Narrative as Social Practice

This is a highly original comparative study of the oral storytelling traditions of two widely divergent cultures, Anglo-Western culture and Central Australian Aboriginal culture. Concerned with both theoretical and empirical issues, this book offers a critical discussion of the most influential theories of narrative. It evaluates them on the basis of textual analyses of Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal oral narratives, viewed in the context of the different storytelling practices, values and worldviews in both cultures. The book offers new insights to readers interested in linguistics, narratology, discourse analysis, cross-cultural pragmatics, anthropology, and Australian Aboriginal studies.

Auteur

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

Résumé

Narrative as Social Practice sets out to explore the complex and fascinating interrelatedness of narrative and culture. It does so by contrasting the oral storytelling traditions of two widely divergent cultures - Anglo-Western culture and the Central Australian culture of the Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara Aborigines. Combining discourse-analytical and pragmalinguistic methodologies with the perspectives of ethnopoetics and the ethnography of communication, this book presents a highly original and engaging study of storytelling as a vital communicative activity at the heart of socio-cultural life.

The book is concerned with both theoretical and empirical issues. It engages critically with the theoretical framework of social constructivism and the notion of social practice, and it offers critical discussions of the most influential theories of narrative put forward in Western thinking. Arguing for the adoption of a communication-oriented and cross-cultural perspective as a prerequisite for improving our understanding of the cultural variability of narrative practice, Klapproth presents detailed textual analyses of Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal oral narratives, and contextualizes them with respect to the different storytelling practices, values and worldviews in both cultures. Narrative as Social Practice offers new insights to students and specialists in the fields of narratology, discourse analysis, cross-cultural pragmatics, anthropology, folklore study, the ethnography of communication, and Australian Aboriginal studies.

Contenu

Acknowledgements
Figures, tables, and maps

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

1. Encountering the Other 1

2. Aims of the study and methodological background 4
   2.1. Aims 4
   2.2. Theoretical background 6
   2.3. Methodology and research design 8

3. The data 11
   3.1. Cultural and linguistic origins of the data 12
   3.2. Choice of the data 16

4. Summary: The plan of the book 22

Part One: In the web of the wor(l)d: The narrative structuring of experience

Chapter 2 Creating webs of significance: The role of narrative in the socio-cultural construction of reality 27

1. Of butterflies and lepidopterists 27

2. Culture as a web of discourses 29
   2.1. Language in the construction of reality 31
   2.2. Provinces of meaning and their integration in a symbolic universe 34
   2.3. Discourse and the colonising of the institutional order 35

3. The role of narrative discourse in Anglo-Western culture 38
   3.1. The myth of objectivity: The denarrativising of knowledge 39
   3.2. Narrative and identity: The discursive creation of a coherent self 43
   3.3. Kid stuff: Fairy tales in the contemporary Anglo-Western world 47

4. The role of narrative discourse in Australian Aboriginal culture 53
   4.1. The Tjukurpa: A fundamentally narrative view of the world 53
   4.2. The voice of the Rainbow Serpent: Re-enacting cultural identity 58
   4.3. Narrative and the transmission of knowledge in Australian Aboriginal culture 62
5. 4. Suspended in webs of significance: Culture, discourse and identity 64

Chapter 3 The narrative sharing of worlds: Storytelling as communicative interaction 71

1. What is a story? 72
   1.1. The problem of story definition 73
   1.2. Labov's high-point analysis 76
   1.3. Towards a formal and semantic definition of the story 81
   1.4. Towards a functional definition of the story 84

2. Solidifying reality: The construction of narrated worlds 86
   2.1. Reflections in the mirror: The ontological status of the narrated world. 87
   2.2. The narrated world as a mental model and narrative as a social institution 91

3. The creation of narrative involvement 95
   3.1. Narrative and involvement 96
   3.2. Subjective evaluation and moral involvement 102

4. Storytelling: The narrative sharing of worlds 104
   4.1. A theory of communicative levels in storytelling 104
   4.2. Creating and sharing worlds in narrative 107

Chapter 4 Exploring the structure of narrated worlds: The search for story schemata 113

1. The study of narrative within the cognitive science framework 114

2. The cognitive science framework and the study of stories from the oral tradition 115
   2.1. Stories from the oral tradition as research data 115
   2.2. Universal versus culture-specific properties of story schemata 119

3. The search for a schema for stories 120
   3.1. Stories as problem-solving episodes 120
   3.2. Episodic analysis: The Johnson and Mandler story grammar 122

4. The cross-cultural applicability of schema-theoretical story models: A critical evaluation 126
   4.1. Schema-oriented story models: Data and experiment designs 127
   4.2. A schema for stories: Problem-solving and the cross-cultural analysis of narrative texts 130

Part Two: Storytelling as social practice: A cross-cultural perspective

Chapter 5 The Beautiful and the Beastly: Cultural specifics of Anglo-Western narrative aesthetics 137

1. Analysing a traditional Anglo-Western narrative: Beauty and the Beast 137
   1.1. The notion of narrative aesthetics 138
   1.2 Methodological considerations 139
   1.3. Story prototypicality and the concept of problem-solving 140

2. The story 142
   2.1. The story text: Beauty and the Beast 143

   3. Towards a description of the story's structural organisation 150
      3.1. Episodic analysis of the story Beauty and the Beast 150
      3.2. Episode embedding and thematic packaging 155
      3.3. Identifying the core problematic of the story Beauty and the Beast 158
      3....