like a crazy person” and talking in ways that were not natural, after several months under Señora Lorena’s care, Daniel no longer startled (lines 6–8). Happily, he was conversing, studying, playing, and eating (line 9). In short, he was engaging in the kinds of activities that fill the lives of healthy young people. Though Marta did not comment explicitly on trafentun, the thrust of her concerns had clearly shifted from the signs of an illness like vesícula (e.g., sharp pains in the side) to emphasize how her son was no longer exhibiting the kinds of “strange” behaviors for which she and her husband had originally sought the help of a machi and subsequently with the lawentuchefe at the Mapuche Wellness Center.

12

Discussion

Over the course of treatment, a healer’s account of an illness may move from wide-ranging to more tightly coherent, leaving behind some interpretive pos-

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sibilities and building up evidence for others. In Daniel’s case, this involved selective inattention to symptoms related to vesícula (gallstones) and emphasis on others, specifically memoria, which bolstered Lorena’s assertion that Daniel was suffering trafentun from an encounter in a dream where he accepted and ate food. And, perhaps ironically, the sheer weight of Daniel’s multiple agreements with the healer’s assessments on previous occasions ultimately lent strength to the healer’s version of Daniel’s story, even despite his disagreement. This article has traced the trajectory of the two narrative/diagnostic explanations across what Wortham and Rhodes (2015:174) call a “chain of narrating events” and does so because, as these authors point out, “the action of … characterizing an individual can only be understood and empirically explored if we trace a chain of events. The crucial social work does not occur within the boundaries of one event, but instead emerges as actions across linked events accumulate to accomplish the focal process.” In this case, the constellation of evidence for a diagnosis of trafentun was afforded by the repeated mention and discussion of associated symptoms and the accumulation of Marta’s and Daniel’s confirmations of these symptoms across multiple visits and new present moments, while early mentions of pain and gallstones receded from memory into the past. As I have noted elsewhere, an important characteristic of the stories of illness that emerge in Mapuche healing is that healers exercise an extraordinary sort of insight and are expected to tell clients about their lived experience of illness. In this sense, the dynamics of ordinary “story ownership” (Shuman 2015) are reconfigured. “Claiming ownership of a story often means claiming authority, whether the authority is an epistemological claim to know about what happened, or a hermeneutic/ legal/ political/ social claim to have the authority to interpret what happened” (Shuman 2015:42). In the case of Daniel’s care and diagnosis, the healer exercised a claim to both. Her practice of pelotun and her possession of the healer’s gift of insight underpin her epistemological claim to knowledge about Daniel’s dream and the authority to cast it as significant to the trajectory of his illness and treatment. Despite Daniel’s general lack of control over tellership, however, it is important to observe that his rejection of the healer’s small story about the dream did allow him, in the context of the telling, to deny being cast in the context of the storyworld into the role that the healer set up for him.

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Conclusion

In a setting characterized by the kind of unequal medical plurality that exists in southern Chile, competing stories about a given illness episode are simultaneously part of an individual’s diagnostic odyssey and part of larger sociocultural processes in which competing medical paradigms wax and wane. As is often the case when there is an imbalance of power, the stakes can be higher for one rather than the other medical system—indeed for one kind of practitioner than for another. In the present case, competing explanations of the biomedical disease of vesícula, on the one hand, and the Mapuche diagnosis of trafentun, on the other, emerged as an interactional site in which the competing medical paradigms of Chilean biomedicine and Mapuche medicine were narratively pitted against one another as competing resources for a good-enough explanation. The family’s buy-in to one or the other medical explanation entailed the social reproduction of one kind of medical knowledge, perhaps at the expense of the other. At the end of the research period, Daniel’s mother had put considerable faith and financial resources into implementing lawentuchefe Lorena’s treatment plan. Her talk about Daniel’s improvement under Lorena’s care suggests that she had bought into the narrative explanation that Daniel had experienced a trafentun and that his symptomatic behavior was the result of that encounter. She reported her belief that Lorena’s treatment had yielded improvement in her son’s condition. It was unclear, however, whether Daniel shared his mother’s perspective or accepted the healer’s etiological story about him. The continued existence and practice of Mapuche medicine is dependent in part on how younger people respond to their early experiences with healers. In part, their response will depend on whether they feel a healer’s treatments have been efficacious. What their answers are to the archetypal question, “Did the medicine work?” As I hope to have demonstrated in this chapter, young people’s receptiveness to and trust in Mapuche medicine may also depend on their assessments of the small stories that emerge in pronouncements about the illness. These assessments rely more importantly on interactional alignment and narrative effectiveness than any strictly medical evaluation. Does the verisimilitude of healers’ stories resonate with young clients? Do young people feel seen and understood when healers exercise empathic insight? Will they acknowledge and confirm their own characterization as Mapuche subjects emplotted in stories about Mapuche illness? It is in the answers to these kinds of questions that the future vitality of Mapuche medicine may lie.

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Appendix: Transcription Conventions

(.) (0.4)

Brief, untimed pause Numbers in parentheses indicate the length of a silence represented to a specificity of tenths of a second . The period indicates falling intonation , The comma indicates slightly rising intonation ? The question mark indicates strongly rising intonation : The colon indicates the lengthening of a speech sound; the number of colons indicates the relative length of the sound The dash indicates a sudden cut-off in speech hhh Audible aspiration; the number of h’s indicates relative length of the aspiration °hhh Audible in-breath; again, relative length of the in-breath is indicated by the number of h’s wekufe kutran Underlining indicates Mapudungun language (word/bird) Text in parentheses indicates a hearing about which I am uncertain. Words separated by a slash are two possible hearings () Spaces in parentheses indicate a stretch of speech that was inaudible or indecipherable ((cough)) Text in double parentheses describes participants’ gestures, shifts in gaze, or non-linguistic audible sounds

Works Cited Bamberg, Michael, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. 2008. “Small Stories as a New Perspective in Narrative and Identity Analysis.” Text & Talk 28:377–396. Bengoa, José. 2007. Historia de un Conflicto: Los Mapuches y el Estado Nacional Durante el Siglo XX. Santiago de Chile: Planeta. Briggs, Charles L., and Clara Mantini-Briggs. 2003. Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling During a Medical Nightmare. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bruner, Jerome. 2010. “Narrative, Culture, and Mind.” In Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life. Deborah Schiffrin, Anna De Fina, and Anastasia Nylund, eds. Pp. 45–49. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Buchbinder, Mara. 2015. All in Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bucholtz, Mary and Kira Hall. 2004. “Language and Identity.” In Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Alessandro Duranti, ed. Pp. 369–394. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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Burke, Kenneth. 1969. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Capps, Lisa and Elinor Ochs. 1995. Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carr, E. Summerson. 2011. Scripting Addiction. Princeton NY: Princeton University Press. Charmaz, Kathy. 1997. Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Citarella, Luca, Ana María Conejeros, Bernarda Espinossa, Ivonne Jelves, Ana María Oyarce, and Aldo Vidal. 2000. Medicinas y Culturas en la Araucanía. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Sudamericana. Clemente, Ignasi. 2015. Uncertain Futures: Communication and Culture in Childhood Cancer Treatment. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Degarrod, Lydia Nakashima. 1989. Dream Interpretation among the Mapuche Indians of Chile. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Foster, George M. 1987. “On the Origin of Humoral Medicine in Latin America.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1(4):355–393. Garro, Linda C. 1994. “Narrative Representations of Chronic Illness Experience: Cultural Models of Illness, Mind, and Body in Stories Concerning the Temporomandibular Joint (TMJ).” Social Science and Medicine 38(6):775–788. Garro, Linda C. 2003. “Narrating Troubling Experiences.” Transcultural Psychiatry 40:5– 44. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. 2007. Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goodwin, Charles. 2015. “Narrative as Talk-in-Interaction.” In The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, eds. Pp. 197–218. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Heavey, Emily. 2015. “Narrative Bodies, Embodied Narratives.” In The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, eds. Pp. 429–446. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Kleinman, Arthur. 1980. Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kleinman, Arthur, Leon Eisenberg, and Byron Good. 1978. “Culture, Illness, and Care: Clinical Lessons from Anthropological and Cross-Cultural Research.” Annals of Internal Medicine 88(2):251–258. Koven, Michele. 2015. “Narrative and Cultural Identities: Performing and Aligning with Figures of Personhood.” In The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, eds. Pp. 388–407. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Labov, William, and David Fanshel. 1977. Therapeutic Discourse: Psychotherapy as Conversation. New York, NY: Academic Press.

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Mattingly, Cheryl. 2010. The Paradox of Hope: Journeys Through a Clinical Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press. Merino, María Eugenia, and Daniel Quilaqueo. 2003. “Ethnic Prejudice against Mapuche in Chilean Society as a Reflection of the Racist Ideology of the Spanish Conquistadores.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 7(4):105–116. Modan, Gabriella, and Amy Shuman. 2010. “Narratives of Reputation: Layerings of Social and Spatial Identities.” In Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life. Deborah Schiffrin, Anna De Fina, and Anastasia Nylund, eds. Pp. 83–94. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Ochs, Elinor. 2004. “Narrative Lessons.” In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Alessandro Duranti, ed. Pp. 269–289. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Ochs, Elinor. 2012. “Experiencing Language.” Anthropological Theory 12:142–160. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oyarce, Ana María. 1989. Conocimientos, Creencias y Prácticas en Torno al Ciclo Vital en una Comunidad Mapuche de la IX Región de Chile. Temuco, Chile: Programa de Apoyo y Extensión en Salud Materno Infantil (PAESMI). Sarradon-Eck, Aline. 2015. “The Psychogenesis of Cancer in France: Controlling Uncertainty by Searching for Causes.” In Anthropologies of Cancer in Transnational Worlds. Holly F. Mathews, Nancy J. Burke, and Eirini Kampriani, eds. Pp. 53–67. New York, NY: Routledge. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Vol. 1. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Shohet, Merav. 2007. “Narrating Anorexia: ‘Full’ and ‘Struggling’ Genres of Recovery.” Ethos 35(3):344–382. Shuman, Amy. 2015. “Story Ownership and Entitlement.” In The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, eds. Pp. 38–56. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.” Language & Communication 23(3–4):193–229. Silverstein, Michael. 2005. “Axes of Evals: Token Versus Type Interdiscursivity.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):6–22. Smeets, Ineke. 2008. A Grammar of Mapuche. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Stuchlik, Milan. 1974. Rasgos de la Sociedad Mapuche Contemporánea. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Nueva Universidad. Timmermans, Stefan, and Mara Buchbinder. 2012. Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening. Berkeley: University of California Press. Torri, Maria Costanza, and Julie Laplante. 2013. “Traditional Medicine and Biomedicine among Mapuche Communities in Temuco, Chile: New Forms of Medical Pluralism in Health Care Delivery.” Anthropologica 55(2):413–423.

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Wortham, Stanton, and Catherine R. Rhodes. 2015. “Narratives Across Speech Events.” In The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, eds. Pp. 161–177. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Zúñiga, Fernando. 2006. Mapudungun: El Habla Mapuche. Santiago de Chile: Centro de Estudios Públicos.

chapter 7

“Syphilis Is Syphilis!”: Purity and Genre in a Buryat-Russian News Story Kathryn E. Graber

Crafting compelling stories is the daily work of television news reporters. Like traditional storytellers, news reporters work within the constraints of their genre and narrative resources to capture the attention of an audience who often proves fickle. They weave together voices, scenes, and explanation to construct a coherent account of events. And like traditional storytelling in other cultural contexts (e.g., Basso 1990, 1996), news storytelling has important social consequences, including to encourage cultural cohesion, shore up community values, and hasten personal transformation. Professional journalists are very aware of their role as professional storytellers, socializing junior journalists into the narrative conventions of the “news story” (see especially Bell 1991) and conceiving of their work as linguistic “craft” (Cotter 2010). They may debate the role of an authorial voice, arguing over the relative desirability of what is increasingly known as “narrative journalism” versus objective reporting (van Krieken and Sanders 2017) and eschewing literary approaches. Nonetheless, even the most non-literary attempts at objective reporting adhere to some basic conventions of storytelling. News stories model appropriate action and populate the television screen with characters who are drawn from daily life, but who are also reshaped and inevitably flattened to fit story lines that are lean by necessity. Stories about health scares and epidemiological crises, which are particularly emotional and high-stakes, showcase these conventions. As Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs (2003) show in their account of news discourse surrounding a cholera epidemic, epidemiological news stories have heroes and villains, experts and tragic, clueless victims. This chapter uses another such case to examine news storytelling as a site of moral, emotional, and epistemic work in the Siberian republic of Buryatia. The production and circulation of a local television news story about an impending syphilis epidemic show how ideologies of purity in language and ideologies of purity in bodily practice are brought together within a common narrative framework. They are animated, too, by the common denominator of shame. The case reveals how such ideologies of purity and generic expectations in news storytelling are both ways that we make and enforce rules for narrative practice—even outside of news sto-

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004393936_012

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rytelling contexts. It also reveals the important ways in which such apparently innocuous practices as linguistic management in news storytelling may reproduce the power imbalances of linguistic and cultural contact by discursively privileging certain types of knowledge over others. As in the preceding chapter by Jennifer Guzmán, we see how different modes of narrating illness entail particular epistemic stances, or ideas about who knows what, how they know it, and how that knowledge is best expressed. In this chapter, we will look at how bilingual medical news stories appear to reproduce an opposition between the “traditional” epistemic roles of a local minority language and the rationalist/modernist roles of a matrix language. Only the matrix language—in this case, Russian, with some help from Latin and Greek—is taken to be discursively authoritative for speaking about a medical topic like syphilis. In news interviews, medical workers reinscribe this preference as they and the journalists framing their story position them as experts. Narrating the impending crisis and the daily clinical work they are doing to prevent it, they do what other narrators do, “position[ing] themselves interactionally with respect to social types” (Wortham and Rhodes 2015:164). Audiences, in turn, see these social types and their linguistic choices as natural and re-narrate the story in the same terms. To illustrate how language ideologies are thus naturalized through news, I will draw on ethnographic research with both journalists and their audience members in Buryatia, conducted between 2005 and 2011, and examine the linguistic choices made by journalists and interviewees in the story that local journalists crafted about the syphilis epidemic.

1

Ethnographic Context of Research

Located on the Mongolian-Russian border, Buryatia has historically been an important contact zone between the religions, languages, cultures, and traditions of Europe and Asia. Heavily Buddhist and shamanist, it has a rapidly developing tourist industry geared mainly toward Europeans and western Russians visiting Russia’s culturally and religiously exotic-seeming East. It is roughly comparable in size, landscape, climate, and population density to the state of Montana, bordered by Mongolia to the south, jagged-peaked mountains and shimmering Lake Baikal to the west, and dense taiga and rolling steppe to the north and east (Figure 7.1). About half of Buryatia’s million residents live in the capital, Ulan-Ude, making it one of the largest cities of Siberia.1 1 Ulan-Ude has an official population of 404,426, according to the 2010 census (Burstat 2010), and an unofficial population of a half million.

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As a semiautonomous ethnic republic of the Russian Federation, Buryatia retains some features of an independent nation, including education and media support for its own official languages, Russian and Buryat. In the last census, 218,557 people within the Russian Federation reported their native language as Buryat, mostly in the Republic of Buryatia and neighboring Buryatdominated territories (Rosstat 2012–2013). Most ethnic Buryats in Russia are fully bilingual in Russian, or are monolingual speakers of Russian, and Buryat use has contracted so much over the past few generations that some linguists consider the language functionally endangered (e.g., Grenoble and Whaley 2006). The principal language of public life in Buryatia is overwhelmingly Russian. In Ulan-Ude, where the news story described here was produced, Buryat is rarely heard on the street. Yet Buryat-language media is legally provided for by the state on the principle that Buryat is the “native” (meaning, in this case, ‘heritage’ or ‘ancestral’) language of the titular nationality of the republic. News for the state television company is produced, by law, in both Russian and Buryat, leading to some interesting quandaries in collecting and crafting stories. Television broadcasting is by far the most popular and widespread way that residents of both Russia and Buryatia get their news (Badmaeva 2004; Mickiewicz 2008).

2

Mixing as “Matter Out of Place”

On a daily basis, television crews seek out “heroes”—protagonists—in the forests, schools, city streets, and hospital hallways of Buryatia. Narrative conventions of news stories demand that there be a hero [geroi] and preferably at least one supporting character for each story, so ideally one would record three or four separate personages to pare down later in the editing room. For some crew members, finding interviewees poses an extreme challenge. Finding a Russian-speaking interviewee for Russian-language news is no more difficult than finding an English-speaking interviewee in a British or American city: your first choice of interviewee may be shy or hesitant to speak on camera, but the hesitation is likely to be due more to the subject matter and publicity of the interview than to the requirement to speak English (or Russian). Finding a Buryat-speaking interviewee for Buryat-language news is another matter. Generations of ethnic Buryats have been shifting from Buryat monolingualism and Buryat-Russian bilingualism to Russian monolingualism, accompanying increasing cultural and socio-political incorporation into the Russian state. Eliciting interviews has become a serious problem as language shift has progressed, not only because interviewees do not speak well, but more crucially because interviewees who generally live and work in Russian-dominant con-

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figure 7.1 The Republic of Buryatia and other Buryat territories within Russia, with toponyms in Buryat, Russian, and English Map of Russia by Peter Hermes Furian/Shutterstock.com. Map of Buryatia by the author; base layers from the Central Intelligence Agency, courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, and OpenStreetMap and contributors

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texts are reticent to speak in Buryat—particularly on camera. Reporters have to work very hard, as we will see, to cajole potential interviewees into giving interviews in Buryat, because knowing Buryat only passively, colloquially, or incompletely is often accompanied by a profound sense of shame. The would-be interviewees who shy away from the camera are correct, in fact, to assume that their speech will be negatively evaluated by fellow Buryat speakers. In focus groups that I conducted in 2009 around the time of the syphilis story’s broadcast, I asked native Buryat speakers of different levels and backgrounds to assess several media samples, including television news stories. Among many negative assessments of interviewees’ speech, viewers were particularly critical of “mixing” Buryat and Russian. For example, they interpreted the “mixed” [smeshanno] language use of one interviewee as indicating that she was like many Buryat heritage speakers in understanding well but “speaking poorly” [plokho razgovarivaet] from too little practice. She was, according to one focus group participant, a “brilliant example” [iarkii primer’] of this phenomenon because she made the “single most important mistake” [samuiu glavnuiu oshibku] of speaking in two languages, using both Russian and Buryat words, at once. Thus while “mixed language” is frequently identified as “how people really talk” in daily life, it is clearly not valued as how they should talk. There is an argument, shared by many in Buryatia, that to speak Buryat with much of the lexicon borrowed from Russian is tantamount to destroying both languages, and thus should be avoided, even if it means speaking only in Russian.2 The interviewees’ speech prompted some viewers to give some locally famous examples of what is often called, humorously, “Buryat pidgin,” in which the lexicon is Russian and the grammar is Buryat (Graber 2017). On this view, while it may be terrible to speak Buryat “badly” (such as with heavy Russian borrowings), and it may be terrible to speech Russian “badly” (such as with a Buryat accent), worse is to fail to keep both codes “clean” [chistyi]. To do so is tantamount to demonstrating a sort of misrecognition, which is embarrassing as a moral— and perhaps cognitive—failure. Indeed, the possibility is so embarrassing that being monolingual in Russian seems to many people (including the parents of young children) to be preferable to attempting and failing to be bilingual with equal mastery of both purist codes.

2 Notably, no one in the focus groups advanced this argument. They instead were inclined to criticize the interviewees for not practicing Buryat enough, or for being lazy or apathetic, implying that purist—or purer—Buryat was potentially within the grasp of any heritage speaker.

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In this way, linguistic features come to seem like dirt or contamination— “matter out of place,” in Mary Douglas’s (1966) famous phrasing, that can be awkward, gross, or shameful. Buryat language ideologies include a clear, strong ideology of purity much like that described by Jane and Kenneth Hill (1986) and in numerous studies since (e.g., Cameron 1995; Kroskrity 1993; Weinstein 1989). Echoing the explanations that Paul Kroskrity (1993) cites for linguistic purism among the Tewa, Buryat language elites, such as teachers, philologists, lexicographers, language activists, and journalists, commonly subscribe to a purist ideology that proceeds from goals of cultural conservatism or reclamation. Traditional Buryat storytelling and certain Buddhist and shamanic religious practices are also governed by expectations of “pure Buryat,” though those expectations are not always met (similarly see Falconi, this volume). This contrasts, however, with the logic underlying other speakers’ purism. Rather than proceeding from cultural conservatism, ritual contexts, or theocratic institutions, the “everyday” Buryat linguistic purism of hesitant interviewees appears to hinge on the shame of misrecognition. Similarly, the discussions of syphilis described in this chapter manifested a sense of shame—not only of bodies, but of the moral failings that syphilis is taken to reveal as a disease of contact, and of a more thoroughgoing inability to keep categories pure and matter in place. The syphilis story, as it aired in Buryat and Russian on Buryatia’s state broadcasting system in 2009, put these multiple sources of shame, linguistic and bodily, very much on display. Thinking about both kinds of purity together sheds light on how shame works to reproduce feelings of inadequacy and reticence to speak, hastening language shift and silencing portions of the population who are already vulnerable. Narrating syphilis thus productively brings together conversations on language ideologies (Woolard 1998), affect and emotion (Wilce 2009), and the relationship between media discourse and public health efforts (Briggs 2003, 2004, 2005, 2012; Briggs and Hallin 2010; Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2003).

3

Syphilis as a Disease of Inappropriate Contact

Syphilis has plagued eastern Siberia since at least 1926, when a research team of Soviet and German scientists traveled to the Lake Baikal region to investigate the high prevalence of the disease among the native Buryats.3 As a venereal

3 The expedition was not designed only (or even mainly) as a public health intervention, but rather as a scientific exploration that would ultimately be used to attempt to disprove Nazi

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disease, syphilis is often spoken about today with whispers and embarrassment over sexual conduct. Media reports like the one discussed in this chapter imply that the main conduits of the disease are lower-class Russian and Buryat women who engage in “chance encounters” [sluchainye sviazi] with men visiting from other parts of Russia. Buryatia has a significant prostitution economy that capitalizes on the infamous “Asian fetish” by catering to men from European Russia. In this context, Buryat women are often seen as the point of contact, couriering venereal diseases from “outside” of Buryatia to the men and children of their villages and homes. Syphilis has a complex history in Russia, and it may be taken not only as a sign of improper sexual contact, but also as a sign of backwardness. Early researchers of syphilis in Siberia determined that the disease spread in native populations less through sexual contact (as it was best known to spread in the cities of Europe) than through poor hygiene and the sharing of clothing, cups, and utensils. While venereal syphilis was supposed to herald the modern age of industrialized urbanism, this endemic form of syphilis was taken as an index of rurality, benighted tradition, and, according to Soviet researchers in the 1920s, the cultural “backwardness” of the native peoples of Siberia (Engelstein 1986, 1992). Echoing colonial projects to control sexual practices in other border spaces (e.g., Boddy 2007, 2011; Stoler 1989, 2010), Soviet authorities declared a metaphorical war on what they saw as poor hygiene practices in rural Russia and Mongolia (Stolpe 2008). In Buryatia, Soviet authorities targeted personal hygiene and embarked on an aggressive campaign to eradicate syphilis by convincing Buryats to wash their underwear. These efforts were well documented in issues of the state Buryat- and Russian-language newspapers, with statistical charts detailing every victory in the fight against uncleanliness. How venereal syphilis arrived in Buryatia in the first place is another matter, probably traceable to the exploits of fur traders, escaped convicts, and other European Russians entering Siberia in the 16th century. As a Buryat friend of mine once explained wryly, “Syphilis is a natural product of the ‘Friendship of the Peoples’ [druzhba narodov]. Of course,” she continued, “before the Russians arrived, we totally didn’t bathe … But we also did not have sex with Russians.” Syphilis, then, is both a quintessentially Buryat phenomenon and a quintessentially Russian one, ascribable not to one people or another but to improper contact between them. Pus-filled nodules and oozing sores are symptoms not only of the physiological disease but of deeper social ills and the victim’s fail-

race science. On the expedition and its surrounding context, see Hirsh 2005; Solomon 1993; Wilmanns 1995.

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ure to appropriately acclimatize to modernity—whether what is being exposed is his or her inability to live up to its hygienic standards or, paradoxically, her over-indulgence in the bodily proximity offered up by it. Thus syphilis epidemics in Buryatia have been the products of contact not only between bodies, but also between indigenous and colonial cultures, and battling such epidemics has figured prominently as a sign of Russia’s civilizing mission in Siberia, waging progress against “backwardness,” science against “tradition.” My friend’s invocation of the “Friendship of the Peoples” mocked this Soviet slogan of interethnic brotherhood, which was supposed to be particularly strong between Buryats and Russians. At the time of field research for this chapter, this motto remained common—even beloved—as both an ideological and historical (amnesic) description of cultural contact in the Baikal region. While contact has disproportionately favored Russian culture and the Russian language, authorities and elites remain committed to performing linguistic equality through parallel institutions like Russian- and Buryat-language news media. However, not all topical genres within news media are considered equally “Buryat,” as the syphilis story suggests.

4

Purism in Media Production

News coverage of the syphilis outbreak was not particularly extended or extreme; the events were approached with an air of daily journalistic routine and were reported mainly as a public service. It happened to be the story I was assigned one morning in 2009 as an observer-intern at Buryatia’s state television station (Figure 7.2). An independent newspaper in Ulan-Ude had recently run a story about cases of syphilis showing up in a kindergarten, and one of the news department heads felt that it was the news team’s public duty to cover the syphilis outbreak immediately, to help prevent an epidemic. I accompanied a lead correspondent, Yanzhima,4 who was responsible for the Russian-language story, and a second correspondent, Dashi, who was responsible for the Buryatlanguage story. News organizations routinely “double-report” stories in Russian and Buryat for their linguistically complicated audience, and crews often collect material together. This way of working is very efficient—in terms of both time and human resources—for producing fresh Buryat- and Russian-language material on a tight schedule, because only one cameraman, one set of equipment, and one good idea is required to produce two stories for the day’s news. 4 All personal names are pseudonyms. To further protect the identities of the journalists involved, I have withheld the dates of production and broadcast.

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figure 7.2 Television complex of the Buryatia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, Ulan-Ude Photos by the author, 2009

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The reporters can collect substantively the same information, in sum; but they still require multiple interviewees, preferably at least one or two in each language. Yanzhima was not pleased with this assignment. She was, in general, less enthusiastic about the public service dimension of her job and preferred to cover concerts, theatrical performances, and other cultural events. Today her boss had given her no choice of topic. She looked embarrassed as she told me where we were going: the dermatological and venereological clinic. The film crew cracked jokes about venereal diseases as they packed their equipment and themselves into a tiny, eggplant-colored Lada sedan, everyone professing to have no idea where the clinic was located and Yanzhima silently suffering. When we arrived at the clinic, however, and saw how wondrously gross everything was, Yanzhima’s spirits lifted. The cameraman insisted that it was illegal for him to film the patients in the clinic,5 so the crew had to settle for filming posters and the pages of a giant medical textbook depicting oozing sores, blistering rashes, and festering open wounds. These images were sufficient to elicit cries of titillated horror and “oh my god!”s [bozhe moi] from all of the editors and production crew members who worked on the footage over the course of the day, and Yanzhima would end the day satisfied that she had made a compelling story for the evening news. Where Yanzhima had it easy, however, Dashi—who seemed to have accepted the assignment in stride—struggled. Given the need for a hero [geroi] and at least one supporting character, the goal for an assignment like the syphilis story is two interviews—not an easy task. The senior male doctor who produced the main statistics and information about the syphilis epidemic gave a fine interview in Russian but would not give an interview in Buryat. Dashi assumed that the doctor might speak Buryat because phenotypically he looked Buryat. Race—usually conceived of in terms of a distinctly European or Asian “face” [litso]—is only one of several factors determining Buryat or Russian language choice in a given interaction, but it is arguably the single most important between strangers. While not all Asian-faced individuals can be expected to command Buryat, there are very few regions or contexts within which European-faced individuals are expected to command Buryat, so initiating a Buryat-language interaction happens disproportionately between speakers racialized as Asian. Beyond using existing social networks, racial guessing was the most common way radio and television reporters identified potential 5 There was some disagreement among the station’s videographers regarding the ethics and legality of filming patients, and over whether it was necessary to obtain their explicit permission.

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interviewees “in the field,” but it did not always result in a good story. Even if the news team managed to record an interview with a person they identified phenotypically as Buryat, it might not yield sufficient usable material. Reporters frequently identified potential Buryat speakers only to turn on the microphone, begin recording, and have the interviewee stutter, freeze, or simply switch into Russian. In this case, the doctor summarily avoided such dangers. He would not say that he did not speak Buryat, simply that an interview in Buryat “won’t work out” [ne poluchitsia]. Dashi, who was usually quite persuasive in these situations, tried a couple of times before giving up. At our next location, a laboratory on the outskirts of town, Dashi succeeding in convincing two middle-aged women, a doctor and a laboratory technician, to give interviews in Buryat, though only after extensive cajoling. They never spoke Buryat at work, they said. They feared their Buryat was too colloquial, and that they would forget the “right words.” I had witnessed hesitation with other potential interviewees—there is, after all, some element of nervousness with most interview situations, regardless of the language spoken—but the requirement to speak Buryat on camera seemed to create special fear. Dashi began by speaking Buryat, like a warm-up to ease the transition. But the doctor resisted this frame, instead speaking Buryat only while the camera was trained on her and frequently switching back into Russian. When she hesitated or switched, Dashi would patiently lead her back into Buryat, suggesting the words or phrases she might be looking for. He stopped short of providing medical terminology and did not correct her on her use of Russianorigin terms like vrach (doctor) and gazet (newspaper), which have common Buryat-native alternatives but which are also sometimes used by journalists in the role of interviewee. Sometimes journalists do make such corrections with their interviewees, but things were difficult enough for this interviewee, and any correction would have risked further embarrassing her and shutting down the interview entirely. At one point she broke off in exasperation, switching into Russian: “It’s very difficult to translate ‘sifilis’!” [Perevesti sifilis ochen’ tiazhelo!] “Ti:mė” [yes], Dashi agreed, switching pointedly back into Buryat to complete the interview. When she appeared thoroughly exhausted and he thought he might have enough material to piece together a story, he thanked her and ended the interview. She looked both relieved and distraught. “Oy, I spoke so poorly!” she cried, in Russian. And Dashi relented and switched into Russian, assuring her that she had given him “very good material.”6

6 I did not interview the doctor or laboratory technician separately. Because I was embedded

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What was striking in Dashi’s elicitation was how much labor he engaged in to get his interviews to talk, and to talk in certain ways (namely in Buryat). Before, during, and after the interviews that would be pastiched together for the evening news, Dashi was constantly gently cajoling, prompting, and otherwise managing his interviewees’ linguistic production. This kind of rehearsing and metacommentary on the performance are what Erving Goffman (1959) helpfully referred to as “back-stage” activities, as opposed to the performance that plays out on the “front stage” (similarly, see DiDomenico, this volume). Media interviews always require back-stage setup, more so with reluctant performers. In the ultimate broadcast, however, this labor was erased, with the interviewees appearing to speak spontaneously. Similarly invisible were the editing labor and struggles over purist Buryat that underlay the broadcast. Back in the editing studio in the afternoon, Dashi tried to do what the doctor had noted was so difficult—to translate sifilis. In his first script, he produced inventive Buryat neologisms for ‘syphilis’ and ‘venereal disease,’ which were rejected by the head editor, Bator. When I spoke with Bator in the evening, he explained that the neologisms felt “twisted” and unnecessarily difficult. While Bator believed strongly in the preservationist role of Buryat-language media, he did not believe that their audience would be able to understand these terms instantaneously—which was, in his view, a primary requirement in the television medium. Thus, while a newspaper editor might have included a Buryat neologism for ‘venereal disease,’ perhaps glossing it in Russian or Buryat or leaving it to the reader to decipher at her leisure, Bator returned Dashi’s draft script with it excised.7 Dashi recorded a revised script and pieced together bits of the women’s interviews to produce his evening broadcast, a portion of which appears here. Russian appears in italics and Buryat with underlining; when something is both italicized and underlined, it indicates that the form could be considered both Russian and Buryat in context. Russian-origin borrowings appear in boldface, giving a quick visual indication of just how much of the speech in this broadcast was recognizably Russian.8

within the news team and was trying to minimize my disruption of their work (not to mention the work of their interviewees), I rarely conducted additional ethnographic interviews with their interviewees. 7 Bator acted on different principles when he worked in other media platforms, such as newspapers, at other points in his career. Ideological differences between media platforms are discussed in detail in Graber 2012. 8 I have chosen to focus on lexical issues for the sake of simplicity, but there are also some grammatical constructions in this broadcast that look like consequences of Russian contact.

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Excerpt from story as aired

Audio track

English translation

Reporter (Dashi), voiceover with images from first clinic: 1 Arhanai bolon venericheskė On the walls at the Ulan-Ude 2 übshėngüüdye argaldag municipal medical clinics 3 Ulaan-Üdė khotodokhi treating skin and venereal 4 ėmnėlgėnüüdtė khananuud diseases are informational 5 dėėrė mėdėėsėlėi sambarnuud posters. 6 baina. 7 Tėndėn’ hain azha huugty, Written there are slogans 8 khünüüdtė haalta bü khėgty telling people to live well, 9 gėhėn uriaa bėshėėtėi. [and] what they should not do. 10 Saashan’ unshakhada In reading further, it is 11 veneriicheskė aiaar khori explained that there are as 12 garan übshėngüüd baigaalida many as twenty-some venereal 13 bii ium baina gėzhė ėlirnė. diseases occurring in nature. 14 Tėdėnhėė bėeė khamgaalzha, There are slogans about 15 bėe bėedėė ankharaltaigaar, protecting one’s body from 16 narin niagta iabakha tukhai these by being careful and 17 uriaanuud baina. treating each other with care. 18 Mai hara khakhadlaba, As we reach mid-May, with 19 gazaa huraggüi dulaarba, it getting somewhat warmer 20 iimė orshon baidalda outside, doctors working 21 arhanai bolon veneriicheskė at the Ulan-Ude municipal 22 übshėngüüdye argaldag medical clinics treating skin 23 Ulaan-Üdė khotodokhi and venereal diseases are 24 ėmnėlgėnüüdtė khüdėldėg getting this nearing situation 25 ėmshėd arad zondo garazha, out to the people, 26 oilguulamzhyn khüdėlmėri it not being possible to launch 27 iabuulaagüidėn’ iaakha an informational campaign. 28 argagüi. Interviewee (doctor), standing in lab area: 29 Zaluushuulai (.) dunda ekhė Really, this infectious disease 30 taradag ėnė (.) infektsionno is very widespread among 31 übshėn bii gėėshė aab daa. youth. 32 Dėlkhėi dėėrė khorëod übshėn On the earth there number 33 gėzhė toosodog. about twenty diseases so called. 34 Tiigėėd tėdėėnėi khoorondo And [uh] among these, 35 ekhė aiuultainiin’ (.) siifilis syphilis is particularly 36 bolono. dangerous. 37 Tiigėėd ėnė harada manai And [uh], I think that this 38 khėhėn azhal ekhė gėzhė bi month our work will be great. 39 hananabi.

Visual track

/images of front door and sign of dermatologicalvenereological clinic/ /poster entitled “the price of carelessness”/

/images of hand-drawn informational posters and photographs of syphilis sores/ /flipping the pages of an “atlas” of infectious diseases, with the title page “sifilis” opening the book/

/photograph in book of blistered nose/ /photograph in book of infant covered in sores/ /cut to lab technician in scrubs filling test tubes/ /lab tech with test tubes/

title on screen: UlaanÜdė khotyn kozhvendispantserėi vrach [Ulan-Ude Municipal DermatologicalVenereological Clinic Doctor] /doctor stands in white lab coat in front of glass cabinet containing paper files/

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English translation

Visual track

[/film break/] Erėhėn zaluushuulsh’e, iamarsh’e erėhėn khünüüdye üzėzhė kharazha, abakha analizuudyn’ abazha, (.) übshėntėi baigaa haan’ übshėniien’ argalzha, zaazha kharazha, kharuulzha khėlėnė gėėshė aabzabdi daa.

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

[/film break/] Bėeė dėėgüür tatazha abazha hainaar iabakhyn tülöö, gėntė bolohon uulzalganuudhaa hüüldė vrachuudtaėnė tėrė iuumėnėi boloo haa, vrachuudta erėzhė üzüülėgty gėzhė khėlėdėg gėėshėbdi. Televizorėėrsh khėlėnė gėėshė aabzabdi daa, gazet iuumėdėsh’e bėshėgdėdėgbdi.

[/film break/] We will probably be examining, looking at youth who’ve arrived [from elsewhere], other people who’ve arrived [from elsewhere], receiving analyses to do, treating the illnesses of the diseased, looking at—demonstrating— examination(s). [/film break/] (If) your body starts intensely dragging, declining, after “suddenly happening meetings,”9 to the doctors— if something like this happens, we are advising that you go to the doctors. We are probably speaking on your television, we have had some newspaper items published.

/film break/

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Reporter (Dashi), voiceover with images of lab interior and exterior: 59 Steklozavod huurinda Studies are based at the 60 kliniicheskė serologiin clinical serological place 61 talaar shėnzhėlgėnüüd in the neighborhood of 62 iabuulagdana. Steklozavod. Interviewee (laboratory technician), seated behind test tubes in lab area: 63 Serologicheska We have a serological 64 laboratoritoibdi. laboratory. 65 Khoër vrach, khoër laborant Working right now (we) are two

9

10

/looks to side of camera with eyes moving all over room, apparently thinking/

/film break/

/close-up of samples and testing equipment/

title on screen: Ėmshėn [Doctor]10 /lab tech sits behind

The expression “suddenly happening meetings” here, gėntė bolohon uulzalganuud, is a euphemism for casual sexual relations, calqued from Russian sluchainye sviazi (‘chance encounters’). Ėmshėn here is ‘general medical practitioner,’ contrasting with Russian-origin “vrach” in the title of the doctor interviewed above, starting in line 29.

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(cont.) Audio track

English translation

Visual track

66

khüdėlzhė bainabdi.

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Nėgė registraator i … khoër sant-, sanitar-(.) sanitarkanuud. Tiigėėd … (.) iuun … (.) teė üdėr bükhėndė bi ėnė serologicheska [???] nöökhi tėrė venericheskė übshėn … tėrė sifilis gėzhė übshėnėi reaktsiia Vassermana gėėshyen’ olodogbi. Tiigėėd IFA gėzhė analiz …

doctors (and) two laboratory technicians. One receptionist and … two ai-, aid-, aides.

samples in white lab coat, addresses journalist off to side/

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

imunno-fermentnyi analiz gėzhė khėdėgbdi. Tiigėėd üdėr bükhėndė khamag gorodhoo asardag lė daa. Dürbė-taban zuun analiz khėdėgbdi üdėrtė. Tiigėėd khoër raion erėdėg.

87 88

Tarbagatai, Ivolga gėėd Ivolgiinska raion.

And [uh] … (.) what … (.) well, every day I [do] this serological [???] that very venereal disease … I have to do a lot of the Wassermann reaction of the disease called syphilis. And [uh] the analysis called IFA … we do the immunological fermentation analysis. And [uh] every day, of course, everything from the city is brought in. We do four to five hundred analyses in a day. And [uh] two districts come in. Tarbagatai, Ivolga- er, Ivolginskii district.

/looks to side, thinking of what to say next/

/looks to samples and rushes forward, speaking quickly/ /cut to gloved hands dealing with samples/

/cut back to lab tech/

This story showcases competing forms of medical and linguistic expertise. As other sociolinguistic analyses of reporting have shown (Briggs and Hallin 2010; Wortham and Locher 1996), even reportage framed as an objective presentation of facts includes evaluative voicing strategies. Dashi frames the doctor’s and laboratory technician’s words as primarily a public service announcement, evaluatively describing what they are doing as “arad zondo garazha”—getting information about an impending health crisis out to “the people” (arad zon). This choice, as well as beginning the report with informational, public service posters, firmly places them in the position of humanitarian medical experts. At the same time, the linguistic production of Dashi and the interviewees suggests that he is the expert when it comes to speaking Buryat. Dashi speaks fluently with complex grammatical constructions, characteristic of the literary language, while the interviewees produce short sentences with syntactic

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repetition and avoid complex constructions. The doctor’s interview, which was particularly difficult, was cobbled together from the short stretches of her discourse that Dashi found acceptable in the editing process, resulting in a series of film breaks and a rather disjointed feel in the broadcast. Dashi and his interviewees managed Russian influence in their Buryat speech in different ways. Their speech is characterized by three different types of contact phenomena from Russian: (1) older borrowings, which often have been more thoroughly nativized, or made to sound more Buryat by using Buryat phonology or grammatical endings; (2) more recent borrowings, which have been less thoroughly nativized and may be pronounced and used just as in Russian; and (3) full codeswitches from Buryat into Russian and back. As we will see, however, these influences from Russian were not necessarily seen as such, depending on who was speaking about what. In the first category, notice mai (‘May’) in line 18. Forms like this could be interpreted as Russian, but they have been fully incorporated into Buryat and do not have viable Buryat-origin alternatives. Like his colleagues in television and radio broadcasting, Dashi nativizes Russian-origin terms like mai and pronounces them with Buryat phonology—albeit inconsistently. By contrast, note gazet (‘newspaper’) in line 56, gorod (‘city’) in line 82, and vrach (‘doctor’) in lines 51 and 53. These are relatively recent Russian borrowings with little nativization, although they get Buryat grammatical endings. For example, in line 82, the laboratory technician says gorodhoo for ‘from the city’ instead of Buryat xotohoo or Russian ot goroda. gorodhoo ‘from the city’ Compare: Russian ot goroda (от города) Buryat xotohoo (хотоhоо) These words denote common concepts and have common Buryat-origin alternatives—indeed, Dashi uses an established Buryat word, ėmshėn, for ‘doctor’ in line 25 and for ‘general medical professional’ in the title for the second interviewee in line 63. But Russian borrowings are nonetheless popular with Buryat-Russian bilinguals like the women interviewed here.11 Other new borrowings, appearing in boldface here, denote specialized concepts peculiar to the medical topic. Most of these originated in Greek or Latin and are sometimes considered “internationalisms,” as discussed below. But they were bor-

11

In the screen title for the first interviewee, the editors used vrach instead of the standardpreferred ėmshėn because it was part of the interviewee’s official job title.

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rowed into Buryat from Russian, and they largely retain Russian morphological features. Prominent in this story, for instance, is the productive –cheskii adjectival ending that you see nativized for Buryat as –cheska and –cheskė, in accordance with Buryat vowel harmony, in lines 1, 11, 21, 60, 63, 73, and 74. Terms like these are often nativized, sometimes quite self-consciously, by applying Buryat vowel length to the stressed syllables of Russian. In line 67, for instance, the laboratory technician uses the Russian term registrator (‘receptionist’) but applies Buryat vowel length to the penultimate syllable, which is strongly stressed in Russian, to say registra:tor. Similarly we have, in lines 11 and 21, Dashi using Buryatized veneri:cheskė instead of the Russian venericheskii, and, in line 35, the doctor using a heavily lengthened si:filis instead of Russian sifilis.12 For Dashi in particular, applying Buryat vowel length to Russian borrowings was a key way of minimizing Russian influence and maintaining fidelity to the Buryat code, as showcased in the phrase settled on by Dashi and his editor: veneri:cheskė übshėn ‘venereal disease’ Compare: Russian venericheskaia bolezn’ (венерическая болезнь) Buryat ??? übshėn (??? үбшэн) Using veneri:cheskė übshėn for ‘venereal disease’—with Buryatized Russian venericheskii and Buryat übshėn—was something of a compromise between the all-Buryat neologism favored by Dashi and the Russian favored by Bator. Übshėn is a common enough term in Buryat to be recognizable to the audience, and it was part of journalists’ regular pool of resources for stories in the medical genre. As one of Dashi’s colleagues put it in reference to the laboratory technician, there was no sense in “stretching” the Buryat language for these purposes when the interviewees were going to speak “half in Russian” anyway. A few days after this story aired, another Buryat journalist with whom I was working pointed to the syphilis broadcast and a story on swine flu that aired around the same time as evidence of the difficulty of producing media in “the pure Buryat language” [chistyi buriatskii iazyk]. Among journalists and audience members there seemed to be consensus that medical stories could not be held to the same standards of purist Buryat as other news stories. There were differences of opinion, however, as to whether this problem proceeded

12

The fact that Dashi applies Buryat vowel length inconsistently in this broadcast (compare, e.g., venericheskė in line 1 and veneri:cheskė in lines 11 and 21) may reflect that these are new borrowings.

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from a deficit of speakers or from deficiencies of the language itself—as well as whether it should be considered a “problem” at all.

5

Mixing without Shame in Tales of Medicine and Science

Language shift impedes journalists’ realization of purism, but not equally so in different media platforms (such as television, radio, or social networking sites), and not equally in different genres. Using more Russian in this particular Buryat-language news story was, in a sense, over-determined by the confluence of the television platform and the topical genre. The medical and scientific terminology necessary for telling the story of the syphilis outbreak presented a special challenge, first to the clinicians, and then to Dashi and Bator as they decided what to air. While they sought a form for the story that would be pure Buryat, the content they sought to provide was more easily produced and understood in Russian, so they ultimately allowed far more Russian influence than in other news stories. When viewed in the context of other television news stories, it becomes clear that there is something peculiar about the syphilis story. Other major stories at the time concerned a public campaign to restore a ruined Buddhist temple, forest fires in the taiga surrounding the city, and swine flu. It was relatively easy in the first two cases to find Buryat-speaking heroes to fit the narrative conventions of news storytelling, and to find Buryat-origin language for the voiceovers. Buddhist lamas gave excellent interviews in Buryat, and the journalists covering these stories had ample terminology for restoration affairs, forestry, and the dangers of forest fires. These stories produced no problems for Buryat purism and the broadcasts included few Russian-origin lexical items, with the exception of terminology regarding the airplanes and technology used to scout and suppress forest fires. The swine flu story, however, linguistically resembled the syphilis story in terms of the quantity and treatment of Russian borrowings, despite being produced by a different crew of journalists. In sum, while television stories show, on average, more Russian influence than radio and newspaper stories, medical stories show, on average, more Russian influence than stories on other topics. The syphilis story appears to be part of a topical genre of Buryat-language media, a genre of medicine and science that can be found in newspapers and radio news as well as television, and that continues to be linguistically regimented through the decisions of journalists and interviewees. In part, the heavy Russian influence of this genre can be explained with reference to the interviewing difficulties and comprehension concerns that I

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have already begun to describe. Certainly the business of extracting Buryatlanguage interviews is especially difficult with medical personnel. Medical personnel tend to work in ethnically mixed Russian-Buryat contexts and use Russian in their daily work, thus feeling “out of practice” with Buryat even if they are from strongly Buryat-speaking backgrounds, like the laboratory technician. As representatives of their institutions, both the doctor and the laboratory technician voiced the other Russian-speaking medical personnel around them, mouthing the words they had heard countless times from others (Bauman 2004). Based on my experience living with a doctor’s family and regularly observing media production involving medical personnel, I might add that those most likely to be in positions of authority—and thus most likely to be initially contacted for interviews—tend to be well educated, urban, and middle-aged, which means that they belong neither to the rural, older, poorer stratum of the population known for speaking excellent Buryat nor to the young, politically active subculture that prizes Buryat as a welcome badge of resurgent ethnic identity. Demographic and contextual factors thus conspire to make medical personnel particularly difficult quarries for the Buryat interview hunt. There is a relatively short list of people who are both able and willing to give interviews in Buryat at institutions around the Republic of Buryatia, and reporters tend to remember people and return to them. The potential interviewees that Dashi tried to convince for the syphilis story, for instance, sighed heavily or giggled about how this was the third or fourth time they had been interviewed. The clinic doctor, the first interviewee in our transcript, also reported that she had been interviewed for television before. Journalists keep track of where women like her are, as evidenced by some of the conversations I observed at the television station. As one crew member said, “Oh yeah, there’s a woman in that clinic who speaks well; let’s go there.” On another occasion, when a Buryat-language reporter was tasked with covering the opening of a new hospital wing, she protested, saying, “It’s going to be difficult in that hospital to find a hero [geroi].” The doctor, in other words, is a known cultural character or “persona” (Agha 2007) who is expected to be primarily Russianspeaking, and that stereotype is reinscribed in news stories partly because it is just so practically difficult to disrupt. Thus, while determining the herocharacter drives the process of crafting any television news story, it plays an especially strong role in crafting Buryat-language medical stories, when heroes are in short supply. Additionally, medical and scientific terminology present special challenges to would-be translators. And to the extent that stories about syphilis and swine flu have been framed as public service announcements, they are prefigured as topics for immediate, urgent consumption—which warrants

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communicating quickly in a Russian-inclusive register rather than lingering over questions of Buryat purism. The way in which the syphilis story was interpreted by its audiences, however, suggests that there is more to the generic regimentation of medical news as Russian than these matters of practicality. I was at the news studio on the evening that this story was broadcast, so I missed the daily ritual of gathering around the television set in a tiny apartment to watch the evening news. Daily Buryat-language television news broadcasts are typically viewed by households of Buryat speakers in this way, alongside Russian-language news, and are actively discussed both immediately and for one day or so following, depending on the timeframe of the news stories presented.13 The next day I called around to participants in my audience study and asked whether they had seen the program and what they thought of it. One woman, Bairma, berated everyone involved in the program, in her usual fashion, for talking too fast or too slow or using Russian words like vrach and gorod. She did not, however, say anything about Bator and Dashi’s version of ‘venereal disease,’ nor about “sifilis.” When I finally asked directly about this, she paused, and then snorted, as though this were a thoroughly idiotic question. “Nu da” [Well yeah], she said. “Sifilis, ėto sifilis!” [Syphilis is syphilis!] The audience study participants and various other Buryat speakers with whom I consulted over the next few weeks offered a range of opinions, which can be generalized as follows: Buryats have never had science; syphilis is a Russian issue, so it’s natural to use Russian to deal with it; Buryat is meant for the cultural sphere, not science and medicine; or Buryat once was a great language of science and medicine but is no longer capable of fulfilling this role. At first blush, this seems like a neat binary between the use(s) of the Buryat and Russian languages. But the Buryat speakers involved felt words like “sifilis” to be outside of it. That is, many of the Russian borrowings that were used in this story, including “reaktsiia Vassermana” and “serologicheska laboratori,” were not identified as such by the speakers or viewers. According to audience members and the journalists themselves, these were “internationalisms.” What are called “internationalisms” in debates over the Russian language are usually words of Greek, Latin, or French origin that may have historically entered Russian via English or some other language, perhaps even very recently, but are claimed as less historically and geographically specific. Similarly, it does not appear to matter that all of the lexical items above clearly entered Buryat

13

News broadcasts that are uploaded to the station’s website or youtube may also be circulated on social media, but this particular broadcast was only available live.

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via Russian, and quite recently, still retaining Russian grammatical and morphological features; they too were identified as “international,” somehow everywhere and nowhere at once. What is the internationalism explanation for “sifilis” doing for the journalists and their audience? I would posit that selective etymology like this is emblematic of a neutral “third space” akin to that posited by Homi Bhabha (1994:312) in the context of postcolonialism: a “cultural space” that opens both between and alongside the confining dual options and “incommensurable differences” of hybridity. Contemporary Buryat journalists are in many ways trapped by purist ideologies that assume a strict binary opposition between Buryat and Russian. In narrating a medical news story for Buryat-language television, using pure Russian is impossible due to generic constraints, and using pure Buryat is impossible due to practical constraints. Buryat-Russian, while an apt description of the narration from a linguist’s standpoint, remains an uncodified range of ideologically incommensurable features; its use is impossible, we might say, due to ideological constraints. But that does not mean that Russian-like features cannot be used and productively re-ascribed to a vaguely “other” time and place of origin. Speaking from this third space, a speaker might avoid the shame of misrecognition and preserve a notion of fidelity to code. As a rhetorical strategy, calling upon the “international” this way is akin to a practice Claire Wendland observed among Malawian clinicians, who discursively figure local medical practice in opposition to an imagined medical situation “out there” in the industrialized world-at-large (2012:115). From her position in a dilapidated building on the outskirts of a Siberian city, the laboratory technician appears equally peripheral to the imagined world-at-large that gave us the Wassermann reaction. Ascribing language—and specifically syphilis—to a neutral third ground of deterritorialized science and medicine simultaneously absolves everyone of needing to manage contact in the interaction and distances a scary and shameful disease. The language of infectious disease manages to be neither Russian nor Buryat, but rather, something external to both.

6

Conclusion

While Dashi and Bator disagreed about how to translate ‘venereal disease,’ and while we might quibble over the etymology of the doctor’s vowel-lengthened “si:filis,” it is very telling that audience members agreed that the syphilis story is not what Buryat is “for.” This appraisal included the positive as well as negative aspects of the story, so it was not just that Buryat wasn’t “for” talking about

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a gross disease, but also that it was not “for” describing the technological processes and equipment that the journalists showcased in their broadcasts.14 The idea that medical stories are not best presented in Buryat probably took hold during the course of rapid language shift in the 1940s–1980s. In the underwear washing campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s, public health messages were being produced mainly in Buryat, so there has been a time in the past century when Buryat was very much “for” stories about syphilis, but, with increasing bilingualism, that time seems to have passed. For our purposes in this volume, this agreement (that “syphilis is syphilis,” after all, and does not need to be nativized) highlights two important processes in narrative practice: (1) how expectations of appropriate tellership are successfully co-constructed, managed, and maintained by media makers and their audiences, and (2) how centrally this coconstruction depends on off-camera, back-stage interactions between media makers and audiences, namely here in the form of media interviews. Together, media makers and their audiences easily linked up ideologies of linguistic purity with ideologies of bodily purity and ascribed to any misrecognition a sense of shame. Buryat and Russian were kept rigorously separate, until they could not be, at which point other explanations for what looked like Russian influence were marshaled in defense of mixing codes. Whatever the moment at which Buryat was disavowed for discussions of science and medicine, the various arguments put forward for excluding Buryat from this genre point to the ideological underpinnings of the otherwise practical choices made in producing the syphilis story. The interviewees and journalists involved did not know—and did not expect their audience to know—Buryat equivalents for the Russian-language medical terminology. Struggling with an apparent conflict between presenting information and sticking to the all-Buryat purist symbolic form, they all took recourse to generic expectations that figure European languages as the languages of science and medicine. Audiences, in turn, concluded that this was only natural, viewing these linguistic decisions as reflective of the historical or intrinsic value of Russian, Greek, or Latin versus Buryat, rather than as an accommodation to their own expectations. Thus, despite elevating Buryat to the authoritative role of news production, the syphilis story shows how an opposition between the “traditional” epistemic roles of Buryat and rational/modern roles of Russian nonetheless reproduces and naturalizes itself through the linguistic regimentation of genre. 14

What genres Buryat is for in news media, according to locally dominant language ideologies, include mainly cultural genres such as religion, dance, music, and the arts (Graber 2012). Similarly, see Meek 2007 on expectations of appropriateness to “traditional” domains among Kaska elders.

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The processes by which journalists selected their sources and constructed and managed purism in this story should challenge assumptions about who— if anyone—produces “natural,” spontaneous, and unconstructed narratives. A well-formed news story is crafted from disparate snippets of life and talk. In the process, the journalists discussed here used many of the same techniques and methods that I used myself as an ethnographer, such as the interview. But stories like the syphilis story are pieced together by journalists with agendas quite different from those of ethnographic researchers, and they conduct their own interviews. The interviews at issue here were not those deemed most appropriate, interesting, or revelatory by the researcher, but rather those expected to generate certain kinds of material useful to the journalists I was studying. Nor could I have forced a Buryat-dominant interaction like what Dashi achieved with the hesitant doctor. Interviews are a speech genre that routinely occurs without the researcher necessarily being present, but these are not exactly “natural” or “naturally occurring” speech events. As other analysts of news discourse have observed, the news interview is a conventionalized, institutional form of talk (Bell 1991; Heritage and Greatbatch 1989). At the same time, news interviews like that given by the doctor and laboratory technician are frequently spontaneous, at least in their raw, pre-studio-editing form, and that is precisely why they pose such difficulty to the journalists. Like reality television, news interviews are supposed to simultaneously appear spontaneous and meet generic conventions. Goffman (1981) noticed this tension when he studied radio announcers’ frequent self-corrections and communicative repairs: radio announcers are supposed to appear both spontaneous and fluent. Of course, those are the professionals—so much worse for the amateurs who serve as inerviewees! News interviews thus trouble neat delineations between solicited interview and un-self-conscious conversation, crafted story and spontaneous narrative. The intertextual, self-conscious, hyper-constructed nature of the syphilis story is a reminder that news storytelling is no less subject to tradition and ideology than are more traditional forms of storytelling. Just as forms of traditional storytelling are regimented into distinct genres, defined by appropriate and inappropriate speakers, modes, and contexts of performance (Bakhtin 1986; Bauman 2004; Kroskrity 2009), so too is news storytelling regulated by assumptions about who constitutes a good character, or what the right mode of performance is—what, in short, will make a good story. Finally, tracing the syphilis story’s production suggests some of the ways that a linguistics of news production, grounded in ethnographic approaches, can illuminate what Bruner (1991) called the “narrative construction of reality.” As Catenaccio et al. (2011:1845) argue, attending to the linguistics of news

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production, rather than only the resulting text, enables us to “unravel the details of institutional contexts, conventions, and procedures as they impact on” the eventual news story. It is in the intertextual movement of texts (“sifilis,” “veneri:cheskė übshėn,” etc.) and the back-and-forth between reporter, editor, and interviewee that we see not only the co-construction of “news,” but also the regimentation of attitudes toward different languages and the re-inscription of ideas about which language is legitimate for which uses. A certain ideological coherence across contexts of use emerges, according to which language choices and purist impulses are naturalized to become, eventually, downright commonsensical. Syphilis, after all, is syphilis.

Acknowledgements Field research for this chapter was generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays program, the National Science Foundation, and the University of Michigan. Thanks to Jargal Badagarov for transcription assistance, and to Elizabeth Falconi, Emily McKee, Richard F. Nance, and Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar for their ever-astute editorial attention. Finally, thanks to the many patient people in Buryatia who welcomed me into their lives and answered my interminable questions, particularly the journalists at the Buryatia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company.

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Index Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) 60, 61–62 Americans, middle-class 30 Amy de la Bretèque, Estelle 144 Anderson, Benedict 87 antiquarianism in 17th-century England 5 Apache 34–35, 172–173 Arminem, Ilkka 60 authority 165–167 in Buryat-Russian news storytelling 165, 166, 167, 227, 244, 247 in medical narratives 165, 166–167, 227, 244, 247 role of storytelling in negotiation of 4 varying degrees of, among storytellers 165 in Zapotec storytelling 165–166 authorship, role of storytelling in negotiation of 4 autobiographical narratives 27–28 Avineri, Netta 18, 87, 90–135 “back stage” in “coming out” stories 57–58, 67–73 in media interviews 237 Bakhtin, Mikhail 12, 43 Bamberg, Michael 93 Basso, Keith 34–35, 172, 186 Bauman, Richard on context 7 on everyday narratives 10 on formal features shared by performance genres 7 on scholarship on personal experience narratives 13–14, 29–30 on stories with “a history of use” 43 on “verbal art as performance” 58 Bhabha, Homi 246 binary oppositions, systems of 5 Blommaert, Jan 145n6, 167 Boas, Franz 5, 6 bodhisattvas and bodhisattva vows 41–42, 43, 49 bodily practice, ideologies of purity in 226– 227, 247

body image 110, 124–127 boundaries of genres, fluidity in 14 boundaries of self, communicative norms mediation of 28 Briggs, Charles L. on context 7 on epidemiological news stories 226 on following people across domains and discursive contexts 112 on initiating formula in folk tales 157 on laments 143, 144 on methodology 16–17 on stories with “a history of use” 43 on use of stylistic devices in storytelling 8 Brothers Grimm 5, 157 Bruner, Jerome 10, 248 Buchbinder, Mara 201 Buddhism and attachments 35, 36, 41 and bodhisattvas/bodhisattva vows 41– 42, 43, 49 Chinese values challenged by 37 and da zhangfu (‘great man’) trope 31, 42–44, 42n5, 45–47, 49 evangelical outreach of 29, 31–32, 32, 34–36, 43 and karma 36, 36n2, 40, 43, 47–48 monastic narratives about 40–41 and reputation of monastics 36, 37 See also monastics in Taiwan Buryatia, Siberia as ethnographic context of research 227–228, 229 (see also Buryat-Russian news storytelling) prevalence of syphilis in 231–232, 233 prostitution economy in 232 and Russia’s civilizing mission in Siberia 232, 233 Buryat language and bilingualism of ethnic Buryats 228 mixed with Russian language/grammar 230–231, 241–242, 245–246

254 and purity ideologies 166, 230–231, 230n2, 242–243, 246, 247 reluctance to speak, in interviews 230, 236, 244 search for Buryat-speaking interviewees 228, 230, 235–236, 244 and selective etymology as “third space” 246 shame associated with 230, 231 technical topics as outside of sphere of 245, 246–247, 247n14 Buryat-Russian news storytelling 226– 249 and back/front-stage activities 237 and dual-language newscasts in Buryatia 228 and editing interviews 240, 241 ethnographic context of research 227– 228, 229 “internationalisms” used in 241, 245– 246 and language of authority 165, 166, 167, 227, 244, 247 logistics of “double-report” stories 233, 235 and management of language(s) 236– 237, 240–242, 247 and medical personnel 236–237, 244 and public service stories 233, 240, 244– 245 and purity standards for language 165, 242–243, 246 reluctance to speak Buryat in interviews 230, 236–237, 244 search for Buryat-speaking interviewees 228, 230, 235–236, 244 and selective etymology as “third space” 246 television complex in Ulan-Ude 234 Cain, Carole 61–62, 62n12 canonical narratives 199 Capps, Lisa on co-construction of narratives 13 on experience as related to personal narratives 48 and framework for studying everyday narratives 199 on narratives about the past 36

index “ordinary social exchanges” captured by 12 on past, present, and anticipated selves 49–50 on sharing stories as means of understanding 198–199 Carr, E. Summerson 200 Carreira, Maria 95, 129 categories of storytelling 1–3 Catenaccio, Paola 248–249 Chafe, Wallace 11 chains of linked narratives 200, 217 Charmaz, Kathy 201 Cheng Yan 49 children, storytelling of 61 Chile Chilean folk medicine 204 as ethnographic context of research 202–205, 203 (see also Mapuche pelotun) Chirrey, Deborah A. 58n7 Cho, G. 95 Cho, K. 95 chronotopes 156–157, 182 chujia (‘leave home’) stories common reactions to 39 and da zhangfu (‘great man’) trope 46, 49 in life history narratives of monastics 40–41 and motives for leaving home 43 role in reframing monastics 31 and “seed” metaphor for karma 48 as tool of evangelism 35–36 Chung Tai temple 39 Citarella, Luca 209 codeswitching between linguistic varieties and layers embedded within performances 8 in Mapuche medical narrative 207, 208, 209 in media interviews with Buryat speakers 241–242 Cole, Jennifer 36, 50 collaborative co-construction of talk 13 collective level of identity 27 “coming home” of ethnographers 140–141 “coming out” stories (COS) 53–78 as collective narratives/memories 28

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index collective remembering in 74 and ethnographic context of research 56–57 expanding tellership through sharing 54 on the “front stage” 57–58, 63–67 and institutional norms 27 and institutional talk 59–60, 62 language socialization through 61–62, 75 and performance/performativity 57–59, 62 and “second stories” 60 as social science scholarship 54–55 and “speakers bureaus” 56 talk-in-interaction in 74 training/preparation for panel participation 14, 27–28, 56–57, 56n4, 58, 61–62, 63n14, 67–73, 74 communication, purposes served by 29 communicative competence 172 contested stance practices 92 contextualization 141–142 conversation analysts 1 counter-narratives 27, 30–31, 40–41 Crane, Hillary 18, 27–28, 29–52, 34n1 critical period hypothesis 102 cultural identities 197, 199–200 cultural norms/traditions 16, 30, 172– 173 “danger of death” question 15 data collection, interviews in 15–19, 16n5 daughters, unmarried 38 da zhangfu (‘great man’) trope 31, 42–44, 42n5, 45–47, 49 decontextualization 141–142 De Fina, Anna 17, 93, 110 diagnostic odysseys 201–202, 206–207. See also medical narratives DiDomenico, Stephen 14, 27–28, 53–84 Dörnyei, Zoltán 97 double-voicing in laments 153, 154, 158 Douglas, Mary 231 dramaturgical approach to mundane social encounters, Goffman’s theory of 57– 58 Dream of the Red Chamber (Mann) 37 Drew, Paul 59, 59n8

Eckert, Penelope 94 entextualization and lament narratives 153, 155–158 markers of 136, 155–158 of oral literary forms 7 process of 7, 141–142 ethnicity ethnic ambivalence/evasion (EAE) 117 ethnic identity 141, 208–209, 244 ethnic nationalism 87–88 ethnography of communication 7 everyday narratives 9–14 alternatives to downplaying intertextuality of 14, 29 expert/canonical narratives contrasted with 2, 199 Ochs and Capps’s framework for studying 199 experience as related to personal narratives 48 expertise in storytelling 13 fairy tales, Western 157 Falconi, Elizabeth 6, 165, 166, 168–195 Fanshel, David 201 fantastical events in narrations 175–176, 184, 187–188 Fernandez, James 44–45, 47 Fernandez, Josefina 143 Fo Kuang Shan (Taiwanese monastic community) 38–39 folklore and folkloristics 1, 5–6 formal/informal division of storytelling performance 2–3 forms encompassed by stories, variety of 1– 2 framing devices as markers of entextualization 155–158 in narratives of personal experience 11– 12 in Zapotec storytelling 173–174, 177, 178– 179, 183–184 “front stage” in “coming out” stories 57–58, 63–67 in media interviews 237 Gabriel, Don 12, 17 garden magic spells 7 Gardner, Robert 96, 122

256 Garro, Linda C. 205 gender and authoritative tellership 165–166 and laments 143–144 and Zapotec storytelling 165–166, 174– 175 genres of discourse, fluidity in boundaries of 14 Giaxoglou, Korina 6, 88, 136–162 goals of narrators 33 Goffman, Erving 2–3, 11, 57–58, 237, 248 Goodwin, Charles 60n11 Gore, Al 39 Graber, Kathryn 18, 165, 167, 226–252 Greece as ethnographic context of research 139–141, 140 Greek laments (see Mani) Guzmán, Jennifer 18, 165, 166–167, 196–225 The Handbook of Narrative Analysis (De Fina and Georgakopoulou) 2 Harding, Susan Friend 34 Harrell, Stevan 38 Harris, Roxy 140–141 He, Agnes Weiyun 94, 95 Heritage, John 59, 59n8 heritage languages defined 94–95 difficulty of learning 91, 102, 103, 105, 117, 121–122 and ethnic ambivalence/evasion (EAE) 117 ethnographic context of research 92 and heritage narratives 90, 129 as a hobby 101–102 motivations for learning 96–97, 99– 100 and performance of moral relationships in past and present 94 personal connection to 94, 99, 107, 108, 128, 129 and person-centered interviewing 91, 94, 98–99, 126, 128–129 prior exposure to 95, 100 scholarship on 94 See also Yiddish heritage narratives connection to heritage language 90, 129

index defined 90 and difficulty of language acquisition 91 and distance-from-culture trope 116– 117 and language ideologies 108–109 and nostalgia socialization 92 and person-centered interviewing 98 heroic tropes 31 heteroglossia 12 Hill, Jane complex experiential narratives shared by 17 on double-voicing in personal narratives 153 and ideology of purity 231 on multilayered voice systems 12, 183 on rhetorical strategies to mitigate responsibility 11 Hill, Kenneth 231 Hindu folk narratives 185–186 Hinton, Leanne 96 historicization 137 hobby, learning a language as 101–102 Hollan, Douglas 126 Holocaust 116, 118 Howes-Mischel, Rebecca 175 Hsieh, Elaine 60 hungry ghosts 38 Hurston, Zora Neale 5 Hutchins, Edwin 94 hygiene practices 232 Hymes, Dell 93 identity, collective and individual levels of 27 individual level of identity 27 institutional identity 27 institutional remembering 74 institutional talk 59–60, 62, 248 insult poetry performed by Wolof-speaking griots 7 integrativeness in language learning 122 interactional storytelling 197 “internationalisms” 241, 245–246 intertextuality 13, 19 interviews as data 15–19 interviewer-interviewee relationship 33–36, 50–51, 109

index by journalists vs. ethnographers 248 person-centered interviewing 97–99, 109, 110, 126, 128–129 introductory formulae 155–157, 155n12 Iraq, laments in 149 journalism 167, 226–227, 248–249. See also Buryat-Russian news storytelling Kagan, Olga 94, 95 Kaluli women, interviews with 16n5 Kleinman, Arthur 97, 198 Kleinman, Joan 97 knowledge, imbalances in 202, 221 Koven, Michele 154 Kroskrity, Paul 8, 93, 173, 231 Kuna Indians of South America 58 L2 Self 97 Labov, William 9, 15, 93, 142, 157, 201 Labovian narrative approach 198 Lambert, Wallace E. 96 laments 136–159 association with death 148 circulation/exchange of 148–149, 154 defined 136 dimensions of performance of 147–148 double-voicing in 153, 154, 158 ethnographic context of research 139– 141, 140 framing devices in 155–158 function of, in Mani culture 146–147 and history behind 150–151 introductory formulae in 155–157, 155n12 natural histories of discourse and narrative 141–143 non-linguistic techniques in 147–148, 153, 158 “old laments” 150–151, 154, 157, 158 orientation sections of 156–157 replicability of 157–158 revenge referenced in 157 and sociocultural practice 88, 143–145 sujét laments of Iraq 149 language and authority 167, 227, 244, 247 in Buryatia’s news media (see BuryatRussian news storytelling)

257 ideologies of purity in 226–227, 230–231, 242–243, 246, 247 “internationalisms” 241, 245–246 language socialization 61–62, 75, 95–96, 99–100 learning (see language learners) linguistic possibility/constraint 2 linguistic proficiency 120–122 See also Buryat language; heritage languages; Russian language; Yiddish; Zapotec language Language in Society (journal) 17 language learners age of learners: middle-aged adults 105– 106 age of learners: older adults 100–105 age of learners: younger adults 106–108 approach-avoidance aspect of language acquisition 108–109 and connection to heritage language 90, 129 and critical period hypothesis 102 and integrativeness in language learning 122 narrative among 90 Latina mothers 30 Lave, Jean 94 Levering, Miriam 42–43 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 4–5 LGBTQ individuals 14, 28, 53n1, 62n12. See also “coming out” stories Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence (Linde) 30 Linde, Charlotte 27, 30, 50, 74 lingual life histories 88, 90 Living Narrative (Ochs and Capps) 12 local speech conventions 15–16 “Looking Good Principle” 30, 190 Lucksted, Alicia 56n5 magical/fantastical events in narrations 175–176, 184, 187–188 Malinowski, Bronislaw 7 Mandelbaum, Jenny 60n11 Mani and circulation of laments 88, 148–149 context of culture 145–147 dimensions of lament performance 147–148

258 as ethnographic context of research 139–141, 140 ethnopoetic/narrative patterning in 151–155 function of laments in 146–147 and history behind “old” laments 150– 151 revenge code of 138, 146–147 See also laments Mann, Susan 37 Mantini-Briggs, Clara 226 Mapuche machi (shaman) 203, 206 Mapuche pelotun 18 about 204 authoritative tellership in 165, 220, 221 and competing explanations 207, 208, 221 and contesting explanations 213–217, 220 and co-telling of stories 205, 213 and diagnostic odyssey 206–207 and diminished state of ill individuals 217 and ethnically marked Mapuche identity 208–209 ethnographic context of research 202– 205, 203 expectations for 205 ideal outcome of 205 onset of trouble related 206 and patient outcomes 218–219 patient’s agreement with 211–213, 220 pronouncements made by healers 204– 205, 207–208 receptiveness of young people to 221 symptoms addressed by healer 209–211, 220 and tellership of participants 197 term 204 and trafentun diagnosis 209, 211–213, 216, 217, 220 McClintock, Mary 54 McCollum, Chris 30, 50 McConnell-Ginet, Sally 94 medical narratives 196–221 arc of narrative 197 collection of 200–202 diagnostic odysseys 201–202, 206–207

index ethnographic context of research 202– 205, 203 and explanatory models of illness 201 of families of color 201–202 interview protocol for 197–198, 197n1 and language of authority 166–167, 227, 244, 247 spirit encounters in 206, 209 as talk-in-interaction 198–199 and tellership of participants 197 unequal knowledge/power relations in 202, 221 and unresolved status of Daniel’s ailment 197 See also Mapuche pelotun melodized speech 144 Mertz, Elizabeth 62n13 metalinguistic communities defined 90, 93 five dimensions of 93 identity-building through 93 and nostalgia socialization 92 metaphoric movement 44–45, 46–47 Mexico as ethnographic context of research 168–171, 169. See also Zapotec storytelling middle-class Americans 30 Miller, Peggy 61 minorities 201–202 mirolóyia (mirológi/mirolói) 138, 138n2, 139, 155n11 Missionary Impositions (Crane and Weibel, eds.) 34 monastics in Taiwan 29–51 and bodhisattvas/bodhisattva vows 41– 42, 43, 49 and Cheng Yan 49 counter-narratives of 27, 29, 30–31, 40– 41, 48–49, 50 and da zhangfu (‘great man’) trope 31, 42–44, 42n5, 45–47, 49 ethnographic context of research 31–33, 32 evangelical outreach of 29, 31–32, 32, 34–36, 49 and growth of monastic communities 39–40 and interviews of subjects 33, 50–51 as “last resort” alternative 39–40

index leaving-home stories of (see chujia (‘leave home’) stories) life history narratives of 40–41 monastery of 31–33, 36 and Mulan model 43–44, 43nn8–9, 46, 49, 50 negative image/reputation of 29, 36, 37–40, 44, 48–49 prejudices against 29 purposes served by discourse in 29 and religious/spiritual instruction 29 and sacrifice of worldly successes and pleasures 41 and “seed” metaphor 48 and stereotypes of girls 45–46 writing about 36n2 monks, Buddhist 37, 39–40, 48 mourning 143–144. See also laments Mulan 43–44, 43nn8–9, 46, 49, 50 myths and stories about 4–5 categories of 5 laments compared to 148–149 Lévi-Strauss’s theories on 4–5 Narayan, Kirin 185–186 narrated communities 172. See also specific communities and activities related to the narrated communities, including Buryat-Russian news storytelling; “coming out” stories (COS); laments; Mapuche pelotun; monastics in Taiwan; Yiddish; Zapotec storytelling narratologists/narratology 1, 9, 10 nationalism 87–88, 167 nation-states and language ideologies 87 natural histories of discourse and narrative 141–143 naturalized familiarity 119 news reports 167, 226–227, 248–249. See also Buryat-Russian news storytelling North Carolinians, moralizing narratives among 30 nostalgia, reflective 138, 138n1 nuns, Buddhist accused of immorality 37 chujia (‘leave home’) stories of 39, 40– 41

259 and da zhangfu (‘great man’) trope 46– 47 and growth of monastic communities 39 and “seed” metaphor for karma 48 stereotypical perceptions of 39–40 Oaxaca, Mexico 169. See also Zapotec storytelling Ochs, Elinor on co-construction of narratives 13 on experience as related to personal narratives 48 and framework for studying everyday narratives 199 on narratives about the past 36 on nature of meaning 14n4 “ordinary social exchanges” captured by 12 on past, present, and anticipated selves 49–50 on sharing stories as means of understanding 198–199 on temporal frame of reference 182 oral literature about 6–9 effect of audience interaction 8–9 narratives contrasted with 14 and social status 7 Pavlenko, Aneta 33 Peebles, Amy E. 62n12 Peräkylä, Anssi 59n9 performance/performativity, narrative 57– 59, 62 Perrino, Sabina 17 personal language histories 90 person-centered interviewing 97–99, 109, 110, 126, 128–129 physical appearance and body image 110, 124–127 Pierce, Norton 96 Plummer, Kenneth 54 Polinsky, Maria 94 power imbalances 202, 221, 227 Preston, Dennis 6 protagonist/audience parallelism 185– 186 prototypes, narrative 200

260 purity, ideologies of in bodily practice 226–227, 247 linguistic purity 166, 226–227, 230–231, 230n2, 242–243, 246 Qing-era China 37 Rampton, Ben 140–141 (re)contextualization 141–142, 158 reflective nostalgia 138, 138n1 religious communities 34. See also monastics in Taiwan remembering, collective 74 repetition 8 researcher’s effect 50 restorative nostalgia 138n1 revenge 138, 146–147, 157 Rhodes, Catherine R. 171–172, 220 romantic relationships, origins of 30 Russia civilizing mission in Siberia 232, 233 as ethnographic context of research 227–228, 229 and syphilis in Buryatia 232, 233 See also Buryat-Russian news storytelling Russian language Buryat language/grammar mixed with 230–231, 241–242, 245–246 fluency of ethnic Buryats with 228 and language of authority 165 and purity ideologies 247 and selective etymology as “third space” 246 Sacks, Harvey 60, 65, 154 San Juan Guelavía, Oaxaca authoritative tellership in 182, 190, 191– 192 convivir [live together] term 189 ethnic/linguistic diversity in 168, 168n1 (see also Zapotec storytelling) as ethnographic context of research 168–171, 169 and gender divisions in storytelling 165–166, 174–175 language shift in 170, 173, 174, 186 local government of 168–169 migration to/from 169–170, 171–172 moral socialization in 172–174, 190

index origin story of 186–188 population of 170 San Xavier Reservation, Arizona 17 Sapir, Edward 129 Schegloff, Emanuel A. 59n8 Schieffelin, Bambi B. 15, 16n5 Schiffrin, Deborah 93 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe 5 “second stories” 60 “seed” metaphor for karma 48 self-perception 44–45, 46–48 Seremetakis, C. Nadia 143–144, 146, 148 shame 226, 230, 231, 232–233 Shandler, Jeffrey 96 Sherzer, Joel 58 Shuman, Amy 143, 154 Silverstein, Michael 6, 12n3 “small stories” about 19, 198 in medical practice of Mapuche healer 220, 221 on relevancy of historical figure to current relationship 113 social collectivities 27 social constructivism 94, 124–125 socialization and narratives 61, 75, 172–174 social practice, narratives as 142–143 social status 7 sociocultural practice, laments as 143–145 sociolinguists 1 Soh, C. Sarah 42n5 Songs of the Underworld and Charos (Alexiou and Yatromanolakis) 149 South American myths 4–5 speaking, recognizable manners of 199– 200 spirit world, narratives about 206, 209 spoken mediation 190–191 stereotypes, countering 27, 30–31 “story of Asdiwal” (Tsimshian origin) 5 Strilakos, Yagos 137–138, 139, 141, 155n12 syphilis linguistic management of, in media 236, 237, 243, 245–246, 247 and physical/moral purism 231, 232– 233, 247 prevalence in Buryatia, Siberia 231–232 and sense of shame 231, 232–233

index Taiwan Buddhist missionizing efforts in 32 cultural expectations in 38 as ethnographic context of research 31– 33, 32 and reputation of monastics 37, 44 stereotypes of girls/women in 45–46 See also monastics in Taiwan talk-in-interaction 74, 198–199 Talmy, Steven 97 tellership authoritative tellership in Mapuche pelotun 197, 220 authoritative tellership in Zapotec society 165 in Buryat-Russian news storytelling 247 in “coming out” stories 28, 54 and construction of cultural identities 200 in everyday vs. canonical narratives 199 lack of control over 200 temporal frame of reference 182 Tewa of Arizona 173 “third space” 246 Timmermans, Stefan 201 Tohono O’odham language 17 “traditional” stories 1 transborder stories 188–191 tropes, application of 44–45 Tse, Lucy 95, 117 Turner, Victor 14n4 Urban, Greg 148–149 Ushioda, Ema 97 Valdés, Guadalupe 94–95 Verschueren, Jef 167 Villenas, Sofia 30, 50 voice systems 183, 185 Waletzky, Joshua 157 Warao people of Venezuela 202 Wendland, Claire 246 Wenger, Etienne 94 Wikan, Unni 98, 112 witnessing 137 Wolof-speaking griots, insult poetry performed by 7 women and laments 143–144, 146

261 A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality (Bauman) 13–14 Wortham, Stanton 171–172, 220 Yezidis 144, 149, 149n8 Yiddish age of learners: middle-aged adults 105– 106 age of learners: older adults 100–105 age of learners: younger adults 106– 108 and body image 110, 124–127 case study 109–128 and community 122–124, 129 and cultural/religious background 116– 120 difficulty of learning 91, 102, 104–105, 107, 117, 121–122 and distance from Jewish background 91, 100–101, 108, 115, 116–117 as “endangered” 92, 95 ethnographic context of research 92 and family life 110–116 and Holocaust survivors 114 and linguistic background/proficiency 120–122 and loss of native speakers 122–123 motivations for learning 96–97, 99–100, 100–102, 106–108, 119 and opportunities for language socialization 95–96 prior exposure to 95, 99, 100, 108 Yorgatzas, lament of 151–154 Young, Katharine 11 Zapotec language Isidro’s command of 177 and language shift 170, 173, 174, 186 Zapotec storytelling 168–192 authoritative tellership in 165–166, 177, 182–183, 190, 191–192 case study: Isidro’s stories 177–191 and elder male storytellers 165–166, 174– 175 ethnographic context of research 168– 171, 169 experiential narratives compared to 176–177

262 framing inherent to 173–174, 177, 178– 179, 183–184, 184n6 multilayered voice structure in 183, 185 protagonist/audience parallelism 185– 186 relating fantastical/magical events 175– 176, 184, 187–188

index transborder stories 188–191 Zepeda, Ofelia 11, 17, 153 Zhi Guang Mountain Monastery. See monastics in Taiwan Zigon, Jarrett 90